As a bloke approaching his 40s. I know people my age +10 are now getting high up positions in firms. I still think this generation still don't grasp you tube and the power and money it can bring in. I have no idea how monetisation on YouTube works, I still don't fully grasp how people who make videos on playing football manager can do that as a full time job on advertising revenue alone. Maybe
@BarryZola could give us a hint.
It's all just about consistently getting enough views after you've qualified for monetisation (1000 subs & 4000 watch hours). I only have 1 monetised channel and it's more of a hobby/side hustle alongside my regular job in retail. Basically the more people who watch your videos, and the longer they stay watching those videos, the more advertisers will give Google/Youtube money to place their adverts at the start and during your videos. Then Google pay you the advertising revenue at the end of the month (minus their cut). So you can imagine, a 45 minute video will be likely to get more advertising revenue than a 3 minute video if they have the same amount of views. More space for advertisers to get their adverts in during your video. The goal, I suppose, is to build up enough subscribers so that every time you release a video you get a base amount of people who will watch your video, and over time this in theory should only increase if you keep the quality of your videos up.
For an example of how much you can make (and it does depend on the demographic of your audience as adverts directed towards people traditionally with more money to spend will pay you more per advert placed) my latest video which is around 45 minutes long has gained almost 60 thousand views. This has made me approximately £390 at this point. I will say, that this is a bit of an outlier as I probably only have 3/4 videos that are over about 30,000 views. A lot come in just in the low thousands and then several more over 10,000 I think. But the thing is, they all add up and your older videos keep ticking along with a few views to add to the new ones that you release. I've only got around 2,000 subscribers so far but I'll just keep on enjoying what I'm doing and adding to the library of videos that are on the channel. I tend to only make 1 or 2 videos a month so you can see that I definitely have to carry on working! But the point is, if you're regularly putting out quite long videos and getting 50,000 views on each one, you can see how that could quickly add up, even if you only made 4/5 a month. This is why you get people just putting out videos as long as possible for no apparent reason (see the guy in a thread yesterday who strings a video out to about 8 minutes long just for about 8 seconds of drone footage). I mean, fair play, he's gone out and made the effort to get some footage, but he could have made that video about a minute long but he couldn't resist the urge to take the p**s out of viewers just to get a bit more view time from them.
Arguably more important than ad placement during videos however, is brand deals and other outside income once you've built up a big subscriber base and are REGULARLY getting vast amounts of views (something that's not even near being on my radar and probably never will be). Companies will actually come to you and offer you money to work with them in whatever way and you'll probably get freebies etc. You've also got Patreon and all those other things where people give you money for whatever and stuff where you send video messages to people and stuff like that. Then there's merchandise. We're talking ThemeParkWorldwide levels here. I would guess that his ad placement revenue is less than the total that he makes from all of the other bits he does (but I obviously don't know), but both will probably be pretty mega, especially when you think about his back catalogue of videos ticking along with views constantly.
Not sure exactly how Alton Towers would look at trying to make money just through Youtube. They most probably already do, but it does seem like they could do more. They would just have to employ someone solely to run the channel for them and be constantly making content. The massive viewer base is already there, all they need to do is keep putting interesting videos out. With special access to the whole site they could produce some amazing content. Hope this helps, even if you're just interested in the mechanics of Youtube ad revenue.
