A YouTube creator with 1.4 million subscribers shares how much money she made in 2019 from ads
- YouTube creator Shelby Church, who has 1.4 million subscribers, broke down how much money she earned in 2019 from ads.
- Church said she earned more than double what she earned in 2018 and shared her strategy with Business Insider.
- By extending her videos to over 10 minutes long, and including more ads within a single video, she's been able to maximize hear earnings.
- Sign up for Business Insider's influencer newsletter, Influencer Dashboard, to get more stories like this in your inbox.
- Click here for more BI Prime stories.
2019 was a stellar year for YouTube creator Shelby Church in making money directly from the platform.
Church, who has 1.4 million subscribers, said she earned around $140,000 from YouTube ads in 2019, which is more than double what she made in 2018.
In general, Church's No. 1 source of revenue as an online creator is brand sponsorships and No. 2 is Google-placed ads in her videos.
Creators with 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours are eligible to have their videos monetized with ads by joining YouTube's Partner Program. These ads are filtered by Google, and how much money a creator earns (known as AdSense revenue) depends on the video's watch time, length, video type, and viewer demographics - among other factors.
Why did Church earn so much more money in 2019 than 2018?
She said one big factor was paying attention to the length of her videos and how many ads she included within a single one.
Church's technique for earning the most money possible
The CPM rate (or cost per thousand views) that creators earn from YouTube varies wildly, and some top YouTubers have ad-placement strategies to maximize their earnings.
One key to earning more money from a particular video is placing ads before viewers will typically "drop off" or click off from the video. Viewers often drop off if an intro is too long, or if the creator stays for a long time on one subject, industry insiders have told Business Insider.
Another way some creators earn more money from YouTube is simply by making their videos longer so they can contain more ads. In 2018, most of the videos that Church uploaded were under 10 minutes long, she said. Since they were shorter, she was only able to include one ad.
Midway through 2019, she realized that if she extended her videos to over 10 minutes, she could include more ads and earn more money.
Church said she usually includes one pre-roll ad before the video (which is the default on YouTube), and two ads within the video, three or four minutes apart. Her videos are typically about 10 to 12 minutes.
"I think this amount has been good for my audience," she said. "They don't usually comment about it being too much."
She found that her videos over 10 minutes long generally made $5.00 per 1,000 views, while the videos under 10 minutes usually made $2.00 per 1,000 views. Church said in her experience, YouTube takes about half of that.
The subject of a video can affect how much it earns
In general, business-related YouTube channels have a relatively high CPM rate.
Marina Mogilko, an entrepreneur and YouTube creator, spoke with Business Insider about her three YouTube channels, and she said that her business channel made more per view than the others - by far.
Another YouTube creator, Kevin David, explained that he earned more money than the average creator, per view, because of the type of content he produced: detailed how-to videos (like how to make money online or sell products on Amazon) and e-commerce tutorials.
That is true in Church's experience as well, she said.
Church said her video about Amazon FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon) had an unusually high CPM rate and that the video earned her about $30,000 in AdSense revenue from 1.8 million views.
She also had a video go "semi viral" (as she put it) in 2019, gaining about 6 million views. She said that video generated about $26,000 in AdSense money.
What was that video about? How much YouTube paid her for a video with 1 million views.
For more on how much YouTube creators made in 2019, and their strategies to earning the most money possibly through ads, check out these Business Insider Prime posts:
A YouTube creator broke down the strategy that earned him $400,000 last year: Kevin David, a YouTube creator and entrepreneur with 838,000 subscribers, earned over $400,000 from Google AdSense in 2019.
A personal-finance influencer who quit his day job for YouTube made over $100,000 in his first year: Andrei Jikh quit his day job and in late 2018 decided to launch a YouTube channel about personal finance.
A Harvard student with 300,000 YouTube subscribers shares exactly how much money she made in 2019 as a college influencer from ads: Sienna Santer, a second-year student and YouTube influencer with 302,000 subscribers, shared how much money she made from Google AdSense in 2019.