In this series, I show you stats for some of my videos so you can see how youtube works for content creators. Please remember, I am a very small youtuber compared to what is out there and my growth has been very slow. But I don’t give up! I just keep going and make changes along the way. Hopefully sharing my stats can help other content creators by showing them what they might be able to expect over the life of their channel. I will be sharing videos that performed well and videos that fell flat. I hope you enjoy this series!
MISSING DATA SO I’M SWITCHING GEARS – Youtube has a glitch (see graph below). The stats are currently completely missing for a 1.5 year period, January, 2017 through June 2018 (that blue rectangle in the graph). It makes no sense for me to analyze videos that were up and running during that period since I don’t know if the reporting is correct. Therefore, I’m putting a hold on the Crumb Quilt Adventure Stats until the glitch fixed. As soon as the data returns, I will finish the stats for that series. Until then, I will stick to videos that were uploaded after June 2018.
MY RED HOT VIDEO!!!
I mentioned before that one of my new videos has performed better than any other new video I have uploaded. That does not mean it is the highest earning video, at least not yet. But it has earned the most in the first month than any other video earned in its first month. It came out of the gate strong!
Video we are exploring in this post:
How I Turn Narrow Fabric Scraps Into New Fabric
Video was uploaded on: December 10, 2019
Date of this blog post: 1/9/20 (at the time of this post, the video is one month old)
Views: 237,410
Watch time: 41,416 hours
Total earnings: $1495.22
Earnings for the past 90 days: It’s not 90 days old yet, but it earned an average of almost $50 per day for the first 30 days.
What does this mean?
It pretty much means youtube promoted the shit out of that video! I see that 82% of my views came from those who watched that video because youtube put it in their suggested videos list. That video alone was responsible for getting me a net gain of 3,787 new subscribers.
As for the earnings, the video was uploaded near the end of the month. Better than that, it was at the end of the year! Some advertisers still had leftover budgets to spend so my video got higher paying ads that usual.
Now it is January and ad budgets have changed. Youtube even posted a note inside the analytics reminding me (and I assume all content creators) that earnings can be down for Jan due to the new advertising budgets.
Looking at the graph below, I see that the earnings peaked during the very last week of December (click image to enlarge). That makes total sense. Advertisers were using up the very last of their budgets.
If you are a monetized youtuber but you are still fairly new to all this, don’t ever be worried or shocked by a big drop in earnings. It happens. It does not mean your videos suddenly suck. It can simply be a matter of what kind of ads you are currently getting. Higher paying advertisers might have depleted their budgets so google will give you lower paying ads.
With that said, it is a very good idea to check your analytics to see which of your videos are earning the highest CPM (cost per thousand, also called cost per mille). To check your CPM in the new youtube studio, go to Revenue, then click See More under Ad Types, then use the drop down and select CPM (this is if you are on a computer, no clue how to find that info on a phone).
I see that I get higher paying ads for my quilt type tutorials than I do on fabric unboxings. Does that mean I need to stop the unboxings? No! I still need those for variety and also just to give me some general chat time (which I usually end up regretting, like in this video).
The other interesting thing (at least to me, you are probably snoring by now), is that my audience retention is low for my Narrow Fabric Scraps video. It’s only 32.9%. Viewers are only watching an average of 10 minutes of that video. The good news is that once there is the initial drop off, I still have quite a few who watched the entire video. It was a long video, about 30 minutes, so that still gave me a high watch time. Youtube likes lots of watch time so that can also help creators get higher paying ads.
There is no one thing that determines which videos perform well. It’s a mix of content, timing and advertising dollars. Some planning is good, but it’s always a good idea to record content you enjoy and that you also feel is worth your time.
I have given up many videos that I enjoyed recording simply because my time is better spent on videos that have a better chance of earning more. I put a lot of time into recording, edting, uploading and promoting. I’m trying to use my limited time wisely. For now. Who knows what I’ll be doing down the road.
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