Hey, what’s up. It’s Jerad with Practically Passive, and I wanted to talk today about my number one source of passive income, which is YouTube. Really, that income actually comes from Google AdSense, because Google AdSense is Google’s ad platform for creators. For example, if you’re a company and you have something that you want to market, and you want that to show up in the form of video before a YouTube video plays, then that’s the process you would go through, you would use Google AdSense for that, you would create an ad and it would show during content that was kind of related.
If you came to one of my videos, which was about an iPhone, and you had an iPhone case to sell, you might want your video to play as an ad before, during or after my video is done. So that’s where that revenue comes from with YouTube. I built the State of Tech channel, and also Ditch Auto, which is another YouTube channel up to the point where I’m getting on average around $1,600 to $2,200 a month just from YouTube ads basically.
I started State of Tech a while back. Actually, State of Tech was the second phase from another YouTube channel that I had called Daily App Show. I had really gotten into reviewing apps for smartphones back when the smartphones first came out. I had a lot of traction there, things were going really well for me at that time. It wasn’t so much traffic, or income that was coming from Google AdSense, and from ads, it was active revenue that was coming from other sources such as companies paying me to review their apps.
But when I transitioned towards wanting to come at things from a more educational standpoint, and actually teach people how to use their devices, inform them on how to do specific things on their smartphones, or their tablets, or whatnot, that’s where I really started looking at, “Okay, how do I add the most value? Because this has to be informative. I have to come at this as a good teacher helping people, otherwise, my information isn’t going to be consumed, and it’s not going to become passive income.” As my ad revenue has grown over the months and the years, I’ve really realized there’s a lot of potential in producing content for YouTube.
As long as I’m producing enough content, it’s relevant, it’s value-added, then I’m going to end up getting paid over time in a passive way from that content that I’m putting out. I started building on State of Tech because I wanted to be more of an informational source, an educational source in mobile technology. I was trying to differentiate myself from the people who were just doing reviews, who were just doing what I had been doing previously, because the competition had gotten really steep. State of Tech came about and I’ve been kind of slowly building that over time.
Now, I haven’t really focused that well on State of Tech as far as finding a specific topic. I think that if I had gone more niched, and made it just about iPhones, and getting the most out of your iPhone, and being more productive with it, and taking better photos with it, and everything iPhone related, it might’ve been a little easier because that’s a big audience. There’s a lot of people with iPhones, and there’s a lot of people who want to learn how to use their iPhone better.
But I also mixed in iPad stuff, Android phones, Android tablets, Mac computers, Windows computers, drones and all that other stuff into this one channel, which I think created a little bit of a challenge for some people, because maybe they’re not as interested in that wide of a gamut of technology.
I know there are people like me who are interested in all of that, and even though some people may not own all of those things, they’re interested in it, they want to know what technology is, and that’s kind of where State of Tech is, it’s like the state of technology, where is that at, and let’s talk about it. That’s where that whole channel and the name even came from. But I’ve started to realize through watching the behavior of people on the website, or on the YouTube channel, when I get a video that has 100+ thousand views and very few of those turned into actual subscribers. I’m realizing that video performed well, and a lot of people gave it a thumbs up, and there’s great comments, so I know that people are finding that video useful, it’s getting a lot of views, but it’s not resulting in subscribers. So I’ve realized that I think I have gone in too many different directions with that channel, and maybe if I was more specific, I would see better growth there.
I don’t necessarily know if the answer is splitting it off into a whole bunch of different channels or not, that’s something that I definitely need to look at. But I do know typically what is going to produce some views for that channel, and because I’ve been able to create content that’s useful, and it helps answer questions, and it solves problems, I’ve been rewarded in the form of passive income from YouTube add revenue. I’ve tried to do the same thing with Ditch Auto, which is the other YouTube channel that I spend most of my time on, which is in the area of photography.
With Ditch Auto, I do a lot of camera reviews and set up videos, and here’s tips and techniques, and camera hacks and some different stuff that people can use to become better photographers. So the idea there is that if I’m providing information then I will be rewarded with views and subscribers. That channel’s been a little tricky to grow as well, because I used to shoot with Canon cameras, so a lot of my content was Canon, and then I switched to Sony, so a lot of my content is Sony. Switching to Sony is kind of the popular thing to do right now as a photographer so it’s worked out somewhat.
