How to make money on Youtube in 2022 - How much money I made this year

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Today, I'm going to explain how you can make money on YouTube in 2022. Also, today I’m gonna break down every single money that I make throughout YouTube in 2021. So let's get started.

Hi guys, it's me Dodie. Today I am back with a little controversial topic: money. Before making this video, I want to give a little disclaimer. This video is not about bragging or showing off how much money I make and stuff, but this video is completely for educational purposes.

I feel like at the age of 20, the amount of money that I make is pretty impressive, in my opinion. Of course, there are people who make 10 times more money than me, but I feel like when it comes to online and YouTube, there is not enough information available. For sure, there are some creators that are sharing how much money they make and how they make it, but I feel like more and more people should share that information to inspire people who are watching this video.

Right before starting this channel, which is my fifth channel, I watched Ali's video about how much money he makes and how he makes it, and it really helped me and opened my eyes. From that day, I truly started to see YouTube as a business, and I have always treated this channel as a business. This mindset has really helped me, so I hope this video can help you and inspire you to start your own journey and make money online.

So let's get started.

Now, let's talk about how you can make money online or how you can make money using YouTube or on YouTube. The main revenue when it comes to making money on YouTube is Google AdSense. What is that? Basically, the ads you see throughout the video, or before and after the video, you know these five-second annoying ads allow us to make money on YouTube.

If you have YouTube Premium, you won't see those ads. I have YouTube Premium, and the thing is, your subscribers who have YouTube Premium allow you to make more money compared to non-YouTube subscribers, even though they watch these ads. Why is that? Because YouTube wants creators to encourage people to sign up for YouTube Premium, so they can make more money.

A lot of people think that in order to make a lot of money on YouTube, you have to have a lot of subscribers, such as more than one million, and get a bunch of views, you know, every single time, one million views or something. But that's not the truth.

First thing's first, the amount of subscribers you have does not directly affect your revenue. For sure, once you have more subscribers, your videos probably get more views; therefore, you make more money and stuff, but it's not directly tied to the revenue. So someone who has 100k subscribers can make more money than someone who has 1 million subscribers.

The amount of money you make is also not directly tied to the amount of views. For example, let's look at my two most popular videos. Even though the half Japanese half Turkish one had 1.1 million views, it only made 636 dollars. The other video, the learning English video, which got 1 million views, made 1.9k dollars. Even though it had fewer views, it made more money.

I'm gonna explain to you why that happened. There are more important things you have to care about if you want to make money on YouTube. The first thing is really important: watch time. When you compare these two videos, one of them is less than eight minutes long, and the other one is more than eight minutes.

If you want to run mid-roll ads, basically the ads that run in the middle of your video, your video has to be longer than 8 minutes. It used to be 10 minutes, but now it's 8 minutes, and you have to pass this certain number. My half Japanese half Turkish video was shorter than 8 minutes, unfortunately. That's why I made less money. But it doesn't necessarily mean that the longer your videos are, the more money you make.

It's really about the watch time retention. If your videos are too long and they're too boring, then people are likely to click off. Therefore, it doesn't necessarily mean that a longer video is better.

So how does watch time affect your revenue? Since YouTube also wants to make money, they are, of course, going to recommend videos that keep people on the platform. Because YouTube wants to show as many ads as possible to people, so they can make money too.

That basically means that if people are staying on your video for a pretty good amount of time, YouTube's gonna recommend it to more people, and that basically means your video’s going viral. So watch time retention is really important. That's why people try to make more engaging videos so that people will stay on your videos.

Back in the day, YouTube, you know, clickbait was a huge thing. But right now, if people are clicking on your video but not staying in that video, it's not that important. So doing too much clickbait can actually damage your channel. If you're going to do clickbait, make sure that you give the value that people signed up for so that your channel won't die.

Okay, so the second important metric when it comes to making money on YouTube is RPM, which basically means revenue per mille—the amount of money that you make for every thousand views. There are certain factors that affect your RPM. Some people have RPMs that are very high, like 10, and my RPM is currently about 2.5 to 2.7-ish.

