how much money I made in my FIRST year on YouTube 💸

Let's talk money because we all know that eventual financial success on YouTube is possible. We see creators like Mr. Beast and Ali Abdaal, and we know that they're just raking it in. But what does a realistic first year on YouTube actually look like?

I started making YouTube videos on this channel early last year, and I remember being in the beginning of my YouTube journey and wishing that more people more openly shared their revenue numbers because I wanted to see what was possible. So today, I'm going to break down exactly how much money I made in the one year following my very first upload on this channel. And keep in mind that this is just one example, just one personal experience. But my hope is that by being transparent with you and sharing everything that I can, it can give you a better understanding of how the numbers might actually look like after posting on YouTube for a full year.

We'll start with the most obvious income stream: YouTube AdSense. When most people think about making money on YouTube, this is the income stream they often think of first. Here's how it works: After your channel hits 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours, you can get accepted into the YouTube Partner Program, or YPP. And once you're a part of YPP, you can start earning money on the ads placed in your videos. You know, those pre-roll ads in the beginning of a video and those mid-roll ads in the middle of a video? Yep, you can start earning money from them.

And the money that you can make from AdSense is measured by this term called RPM, or Revenue Per Mill. This metric measures how much money you make per 1,000 views on your videos. This RPM varies massively from niche to niche and market to market, and this variation is often driven by how valuable an impression is to advertisers. So let's take a look at my own AdSense numbers over my first year on YouTube.

For the sake of this video, we're going to count my first year as starting on April 14th, 2023, which is when I uploaded my first video to this channel, and ending one year later on April 13th, 2024. Looking at the analytics, we can see that although I started my channel on April 14th, it took me until September 22nd to see a single cent. That's how long it took me to reach the requisite 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours required to get monetized on YouTube. Everyone reaches this threshold differently, but for me, it took 22 videos and around 104,000 views across a little over 5 months.

Looking at my views, you can see that this was largely driven by this upload on September 8th, which has since gone on to be my most viewed video of all time. If we take a closer look at that video, we can see that it started out by bringing in a few hundred views per day, which was already incredibly high performing for my channel at the time. And then, here one week after being live, the video really started taking off. In 2 weeks, that single video accounted for 70% of the total views on my channel, and those views were what tipped me over the threshold to reach my monetization requirements.

And I'd say that this is relatively common because there are two main ways of reaching your monetization requirements: by steadily increasing your subscriber count and watch hours over time until you finally pass the threshold, or by having one video take off and blowing right through those requirements. And for many people, this is the case, which has its pros and cons. On the pro side, at any point, you're potentially only one video away from getting monetized, which is pretty darn cool. But on the con side, you can never really predict with 100% certainty when that video will be. It can come five months into posting videos like me, or it can come a year and five months into posting videos, or even longer.

So if you're at a point where you're trying to get your channel monetized, you're better off just focusing on making better videos versus obsessing over trying to hit those monetization requirements, which I know is a bit cheesy and everyone always says, "Just make good videos," but it's true. If you make good videos, the rest will come.

And look, you see these videos right here? I released them before my channel got monetized, and they both leveled out around a couple thousand views. But then later on, after my intro video started getting some traction, they took off again and are now both over 200,000 views each. It's not like those videos suddenly became better overnight, but when one video takes off, it gives more people the chance to discover other videos of yours. And the better your back catalog of videos is, the better off you'll be when your big break does come.

And speaking of big breaks, let's take a look at what happened after I reached mine. In the remaining seven-ish months of my first year on YouTube, my lowest earning day was October 15th, where I brought in $9.41, and my highest earning day was November 28th, where I brought in $71.48. During this time, my channel brought in 1.3 million views, and my five top-earning videos were, unsurprisingly, my top five performing videos. My RPM was also an average of $4.27, which is an average because your RPM actually changes a lot from video to video and even from day to day. Take these two videos for instance: they both brought in around the same number of views, but one brought in almost double the revenue of the other because of the sheer difference in RPM.