I just haven’t really found a niche there either to where people could really find a use for every single piece of content that I put out. It’s not relevant to every person every piece of content that I put out, that’s been kind of a challenge for me. But, with all that said, and understanding that there’s a lot of things that I could fine tune and actually make work better, I’m still earning on average $1,800 to $2,200 a month of passive income from those channels alone without even included revenue from links to Amazon products. That’s something that I’ve been able to build up by being persistent, by putting content up as often as I can, even though I’ve had to take some good breaks from that. Especially the last two months, in July and August of 2018, I’ve had to take a lot of breaks from putting up content just because life’s gotten busy, and my actual company has gotten busy, and I lost an employee, so I had a lot of stuff enter my plate. With that, it’s taken away from producing more content for my YouTube channels.
But, with that said also, I am now looking back at that and saying to myself, “Okay, these are great passive income revenue sources that I cannot afford to ignore for too long, how do I make the most of them, how do I produce the content that people want to see and that people will actually subscribe to so that they’ll watch more than one video or they’ll come back as often as I’m putting out new content?” Because that’s where that passive revenue that comes from the YouTube ads is going to grow much faster is if people are coming back. Not every person is new, but I have new people coming in, but I also have people that have been around for a while that are watching content and consuming new content.
With that said, those are the things that I’ve done and kind of the mindset that I have around those YouTube channels, and why they’re working as well as they are. I’ve been feeding into them for quite some time. Now, not only am I being paid with those videos from YouTube, but a lot of them, when they are about a product or something like that, there is an affiliate link down in the description of the video. If I’m talking about, if I did a video on the top five cases for the new iPhone 10, there are five cases and their affiliate links down below.
If I do a product review on something, if I do something educational that requires something that people would have to buy, then there’s a link down in the description. Those videos I’m getting paid for for people watching them, but also if somebody decides to go and buy the thing that I recommended, I’ll also get paid there. That’s all passive income.
I wanted to talk about the fact that I have made over $60,000 on YouTube because I wanted to make sure that people understand that it’s not the only source. If I put all of my efforts into just getting paid from YouTube only, and then YouTube decided to change the game with the way that they pay out. So I wanted to talk about this so that I could explain that yes there is one passive income revenue source that does produce a decent amount of revenue for me, it’s not the only place that I’m receiving passive income. Because if YouTube decided to make some major changes to their monetization, or if for some reason something happened to my YouTube channel, or whatever, there’s always things that can happen when you’re playing in the space of other companies such as YouTube.
If something was to happen and I lost that, I wouldn’t lose all of my passive income. Yes, that would be a big chunk of income, and it sure would hurt to lose it, but it wouldn’t be the end of the game. I would just have to look at how I have all these other passive revenue streams, how do I make them the primary or how do I build upon them as well? Having multiple things going on definitely takes the stress out of it all being in one basket.
The same way that I typically was stressed out because all of my income was reliant upon clients, getting new clients and stuff like that. If I didn’t get a new client, then I wasn’t getting paid. If I wasn’t able to get the work done in the time promised, then I wasn’t getting paid either. Now, with passive income, I’m getting paid for work that I’ve already done, and all I need to do is continue to pour into that so that those can continue to grow.
If you have any questions about that, especially with YouTube, I know YouTube monetization is a huge one, especially with earlier this year YouTube deciding to set higher guidelines, or higher limitations that people would have to reach. That’s going to do it for this video, if you have any questions especially around the topic of YouTube monetization, let me know. I have several channels that I monetize with YouTube as well as one that I’ve brought to monetization this year in 2018 after YouTube raised the level of requirements for a channel to be monetizable.
Just to recap that, in order for you to monetize your YouTube channel and get paid by the ads that show up in YouTube videos, you have to have reached 1,000 subscribers on your channel, and you also have to have 4,000 hours of viewed content within a rolling year’s period of time. In that year’s period of time, you have to have 4,000 hours of watched time. I don’t know what happens if you fall below that in the future, if they take away the monetization or what, but I know that you have to at least reach those things in order to monetize. I’ve done that with one channel this year, and my goal is to do that with this channel as well, but it’s going to require you subscribing.
Please, subscribe to the Practically Passive YouTube Channel. Check out some of the other videos that I have here on the channel that you find useful. The more that you watch them, the more that it counts towards that limit that I’m trying to reach. That is definitely a goal of mine that I have that I would love to achieve within the next 30 days. I would appreciate the subscribe, and definitely appreciate you watching some of the other videos all the way through. Until next time, my name is Jerad with Practically Passive, and I hope to see you back here soon.