At the beginning of my YouTube journey, it was less than a dollar, and I’m gonna explain to you how I made my RPM go higher, even though I get fewer views right now. I make more money compared to the past.

Okay, so the first thing that affects RPM is the topic of the video. Basically, when you make videos about tech, real estate, or finance, like this video, you make more money on these videos than vlogs or, you know, videos for kids and stuff. Why is that? Because real estate, tech, and finance companies have a lot of money to burn, which means they have a lot of money to spend on these Google ads.

Since they spend a lot of money on Google ads, when they run these ads in your videos, it's gonna make your RPM higher because those are the customers that pay the most. If you have enough knowledge about those topics, go for it; you're gonna make a lot of money. If you watch Graham Stephan, who is a personal finance and real estate type of YouTuber, he makes more than one million dollars every single year because he has a pretty high RPM of 10, which is like four times higher than me, and he's basically a millionaire.

The other thing that affects RPM, as far as we know, is the country. Some countries have higher RPM than other countries. What does it mean? So when it's a highly developed country, where their citizens have a pretty good economic situation, they are more likely to buy things from these YouTube ads, right? So they are the customers that YouTube wants to target because YouTube wants to sell things from these Google ads.

When we look into my channel, as we can see from this graph, the United States, Australia, and Norway are the top three countries. When you look at them, they make like $13.9, $13, and $12 or so. When you compare, for example, the United States to Germany, viewers from the U.S. make the most money.

Therefore, for me, targeting people from the U.S. would be more clever than targeting people who have lower RPM. If you want to do YouTube for fun, you don't have to think about those things. But since I treat this channel as a business, for me targeting U.S. viewers is going to benefit me in the long run.

I'm gonna explain how to make a successful channel in another video, so stay tuned for that. Since we talked about Google Ads, now we can talk about sponsorships. Sponsorships are a great way to make money on YouTube. Only relying on AdSense is not a really clever thing to do, so doing sponsorships here and there is a pretty great choice to increase your income and also share with your audience the services that you believe in.

For example, today’s sponsorship is Squarespace. I’ve been working on my website lately. I don’t have a website yet; there is like one website that I haven't worked on, but I'm currently creating a pretty beautiful and aesthetic website for the projects that I'm gonna do in 2022. I’m planning a lot of things, so stay tuned for those.

The thing that I really like about Squarespace is that it makes it really easy to build a website. Even though I don't know coding and all of these things, I can make my website easily using Squarespace because there are so many tools on Squarespace that you can use, such as a website builder. It really helps you when making a website or online store, portfolio, or blog—whatever.

There are so many options that you can choose with Squarespace; you can turn any idea into reality, which I'm currently working on. You can browse templates on Squarespace and pick one that suits your website. Another great thing about Squarespace is analytics. You can see from the analytics where your customers or your viewers are coming from, what type of traffic they are, and what your visitors are looking for, where they are coming from, how they're interacting with your content or your product, so that you can analyze and improve your business.

Head to squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com/judyohama to save ten percent on your first purchase of a website or a domain using the code OHAMA. Thank you, Squarespace, for sponsoring this video.

Okay, so now let’s talk about the amount of money that you can make from sponsorships. There is an equation where you can calculate the amount of money that YouTubers should make or are making. The average view amount divided by a thousand multiplied by twenty to thirty dollars.

So when it comes to my channel, for example, on average my videos get around 50k to 60k views, depending on the video. My language videos are much more popular than that, but we're not going to talk about those in order to make things easier. So let's divide 50 to 60k by 1,000, and you multiply that by 20 to 30.

For each sponsorship, I should be making around a thousand dollars to 1,800. Even though it's really different from the real numbers that I make, I'm not gonna say in which way; these are the estimated amounts that YouTubers make.

