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In the modern-day, many people dream of making a living as a YouTuber, TikTok star, or Instagram influencer. The draw of making money on these social media platforms has only gotten stronger in the past several years一but how does it actually work? For many content creators, sponsorships and brand partnerships make up a good portion of their income, but certain platforms (like YouTube) also pay the creator if they reach certain conditions.
Keep reading to learn more about public watch hours on YouTube, why watch time matters, and how much of it you need to start making money.
An Overview of the YouTube Partner Program
There are multiple ways to make money on YouTube, and the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) makes them all easier.
To be approved for monetization in the YouTube Partner Program, your channel needs to have 4,000 watch hours in the past year and at least 1,000 subscribers. Receiving a consistent amount of public watch hours is essential because if you ever have a span of 12 months in which viewership drops below 4,000 hours, your YouTube channel will be demonetized.
The good news is that many different types of videos can be monetized, as long as the content isn’t explicitly inappropriate or plagiarized.
Now, creators don’t have to be a part of the YPP to make money with AdSense, but it makes the whole process much easier. When you become part of the YPP and connect your AdSense account, Google takes control and handles everything from ad placement within your videos to payments into your bank account.
AdSense is only one to make money on the platform. Creators can also conduct live streams on YouTube and viewers can pay for “Super Chats” and “Super Stickers”, which makes a donation to the creator and also makes their comment more visible. There are also options for paid memberships and merchandise promotions.
Tips for Getting Public Watch Hours
Uploading videos frequently and creating a formidable backlog of videos is very helpful when trying to get to accrue watch time. After all, if your channel doesn’t have much to watch, it will be challenging to reach 4,000 hours of watch time. In addition to making interesting videos, it’s a good idea to optimize them for the platform so they’re more likely to be recommended. Here are a few tips on how to optimize SEO for YouTube:
- Research keywords for relevance and potential reach.
- Keep titles SEO-friendly. Add keywords and keep them shorter rather than longer.
- Add tags to ensure your video is indexed correctly.
- Write a video description. Use related keywords and share information that is relevant to the video for the benefit of the viewers and the algorithm.
- Create a transcription and captions to help search algorithms learn more about your content and to make your videos more accessible to people with impaired hearing.
- Make exciting thumbnails that are more likely to be clicked on.
Even the smallest amount of watch time adds up! Your videos don’t need to go viral every day for your channel to reach the 4,000-hour requirement.
Four thousand hours in a year comes down to an average of about 11 watch hours per day. If you had one video that was 15 minutes long, it would need to be watched 44 times per day to reach 11 watch hours. If you had a collection of about sixty-five 10-minute videos, they would each only need to be watched once per day to achieve this 11-hour goal. This is just an example of the benefit of posting content consistently.
YouTube Can Provide Passive Income for Anyone
Not everyone can make a six-figure income on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Twitch. In fact, only about 2 million people are currently doing so out of the hundreds of millions that attempt to. However, this doesn’t mean there’s no reason to try.
If you can get enough views to monetize your channel on the YouTube Partners Program, you’re on the right track. Even a couple of hundred dollars a month is a win, especially when it comes in the form of passive income from people watching old videos.
In Review
You don’t need to be a part of the YouTube Partners Program to make money on YouTube, but it opens up a lot of possibilities and makes the entire process much more manageable. To become monetized within the YPP, your account has to have 4,000 watch hours in the past 12 months, and you have to have at least 1,000 subscribers.
There are several things you can do to boost your watch time, including posting quality videos frequently and following YouTube SEO strategies. One of the best ways to “make it” on YouTube is to stay consistent. The more content you publish, the likelier people are to find it and watch it!
