Making money from youtube? Hmmm....

[Patrick]

Ive just received an e-mail supposedly from youtube. I was quite surprised by the subject header. It says "Apply for revenue sharing for your video Wolf spider attacks a millipede."

This is the message:

"Your video Wolf spider attacks a millipede has become popular on YouTube, and you're eligible to apply for the YouTube Partnership Program, which allows you to make money from playbacks of your video.

Once you're approved, making money from your video is easy. Here's how it works: First sign into your YouTube account. Then, complete the steps outlined here: http://www.youtube.com/ivp?v=iQodHUxLf5g. Once you're finished, we'll start placing ads next to your video and pay you a share of the revenue as long as you meet the program requirements.

We look forward to adding your video to the YouTube Partnership Program. Thanks and good luck!

The YouTube Team"

I am wondering if this is the real deal. Anyone else heard anything like this coming from youtube? The e-mail address that sent this is no_reply@youtube.com. Sure enough, I do have a video posted on youtube called 'Wolf spider attacks a millipede.' I haven't clicked on any of the links in the e-mail as I want to be sure that this is genuine. If it is, then great! However, I have a sneaking suspicion that if I agree, they may ask me to hand over my rights to the video....something I wouldn't be happy about.

[super8man]

Congrats on getting 17,500 views or so. One of my videos hit 5,000 so I would not know about being popular enough to generate ad revenue. Sounds legit. Why not just google "youtube ad revenue" or something and see what the blogosphere has to say?

[Scotness]

Whether or not the email is genuine I don't know - but I'm pretty sure the scheme is. A few years ago Youtube added the moneymaking scheme to it, but it was only for US originated members to begin with and was going to be rolled out to others later on.

The best thing is to log into your account in youtube as per normal, and try and find a link to this scheme for your video. Don't click on the link in the email incase it might take you to a fake site.

Remember google bought youtube for a small fortune and youtube hasn't made a profit yet - they are continually exploring ways to try and make it make money.

Scot

[Patrick]

Oh yea, I'll play it safe, Scot. I did log in to youtube last night to see if I received the same message in my inbox. No such message was there.

Mike, Ive really enjoyed watching your super 8 films on youtube, in particular the sailing films and the time lapse road journey. The regular 8 films were great too! I only have one super 8 film (another time lapse) on youtube so far and that hasn't attracted anywhere near the number of views as yours. Quite staggering how popular some peoples videos have become on youtube...I see over a million views on some with over a thousand comments.

[super8man]

Thanks. I shall be posting more. I finally landed a Nikon ML-1 remote for my Nikon R8 so now I have to dream up an actual use for it. The connecting cord was the tough find...oops, back on topic: yeah, I think you need to include certain bodily function words in your you tube titles to get the hits...it also helps if your high school friends hit it as well in order to pull a Blair Witch faux hype and trick the masses.

[Patrick]

Well finally, I can actually get my hands on the money that Ive been earning from this video. With 181,642 views, it has accumulated $118.03. Though it took four years to make that amount lol. That's what I call slow money.

[Tommy]

There are people making big money on youtube....but they are getting hits in the millions. What is incredible to me is how terribly boring, I find some of these videos are.....of course, entertainment is subjective , so apparently, someone likes them.
Some people have made a mucho dollars just with filming their cats do something goofy.

[beaunizo]

Well finally, I can actually get my hands on the money that Ive been earning from this video. With 181,642 views, it has accumulated $118.03. Though it took four years to make that amount lol. That's what I call slow money.

If you have the same avatar there you might want to change it. It puts people off.

[Patrick]

Gosh, things have really changed with regards to youtube's monetisation program. Years ago, you had to be invited to take part in it (like I was with my wolf spider video which gained enough views to be considered.) Then later on, anyone could participate in it, regardless of the number of views. Now youtube have enforced strict, new rules that state that you must have something like 1000 hours of views in order for your videos to be monetised. As a consequence of that, I am no longer eligible and monetisation has been removed from all of my videos. I guess it's the end of an era. By the way, that wolf spider video is still my highest viewed video with 239,645 views currently. My second highest viewed video has 28,950 views. My other videos are nowhere even close to those figures.

I admit I was not exactly happy with the latest news from youtube with regards to monetisation. Though even before that, youtube were doing things that made me extremely annoyed. They have this automatic detection system which flags videos that are supposedly not advertiser friendly, thinking that they're offensive in some way. And one of my videos was targeted. The video was simply footage that I had recorded inside an ant nest with an endoscope camera. Completely innocent and harmless and yet monetisation was removed from that clip. Then later on another video of mine (in which I'm experimenting with green screen visual effects) had monetisation removed. And once again, it was a video that had no offensive content. One of the comments on the video even describes it as 'family friendly.' Gee, all this time I thought I was doing the right thing by making tame, innocent videos and yet I'm rewarded by this. Then not long after that, monetisation is removed from all of my videos thanks to the new rules. I admit I wasn't making much money since the last payout but even so, it's still a kick in the guts.

[Tscan]

Google took my old You-Tube account when i was too busy to notice. Now I just use Vimeo