And taking a look at my RPM over time, we can also see that it gradually increased as my channel got older. When I first got monetized, my RPMs were closer to $2 to $3, but it grew over time to be closer to $6 to $7. This is also pretty common. Newer channels tend to have lower RPMs at first because YouTube has less information about them and places fewer ads in their videos. And then, over time, as you upload more and YouTube becomes more familiar with your channel, they can place better targeted ads in your videos, and your RPMs will rise. All this to say, if you get monetized and notice that your RPMs are super low, you can expect them to rise a bit over time.

So, in the first year of this channel, I ended up bringing in 1.4 million views, 97.7k watch hours, 45.1k subscribers, and $568.129 of revenue. And honestly, that's pretty good. And I don't say that to brag or pat myself on the back, but rather to set clear expectations if you're someone who's considering starting a channel of your own. I have a lot of friends who've been making amazing videos for quite some time, but who either haven't gotten monetized yet, or who have gotten monetized but haven't seen over a million views yet. And the biggest contributing factor to why I was able to get my channel monetized in only around 5 months is because, plot twist, this isn't my first channel.

I started this channel on April 14th of last year, but I've been on YouTube as a whole since July of 2021, when I started posting videos on a different channel. That old channel is long gone at this point, but that experience of making videos on that channel 100% carried over into the creation of this channel. And it's really important that I give you that context because I would never want someone who's starting from scratch to compare their journey to mine and wonder what they're doing wrong. In a way, the first year of this channel was 3 years in the making. So keep that context in mind as we go through the rest of this video.

And the other ways in which I made money in this first year. This is a realistic first year on YouTube, but it's my realistic first year on YouTube. And my hope is that by sharing what I tried and what my experiences were like, you can gain a little insight into what one possible YouTube monetization model could look like.

So, YouTube AdSense brought in around $5.6 grand in the first year of this channel. Which, on one hand, hey, that's $5.6 thousand dollars. I'll never complain about that. On the other hand, there's no way I can live off of $5.6 thousand dollars in a whole year. Which is where other income streams come into play. I had seven income streams other than AdSense in my first year on YouTube. So let's go through them from lowest to highest.

Stared with number seven: selling research. And honestly, this one is less of an income stream and more of an income trickle or an income droplet, but it happened, so I'm counting it. I do a lot of research for the videos I make, which I often show a quick preview of in the beginning of my videos. And in one video, I mentioned that I had a 43-page long research doc for one of my Mr. Beast deep dives, and someone reached out asking if he could buy a copy of my notes. The longer you're on YouTube, the more random requests you'll inevitably receive. And at the time, I said yes, but I wouldn't do it again. I feel like my deep research is a large part of what makes my video so special, and I don't love the idea of just selling my raw notes to a complete stranger. From that experience, I learned that just because someone asks you for something that you can deliver, it doesn't mean that you have to, or that you even necessarily should. And I got a lot better at saying no after that. But at the time, I ended up selling that copy of my notes for $300. Bring our grand total first year revenue up to $5,981.29.

Next up in our line of income sources, we have mentorship. So earlier on my YouTube journey, I took this cohort-based version of Ali Abdaal's Part-Time YouTube Academy, or PTY, and they kindly asked me to come back and run some mastermind sessions for some more intermediate students. This was another random one-off thing, but unlike selling my research to a stranger, this was something that I actually felt quite good about, mostly because I wasn't really doing it for the money, but more so just to become more involved in the community because I really did love my time with PTY. I ended up running a few sessions for them, which netted me another $600. Which brings our first year total up to $6,581.09.