Now let’s talk about the other way that you can make money using YouTube: affiliates. I put a lot of links in my description below. If you check that out, for example, if I would put an Amazon affiliate link and if you buy that product, I get a really small percentage from that. For affiliates, I am using Amazon, Ikea, Unix, and Sakurako boxes affiliates.

So the fourth category of making money using YouTube is creating online courses. You can create online courses on Skillshare, Udemy, or you can create your own online course platform and drive the traffic source—drive the audience that you have on YouTube to those online courses and make money out of them.

Ali does it, and Ali makes like more than one million dollars or something every single year. I’m gonna announce a Skillshare class in 2022, so stay tuned for those, but currently, I don’t have any online courses, so I don’t have any revenues from that, unfortunately.

So now let’s talk about how much money I made in 2021. I'm gonna break down every single thing and explain to you. So let’s start with Google AdSense. When we look at my Google AdSense, even though it's not the end of the year, this year I made around 20k dollars. So Google AdSense: 20k.

When it comes to sponsorships, including this video, I made 22 sponsorship videos this year, and since we said I should be charging a thousand to two thousand hundred dollars per sponsorship, this year I have to make around 22k to 32.6k U.S. dollars. Even though it's really different from the real numbers, we're just gonna take that.

I'm not gonna break down every single sponsorship money that I made because I feel like it's gonna be really unfair to the companies that I got sponsorships from, and in most of the contracts, you're not allowed to share the amount of money that you make. So it’s not even legal for me to say the exact amount that I make from sponsorships, but let's take the average and say 30k this year out of sponsorships.

From the affiliates, as I said, from Amazon, Ikea, Unix, and Sakurako, in total I made 1151. Again, it would be really unfair to these companies as well, so I'm not going to break down each of them, but in total with the guesses of the sponsorships, I should have made around 51k dollars this year.

I feel like 51k dollars is pretty good, and when we think that I started to make proper money in March, so from March to December, I make this money, and I’ve been posting regularly for almost a year—less than a year right now—and I made 51k dollars on this channel. I do think that this is pretty impressive, don't you think?

I mean, I’m currently able to support my education and also my life in Italy, which is pretty cool. Like a year ago, I never thought about it, and now I'm currently able to do this; like it's really crazy to me. A lot of people think that just because I had a viral video, I make this amount of money. But there are actually a lot of tactics and things that I made in order to keep the attention on my channel, and not say, "Oh, that was just like a one viral video; I'm not watching her anymore."

There are so many things that I've done and worked for this channel, which I'm gonna explain in the upcoming weeks with a new video, so stay tuned for that. Relying on one source of income is not a stable thing to do, so I'm gonna branch out, release a lot of products and courses so that I can increase the amount of money that I make, and also I can bring value to you.

The thing that I can say before finishing this video is that never ever give up on your dreams. This is my fifth channel, as I said. I was 14 when I first published my video, and it's been six years—six years of me trying to become a YouTuber, and finally, I’m a YouTuber.

The only channel that you see is this channel, but it's not the only channel that I made. The effort that you see is literally like an iceberg. You see the very top of it. You might think that, "Oh, she made this amount of money in less than a year, so I should be able to do that too." You’re probably able to do that, but for me, it took six years to reach this point.

So YouTube is not a get-rich-quick scheme or something. You really have to work for that. Yes, I had a viral video a couple of times, but I actually planned those viral videos, and I was guessing that these videos were gonna go viral, and I played my cards according to that, did some tactics, read the analytics, and played according to that.

I'm gonna make a video about how to grow your channel in 2022 and the tactics and things you should be aware of when it comes to growing channels, so stay tuned for that video.

And I, uh—I'm gonna cry. I'm so thankful to you guys for supporting this channel and supporting my journey. It's been always a dream of mine to become a YouTuber, and now because of you guys, I'm able to do this, and I'm so happy for that.

And thank you, Squarespace, for sponsoring this video. I love you guys for making my dream come true. There's so many more to come, and see you in my next video. Bye!

Ah, I’m gonna cry.

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