The YouTube Formula

6Make Money Partnering with YouTube

So you're ready to make money on YouTube … wait, you can make money on YouTube? How do you make money on YouTube? And you do this full time? How?

These are actual questions I get all the time when I tell people what I do for a living. The general population doesn't know and doesn't get it. The first and easy answer is that you can start making money by becoming a member of the YouTube Partner Program (YPP). As you'll see, this is just the first drop in the bucket, but we'll get to the rest of it in the next few chapters.

You remember from learning about the YouTube ecosystem in Chapter 2 that this program began in 2007 and was like the great California gold rush. Advertisement revenue sharing had never been done before Google's AdSense on google.com and then youtube.com, so this was a huge, brand‐new opportunity. Creators could monetize their content if it performed well enough, so they did all they could to achieve this. In other words, YPP raised the bar on quality content and reliable, perpetual quantity.

I already told you that YouTube finally shared their annual earnings, claiming $15.15 billion revenue in 2019, but all of that money didn't go directly to YouTube. A huge chunk of it went to creators in the Partner Program. The program started out with a 45/55 split, which means YouTube took 45% of the revenue from ads running alongside content, while the creator of that content took 55%. The percentages are a little more complicated ...