How much money do I make on YouTube

I made a post about how my channel performed compared to the goals I set for 2019, and I did much better than expected. I actually qualified for monetization, which I never actually expected. (Mainly because I thought the viewing requirements was 400,000 minutes, not 4,000 hours, in a single year.)

As it turns out, I finally qualified for and was accepted for monetization the Saturday before LiveWorx 2019. So how much money am I making from YouTube?

In 2019 I made just under $700 from ads playing on my videos. That’s a cup of coffee a day, just over $2 a day, for the year, but again, I wasn’t earning money the entire year.

Looking at more representative time periods, I was peaking at a 28-day average of around $6 a day, sometimes going as high as just over $10 a day. That was before the Thanksgiving to New Years stretch, which has killed my monetization. Recently I’ve been barely over $3 a day.

So $700 for 350 videos… but it’s also $700 more than I ever expected to make.

But now that I am making money, how much would I like to make? Obviously, I’m never going to be one of those YouTube millionaires like the kids who unboxes toys or video game players, and that’s okay – that was never my goal. But here is what would be nice:

· If I were making $20 a day for the year, that would cover all my software costs for Creo, Mathcad, Onshape, and the apps I use for filming and editing.

· If I were making $100 a day, I’d be comfortable reducing my day job employment down to 75%, or 3 weeks of every month, to spend more time generating video content and writing.

· In order to leave my day job, I would need to make… I don’t think I would do that. I wouldn’t run this channel if I weren’t actively involved in product development or Creo / Windchill implementation. I think I need to be actively involved in this field to make content.

After 16 months of this, is it worth it? Unequivably, YES. Again, I didn’t get into this for the money; I never expected to make money. I thought it would help my book sales and help establish cred for the next company I work at, so I thought it would help me indirectly financially.

What do I really get out of this? I knew that after 13 years as an instructor for PTC and its Value Added Resellers, I had gained a tremendous amount of knowledge in design, analysis, manufacturing, routed systems, engineering calculations, and Product Lifecycle Management using PTC tools. It sucks that I have all this knowledge in my head and people aren’t benefitting from it. Imagine if you died and still had millions of dollars or some other kinds of assets that you could have used to help people or educate them or do some other kind of good, and that stuff died with you. That would truly suck. I get the satisfaction of knowing that I’m doing what I can to share the knowledge I’ve acquired over my career.

Do you want to help? If so, share the channel with your co-workers, fellow students, or other Creo acquaintances and encourage them to subscribe. (If every subscriber got one other person to subscribe, that would be bonkers.) Share video links on social media or your company’s chat rooms. And like the videos and write a comment.

Thanks a lot for watching. I appreciate everyone who has supported the channel.