5 Ways To Earn Money On YouTube

2005 saw the rise of one of the largest sources of entertainment and information on the internet: YouTube. Bought off by Google in 2006, the video hosting site has grown to become an integral part of Google, raking in a revenue of as much as around US$15 billion, as per 2019 figures. YouTube is such a large platform that is one of the most accessed websites on the internet, second only to Google, according to Alexa Internet. As of May 2019, more than 500 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube per minute. To give you an understanding of that figure, 500 hours almost 21 whole days.


In that time, you can watch the entire Game of Thrones series in its entirety nearly a full eight times, continuously. In 500 hours, a person could shuttle between the Moon and Earth around seven times! All this, in just a minute! This simplifies the understanding of the vastness and depth that YouTube possesses.


What does YouTube contain, though? YouTube has content which includes short video clips, TV shows, movie trailers, instructional videos, music videos, vlogs, live streams, gaming videos, and a countless number of others. The outreach of YouTube shows that YouTube has 2 billion logged-in monthly users. That’s around 1/4th of the population of the world. The content creators range from the common man to large companies like HBO, T-Series, Vevo, and NBA, amongst others. What if you could get money from your videos?



Some of these content creators earn revenue from the content that they upload. The ways that one can do that differ, of course. These methods have a minimum requirement from the content creator’s side, which YouTube has established. Some of the requirements vary, depending upon the purpose of monetization. A fundamental necessity for all of these methods, though, is that the content creator must be at least 18 years of age (or have a legal guardian over 18 years, concerning Ad Revenue). The number or type of subscriber is another requirement, one which changes with the method employed for monetization.


To be able to monetize your content, the primary step is to be enrolled in the YouTube Partner Program, following which you can select your method of monetization, depending, of course, upon the pre-requisites as discussed above. Let’s talk about these different methods now.

Advertising Revenue

Basically, in this method, a creator earns revenue from advertisements on their videos. These advertisements may either be a display, an overlay, or a video. A display ad appears on the right-side portion of the screen, next to the feature video. An overlay ad appears on the video itself. Video ads may either be skippable or not.



One can turn on ads on either a single video or multiple videos. Moreover, they can help others earn prizehog.net so that people will watch them more. However, to do so, the video(s) in question must fully comply with YouTube’s Advertiser-Friendly Content Guidelines. The content creator must be at least 18 years of age or have a guardian over 18 years of age who deals with the payments via AdSense.

Channel Memberships

Channel membership requires your members to make recurring monthly payments in exchange for exclusive perks that you, as a creator, may offer. This may include badges, emojis, or other goods that you may provide.



To be able to be considered for channel memberships, you have to have at least 30,000 subscribers (limited to 1,000 subscribers in case of gaming channels). You have to be at least 18 years of age, and your channel should not be set to the “made for kids” option. You have to be located at an available location as prescribed by YouTube.

Merchandise Shelf

Here, your subscribers can browse and purchase any number of official, branded merchandise available and showcased on your page. You would have to create or modify your merch item with your official merchandise retailer, and then submit the video to YouTube, where they’ll check it for compliance.


To be able to enable this mode of monetization, you must either be an official artist channel or else have more than 10,000 subscribers. The chain must also not be set as “made for kids.”

Super Chat & Super Stickers

This method enables the fans to pay for their messages highlighted in the chat streams. These messages stand out or even pin them to the top of the chat stream.


To be eligible for this, you have to be at least 18 years of age and must live in a country where the Super Chat is available (list of countries is available on the support.google.com page).

YouTube Premium

When a subscriber watches your content available on YouTube Premium, you get a part of the subscriber’s subscription fee. YouTube premium has ad-free content but still pays the content creators. This works as a win-win for the creators and subscribers.



The only requirement for this that YouTube Premium must be available at your location. Apart from that, the videos must comply with the standard guidelines of YouTube.


The method of enabling each of these monetization methods varies. The exact way to do the same can be found on the YouTube Help website. There are about 50 million users creating content shared on YouTube to date. It is a much smaller number of these content creators who earn money from their videos, but their videos are regardless watched aplenty. YouTube is an excellent way for a person to make money, provided they meet the requirements as set down by YouTube.