Coming in at income stream number five, we have affiliate income. And if you're not familiar with affiliate income, it works like this: when I mention a product and put a link to it in the video description, those links are often affiliate links. This means that if someone buys a product through my link, I get a small commission. The viewer will pay the exact same whether they purchase a product through my link or not, but if they do use my link, I get a small reward. One of the easiest affiliate programs to join is the Amazon Associates program. You can just sign up and instantly get affiliate links to anything on Amazon, which is something you can start earning money from before you even get monetized on YouTube. For instance, at the bottom of each of my video descriptions, I have a little section with the links to all of the gear I use to make my videos. I don't really mention that it's there, but I will get a couple hundred clicks per month. But the Amazon affiliate commission is notoriously low at around 3 to 4% of the sale price. So if someone purchased a $50 light panel through your link, you'd only get around $1 to $2. In contrast, the affiliate programs of individual brands are often much higher, offering 15%, 25%, or even up to 40% commission. The math on these affiliate offers becomes even crazier when dealing with software products with a recurring subscription because then you get monthly recurring affiliate income for as long as your referee is subscribed to the software.

I started as an Amazon affiliate as soon as I started my channel, but I didn't join any other affiliate programs until around 9 months in. But even with only being active affiliate for around 3 months out of 12, I still brought in $677.58 in affiliate income in the first year of this channel, bringing our grand total up to $7,258.87. Honestly, affiliate income is one of the easiest ways to bring in money as a new YouTube channel, allowing you to make money before you hit your monetization requirements or are big enough to attract sponsors. And I'd really recommend that everyone at least give it a try. It's not going to be life-changing money, especially if you're just starting out, but it can be really encouraging to see even just a few dollars come in from making videos on the internet, and it really can start to add up.

Income stream number four is workshops. Someone reached out to me after seeing my content, and it turned out that he ran a paid entrepreneurship community. He liked my videos and he asked if he could pay me to prepare a live 1-hour workshop to teach his community about how to get started on YouTube. This was another one of those serendipitous opportunities that come from putting videos out there for anyone in the world to see. And I will say that things like this are more common for channels that are more educational in scope because the potential collaborations are often more obvious or straightforward. It's not that something like this is impossible for an entertainment channel, but this is one of those income streams that tend to be a better fit for more educational channels. Anyways, I said yes to the request because I thought that it would be a cool opportunity to try something that I hadn't done before. And while it took me quite a bit of time to put together that initial presentation, once I had it, it became something I could offer and deliver again and again, both for that initial community and for other communities. In the first year of this channel, those workshops brought in $1,000, bringing the aggregate total of my first year income up to $8,258.87.

This brings us to our top three sources of revenue other than AdSense. And coming at number three, we have sponsorships. Sponsorships involve working with a brand to market or promote a product or service, typically in the form of talking about that product or service in a video. For example, this video was kindly sponsored by Glorify. See what I did there? And as I tell you about Glorify, I'll also use this as an opportunity to tell you what factors I look at when deciding whether or not to accept a sponsor because accepting sponsors was something that I held off on for a long time.

The first is genuine usefulness. I've had a lot of brands, especially AI tools, reach out with products that I didn't feel was useful enough to actually be worth purchasing. When you're starting and growing a channel, most of us are very selective with what we choose to spend money on, especially if you're at a point where your channel isn't bringing in money yet. I would never want to accept a sponsor whose product I didn't feel was actually worth buying. As one of my few accepted sponsors, Glorify passes the genuine usefulness test with flying colors. It's an editing tool built specifically for YouTubers that automatically removes the silences and bad takes in your raw footage, leaving you with a rough cut that you're then able to export into whatever software you normally edit with. So if I say Glorify passes the genuine usefulness test with flying colors, it'll automatically cut out those first two takes and leave me with the last. And then, because it exports directly into your editing software, I can tweak and adjust any cut it made to my heart's content. Genuine usefulness: check.

Next up in my sponsorship checklist is a big one, and it's a bit controversial, but it's that I must be an actual user. I know that a lot of YouTubers will get sponsored by brands that they don't actually use themselves (cough cough, NordVPN). But personally, I feel like it's important that I actually use the products and services that I help advertise for. One, it helps me more genuinely talk about the product because I know firsthand what I'm actually talking about. But I also feel like if it's not something that I use, it's not something I should be asking my viewers to use. And I know that it gets a little complicated because maybe there are tools that aren't directly relevant to my specific content type and workflow, but that could be relevant to someone else's specific content type and workflow. It's something that I'll continue to think about, but for now, that's where I stand. Which is a big reason why I accepted working with Glorify. It's a tool that I genuinely use with every single video that I make, including this one. I used to spend hours combing through my raw footage to get my rough cut done, but now I can instantly cut down an hour and 30 minutes of raw footage into 29 minutes of a base cut, saving my time for more advanced edits. It's a tool that I tell my real-life friends about unprompted, so it definitely checks that actual user box.

