My First YouTube Paycheck and How to Get Monetized!

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how much I made on YouTube, and how you can get monetized too!

YouTube Channel

My YouTube channel is still quite small. At the time this video was created, I had 1400 subscribers, and about half a million views total. I became monetized in August, 2020, and in a couple of months, I received my first payment.

Adsense Account

In my Adsense account, you can see I had a partial month in August because my channel was monetized toward the end of August. So, I received $29. Then September brought in $120. Adsense doesn’t distribute funds until your balance has exceeded $100, so at the end of October, I received $149 for August and September. Now, this helps with motivation to get more videos produced, viewed, and monetized.

How Do You Get Monetized?

Look at your YouTube account (using mine as an example).
Click on your profile, then click on YouTube Studio.
On the left, click on Monetization. Here you can track your progress.
To get monetized, you need 1000 or more subscribers and 4000 or more watch hours for the year (Watch hours are the total hours people have watched your videos.) You have to hit both goals to get monetized.

When you have reached these goals, there will be a button for you to apply to be monetized. YouTube will review your channel, it may take a few weeks, so be patient. As long as you aren’t doing anything too wild or crazy, offensive or racist, then you should get approved.

Once I am Monetized, How Do I Start Getting Paid?

One of the most common ways of getting paid is to display ads. This is done simply by allowing ads to run before your videos or little text ads on top of your videos. Here is how that is done:

After you are monetized, click on Videos.
You can see all your videos with details in columns to the right. Visibility (whether they are public or private), then Monetization. You can click the drop-down next to the dollar sign to turn videos on or off.

Click the little dollar sign for monetization.

The common ways to monetize are, with the most popular being first:

• Skippable video ads, which are a lot less annoying to the end-users, hence keeping them watching your video. This one is my preference.
• Video ads at the beginning, middle, or end of your video.
• Display ads showing up on the side of the video.
• Text-based overlay ads on top of your video, near the bottom of the screen.

How Will The Money Get To Me?

You need an Adsense account set up with Google. It’s effortless to set up, they will ask for all your identification and legal information: name, address, tax information, bank account information. It is not hard to do and it is completely free. Once that is set up, Adsense will deposit your payments over $100 in your bank account, as described at the beginning of this video.

How Long Will It Take?

For me, it took 6 years, but that is because I started out very slow and inconsistent. But for someone who is very serious at the start, ideally you should be producing at minimum, one video per week. Then you’ll get monetized a lot quicker than I did. If you can’t handle one per week, then one or two per month should still allow you to get monetized in a reasonable period of time.

Looking at analytics gives you a good idea of how soon you will meet your goal. At the time this video was produced, I had around 22,000 views and about 500 watch hours, producing $128 in revenue. At this point, I can expect to make around $100 to $150 per month, until I reach the next level.

What’s Next?

My next goal is to double my YouTube income. When that happens, I will share with you tips and tricks, so you can do the same.

Feel free to contact me with questions or comments, and subscribe to my YouTube channel so that you can get my updates and learn more.