How Much I Made From My First Year on YouTube
Starting My YouTube Channel
During the summer of 2020, right before my senior year of college, I decided to start a YouTube channel. I was majoring in Statistics and Data Science and was working on a bunch of side projects to help practice the skills we had been learning, but I had no one to share these projects with. I figured that YouTube would be the perfect place to find people that would be interested in the work that I was doing.
This is how Minding The Data began. The goal of my channel was to take an in-depth look at the mathematics behind anything from the stock market to cryptocurrency gambling websites.
My first video was all about the math behind a cryptocurrency casino game called Crash. Here’s how the video did in it’s first 5 weeks of being on YouTube.
During the first two weeks, I posted my video anywhere I thought people may be interested. I shared it on Reddit, Twitter, and even gambled the $10 minimum that was required to join an online casino’s chatroom in order to get some views from there. From the graph above, we can see that this strategy was working, but only for about 20–40 viewers a day on average.
My theory was that YouTube would find users that shared similar interests to the ones that I was personally directing to my video. The hope was that YouTube would start to take over the recommendation process because I was spending way too long advertising my channel for only a couple dozen views a day.
And it worked! Right around Week 3 I began to see views rolling in when I wasn’t even advertising my video anywhere. YouTube was showing the video on other user’s homepages, and at a much larger scale than I was able to do. I started getting a few hundred organic views a day, which then jumped into the thousands, and by the 5th week of my first YouTube video going live, I was receiving over 7,000 views on the video in a single day!
Monetizing My YouTube Channel
Unfortunately these views were not earning me any advertising revenue, as I had to have a minimum of 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time on my videos to join YouTube’s Partner Program. Fortunately, on August 27th 2020, just 6 weeks after starting my YouTube channel, I was approved for monetization and was able to start earning money from my videos.
On my first full day of earning revenue from my videos, I made $21.53. This absolutely blew my mind. I was earning this money with only a couple of videos on my channel and I didn't even have to do any work to keep the revenue coming in. The chart below shows the rest of the ad revenue for 2020.
Over the next 4 months, I ended 2020 making just under $1,500 from my YouTube videos (13 cents short to be exact). My videos had been viewed 315,000 times, and once I was approved for advertising, I was earning about $4.76 for every 1,000 views.
Full First Year Results
Now let’s include the revenue from 2021 to see the results of the entire first year. In 2021 I was a lot busier with school and other projects, so I’ve only been able to complete 2 videos in this time. However the channel is still getting a decent amount of views. Here are the results from the start of the channel to right now, a total of just about 1 year and 2 months.
1,500,000 Views. 38,400 Subscribers. 94,500 hours of Watch Time. and $5,550 in Revenue.
This channel grew so much larger than I had ever imagined to be possible. People have spent 10.79 years watching my videos in just a year’s time. This was a niche that I thought only appealed to a small proportion of people, and my expectations have been blown away. It has been so exciting to see other people interested in a topic that you are passionate about.
August 2nd, 2021 has been my most profitable day so far. Around this time, I had a less popular video from August 2020 begin to gain views almost out of nowhere. This video covered the math behind a lottery game which MIT students made millions off of after discovering a loophole in the game structure. It had soon expanded outside of the range of users who were interested in mathematical topics, and began spread to all sorts of users, helping to reach my largest revenue day ever at $178.58.
Conclusion
The decision to start turning my projects into YouTube videos that can be shared with others was one of the best decisions I have ever made. The extra income is great but the truly amazing part is seeing a community of users form and gain interest in the information that you’re sharing. Everyone out there has something that they’re passionate about or something that they would love to share with others.
So what are you waiting for? Maybe you’re afraid that the production won’t be good enough or there’s just not enough people interested in your topic. My best performing video is the one that I made on iMovie using my computer’s audio to record myself talking. You don’t need the latest editing software or a $200 microphone to get started. There’s such a satisfying feeling of accomplishment that comes with posting a video to the point where you’ll consider it a success no matter how many people it actually reaches.
I hope that taking a look at my journey has inspired you to look into the possibility of starting one of your own :) I can’t wait to see what you create!