And finally, in order for me to consider accepting a sponsor, the sponsor must be relevant to my audience. There are plenty of products or services that I use in my life that are useful, but that aren't relevant to YouTube or video creation. I'll even spend a ton of time thinking through specific video ideas that will be the best fit for the sponsor, allowing me to more naturally integrate the sponsored segment into my content in a way that hopefully doesn't feel super obnoxious or random to the viewer. This particular sponsored segment for Glorify was a little cheeky, but we do have an upcoming sponsored segment coming in a video about how to edit for YouTube, which is a more natural fit. If you want to give Glorify a try, which I highly recommend that you do, especially if you're a talking head YouTuber like me who films more scripted, sit-down content, I'll put a link in the description below with a coupon code you can use to get an extra free video edited by Glorify. Thank you so, so much to Glorify for sponsoring this video.

Now, when it comes to money, I can't tell you exactly how much each brand paid me because I'm not allowed to. But I finally started accepting sponsorships on my channel in February of 2024, 10 months into the start of my channel. And in the 2 months following, I brought in $5,000 from sponsorships, bringing my first year revenue up to $13,258.87.

Moving on to income stream number two, we have consulting. And in my first year on YouTube, I tried my hand in consulting in a few ways. For a brief period of time, I experimented with the concept of mini channel reviews. Someone could purchase a channel review for $100, and I'd send them a brief form to fill out with some background info and context into their channel. I'd review their channel, noting what recommendations I had across categories like titles and thumbnails, ideas, scripting, editing, etc. And I'd deliver my findings to them in a 10-minute recorded Loom video. I made six sales before I ended up shutting that down. I had a lot more interest, but for the amount of time that I was spending on each channel review, it just wasn't worth it for me to continue doing it at that price point. It's something that I might consider bringing back in the future, but it would have to be at a price point and model that's worth it for both me and for the viewer.

I also tried out one-off hourly consulting where people or businesses could purchase an hour of my time to use however they like. I would also preface those sessions with a form for them to fill out to help me prepare for the call, and the calls themselves would usually be a mixture of talking through titles and thumbnails, ideation, overall strategy. All of the interest for this was inbound; it was never something that I advertised, but I had a lot of people DMing me asking if they could pay for my time. And I wanted to offer them something. But I pretty quickly stopped offering those as well, mostly because I would spend up to a few hours just preparing for a single call itself, which both stressed me out a lot. I lowered my effective hourly rate for those consulting calls.

And finally, I tried out offering a longer-term consulting package. This was a higher ticket, 6-week long offer where I'd have weekly calls with my client to more tangibly support them over time. I tried this out for one client, and it was a lot. In typical April in fashion, I'd stay up really late the night before the call just preparing and preparing to try to make it as useful as they possibly could. Because this was a more expensive offer, I just got really in my head about needing everything to be as valuable as possible. The client got awesome results, and I'm really glad that I did it, but I don't think I'd do it again. Ultimately, I think I realized that consulting, or at least consulting in this form, just isn't for me. The overachiever in me just spends way too much time on it, and it saps a lot of my energy, leaving me with less time and energy to work on my own videos, which is the point of being on YouTube in the first place. And this consideration is something that I now prioritize when thinking about any other potential new income stream.

As YouTubers, there's so much available to us. The income streams I've tried out personally are just scratching the surface. There's memberships, in-person retreats, physical products, and infinitely more options. And when you see someone else making money in these ways, it can be easy to feel like you have to do all of them too, but that's just not the case. Sure, try things out, but pay attention to how each thing makes you feel. Not every income stream will be a fit for every creator and every channel, and that's okay. Just try them out and see which one is the best fit for you.

