If you don’t want to read it, you can watch this video.
YouTube has come up with something really, really cool. It’s got a few issues, but over-all I think it’s a good idea. We’ll see what the future holds. What you can do is sell or rent your videos.
First of all. Let’s talk about what you need before you can start doing this. You need at least 1000 active subscribers. You need to be a confirmed YouTuber. Most of you have already done that. Then, you have to link your AdSense account.
But what’s funny is that’s not how you get paid and that’s not where the money goes. I’ll tell you about that later. But this is how you get into it.
I’ve already done it. You have to go to your creative studio and to your paid subscriptions. Then you will get this agreement. You should read through that to be sure there won’t be any problems. When you click on it, you’ll have to put in your name and your company name and all that stuff.
On the paid subscriptions page, be sure not to click the red block or it will unsubscribe everybody from your channel and they will have to re-subscribe for it to be a paid channel. So, your better option is to create a new one.
Now, let’s get into the really interesting part of this. I love YouTube, but it would have been really cool if there was a handbook. I started experimenting. Let’s go to how this thing looks. There is a review process that is 24 to maybe 72 hours. There is a playlist. When you go to play one, you’ll either see this video is available or this video is being reviewed.
When you go in to make a video paid, you will hit monetization, then you can click on rent or purchase. This is the other thing that is real interesting. For every region, you have to make an offer in all of these currencies. I selected the UK and the US because that is where 90% all my views are coming from. What I am going to do is create a special tab in my Gumroad account where people can buy a collection of videos.
Once you select the purchase option, it is forever and ever. It’s awesome. I see myself just using the purchase option. Once you purchase it, it is yours forever. You can’t delete it or change any of the stuff that goes along with that video. It’s pretty simple.
If you want to sell in a lot of countries, it gets a little tricky. What you’ll have to do is go to Google currency translator and translate all the currency into the prices you potentially want. If you see one you want to buy, just send me an email and I will go ahead and make the adjustment.
Now, let’s talk about that. I haven’t done it yet, but I have the feeling that once you make the adjustment, you will have to go through the review process all over again. That’s what I think is going to happen. That may not be true, but govern yourself accordingly. That is how you create the paid videos.
What’s really cool about this is I’ve got one approved and essentially how people will pay for this is through Google wallet. Now this is where it gets really, really interesting. At first, I didn’t know where the money was going. There is a two to three-day lag from time of purchase to it showing up.
Let’s talk about the video that was approved. I believe one of the reasons this was approved so fast is because it was a Google hangout video. Once it converted, I turned it into a paid video. It was really quick compared to the other ones which I am still waiting on.
Going back to the bad. Once you do this, it’s going to turn it into a publicly announced video. When you turn one of your videos into a paid video, the minute that you do that process, it’s going to shoot out an email to all your subscribers. Then when they come to that video, they can’t see it and they get this weird message. That pisses people off.
I’m one of those people who are not risk adverse. I can deal with the dislikes and stuff until this improves, because I think the potential for this is massive. And when I say massive, I am talking massive massive. Say you are a YouTuber, right. And you have 100,000 views per month. If you can convert 1000 of those views into 99 cent paying customers. Let’s just crank it down even more, let’s say if you can convert .5% of that 100,000 to paying customers, that’s $500. For many of you in that range, that’s equal to or greater than your AdSense.
I’m going to stick with this program, because I think the upside is massive. Let’s say you have a $3 product. And you take 1000 people out of your 100,000, that’s $3000 dollars. This is doable. That’s kicking AdSense in the ass all day long. If you’re a creator, I suggest you experiment with this during the summer. If you’ve been on YouTube for any time at all, you know that sometimes your views will dip during the summer.
If you can get things going in the summer, it is just going to get better and better in the fall. That’s been my experience my last six years. That’s the good. That’s the bad. That’s the ugly. I think the potential is incredibly massive because I have almost 1000 videos you can see and I have another 276 that are private. I think there are about 100 I can put under this tab. I just converted a bunch and I will continue to do that once this batch gets approved and I get more feedback.
I’ve always made more money selling products than with AdSense. AdSense has been nice. But once it was opened up to everybody, it got to be less and less money. I even took the ads off my videos at one point, because it didn’t make any sense.
But this makes a lot of sense. What would you sell? It would have to be a “How To” or an educational video. Say you do a review on a brand-new camera. Then maybe you have that camera for six months or so and you know all the quirks and stuff, then you create the Insider’s Guide for like $5 or $10. It will sell because it’s like a cheat sheet so they won’t have to spend six months learning it on their own. People will pay money for that type of information because it makes their life easier.
I don’t know how this would work for people doing entertainment channels. If you are a review channel or a “How To” channel, this will kick AdSense in the ass.
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