But all in all, my various consulting offers brought in $7,850.19, bringing my first year revenue up to $21,109.06. Which brings us to the last and highest earning income stream: income stream number one, courses. I say courses, but it's really just one course: BGTY, the Beginner's Guide to YouTube. And I always feel a little weird talking about the course on this channel because I feel like there's this underlying vibe of, "Oh, she just has a YouTube channel to sell her course," which is absolutely not the case for me at all. I have this YouTube channel because I genuinely love the craft, and at this point, I can't imagine doing anything other than make videos. There are very few things in this world that bring me more joy than learning something new and getting to package it up and share it with others.

But my course, like many other of my income streams, started quite randomly. Remember that workshop I created to deliver to that viewer's entrepreneurship community? Well, one day, he said he was trying something new for his community and he asked if I was interested in converting my live workshop into a self-paced course. He'd give me $5K as a pre-order to license the course to share with this community for free, but otherwise, it would still be my own course to sell or do whatever I want with it. I said yes, and he sent me the $5K that very day. So I made the course called BGTY, the Beginner's Guide to YouTube, which focused specifically on helping people get their first 1,000 subscribers on YouTube. Most of the marketing for it was done through a pre-sales campaign, which I ran primarily through my Twitter account. I don't really mention the course at all on this YouTube channel, but I do have a link to it in the video description, so I will get some clicks through that.

And if I'm being honest, I don't love having a self-paced course as an income stream. I had a great and very unorthodox opportunity to make this specific course, which I am very grateful for, but I don't think I'd ever make a course like this again. I've gotten amazing feedback on my course, which is incredible, but to me, and this is no shade at all to people who do have courses, a self-paced course experience just feels too similar to merely watching a video on YouTube. I always try to make the best, most valuable YouTube videos that I can, and I love the fact that I'm able to put them out on the internet for free for anyone to be able to access at any time. And while still keep my course up because I do think that's a valuable resource to those who choose to purchase it, when I think about what sort of income streams I want to pursue in the future, I want them to have some sort of element or experience that you can't normally get on YouTube, like direct FaceTime with me, or a small group setting, or something else like that.

But in the first year, including that $5K initiating pre-order, my course brought in a total of $12,643.12, which makes a grand total for how much money I made in the first year of this YouTube channel: $33,752.18.

Now, to some, that might not seem like much. After all, I live in California, where the minimum wage salary is around $66,000. So on one hand, I made around half of a minimum wage salary while working way over 40 hours a week. But on the other hand, holy cow, I made $33 grand just sitting in my room, learning cool things, and making videos that I love. And besides the money, only tells one side of the story. Over the last year, my life has changed in previously unimaginable ways. I've traveled to countries that have been on my bucket list for years. I've gone to conferences and stayed up talking about titles and thumbnails until 5:00 AM. I've made incredible friends whose existence I'm thankful for every single day. And I've even spoken with the freaking CEO of YouTube. That's insane.

And through it all, I've been able to write and film and edit and improve my craft every step of the way. I've been able to learn so much, not just about how to craft a video, but about how to craft a life I love living. I've had the corporate 9-to-5, I've had the high paycheck, and yet somehow, the $33 grand from this YouTube channel feels like a greater accomplishment than any promotion I've ever received.

I know you clicked on this video because you're interested in the money, and trust me, the money is there. The crazy thing about YouTube is that everything compounds. We are nearing the end of the year now, and I can tell you that I'll make more money in the next 3 months than I made in the entirety of that last year. When things take off, they take off. But if you're only in it for the money, I think you're barking up the wrong tree. There are plenty of ways to make a living out there that is much easier than starting a YouTube channel. But YouTube has the power to bring in so much more than just money. And this is only year one. We're just getting started.

This video covered my income up until April of this year. At the end of the year, I'll post an update with a detailed breakdown of everything that's happened income-wise since then, which I can still hardly believe. I'll link to it here when it's out. But if you're watching this video before then, now would be a great time to subscribe to make sure that you don't miss it. Otherwise, thank you so much for watching, keep creating, and I'll see you in the next video.