 Am I leaving my job to pursue YouTube full-time? This is the question that I'm answering today. I'm so excited for this and I'm also going to share with you how much money I made exactly from my first paycheck on YouTube. If you're a returning subscriber, welcome back. Good to see you again. If you're new here, hello, welcome. My name's Habiba. Be sure to subscribe and give this video a thumbs up and I'm so excited to have you here. Let's talk about monetization on YouTube when I started this YouTube channel. But first off, why am I making this video? So many reasons. First reason, if you are a YouTube content creator yourself and you're just starting or you're about to get monetized and you're just curious as a small YouTuber what to expect from your first paycheck on YouTube, this is going to be probably helpful. And also for me to keep track of how this YouTube channel is growing over time. Let me grab my laptop. I'm going to be taking you over to my analytics. I'm going to show you my revenue and all of the details that you'll probably will be interested in. But first off, when did I create this YouTube channel? I started this YouTube channel back in August 11th of 2019. My intention in the beginning was to really create a platform where I can share my hiking trips and backpacking with family and friends. And obviously I had so much fun doing it that it grew to something a little bit more than that. You probably already know that in order for you to get monetized on YouTube, it's not that you just create your first video on YouTube and you start making money. It's not like that. But there are some criteria in order for you to be eligible and to get monetized. Two criteria. One, you should have 1000 subscribers on your YouTube channel. And then two, you should have 4000 hours of watch time accumulated over the past 12 months. A lot of new content creators struggle with the 4000 hours of watch time, which it is a lot of watch time. You have to have a lot of people sitting there and watching your content. Once you meet them, you are eligible to apply for the YouTube partnership program, YPP. So once you reach that milestone, you will receive an email from YouTube that says, Hey, you are eligible. You can go ahead and apply and they're going to walk you through the process. And once you apply, it probably take between two days in order for them to come back to you and say your channel is looking good. You are now in the YouTube partner program. And basically what YouTube does, they just want to make sure that the type of content that you are creating is aligned with their policy and rules and it's not offensive or derogatory. And they also want to make sure that you have 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time. How do you start making money? Once you get accepted into the YouTube partnership program is when you can start making money from ads on YouTube. And usually these ads are the ones that you see placed on videos and you can skip through them. And sometimes they're just like a banner in the bottom of the video. There are so many type of ads placed on your video. And this is how you start making money basically. I'm going to take you over to my analytics right now. And I'm going to share with you a couple of information here before I share with you exactly how much money I made. The other thing that you want to keep in mind is that once you start making money on YouTube, you will track that revenue using Google AdSense. And Google AdSense is also how Google is going to start paying you or depositing money to your bank account. There is a verification process that you have to go through. I'm not going to talk about it right now, but if it's something that you are curious about, let me know in the comments and I can walk you through the whole thing. But the one thing to keep in mind is that they will only issue your first payment when you reach a threshold of 100 dollars. So let's say you get monetized towards the end of February. And then you had made $30, $50, something like that. They're not going to issue a paycheck until you reach 100 dollars. So just keep that in mind. Okay, so let's go over to my analytics. I am going to change my filter to show lifetime. I just want to go through the revenue analytics page here just to help you understand a couple of things before we dive deeper into how much money I made. All right, so I have my revenue or my estimated revenue set to lifetime. So if you can see right here, like I said, August 11, 2019, I was making no money because I was not monetized and it's been the case for a long time. So you can see right here up until February of 2021, I was making no money from YouTube. So way over a year, it's probably a year and a half or so. I was not making any money in the beginning. And then like we said, I got monetized around February 24. Yeah. So February 24 was the first day I got monetized on YouTube after they went through the verification process and so on. And then on February 24, I made $2.61, which honestly, when I saw that I thought that it was a good number to start with. I was expecting really a lower number, less than a dollar, just a couple of cents. So $2.61 on February 24 was not bad. And then the day after February 25 was $4.31, February 26, $4.86. And then you can see how this number keeps changing throughout the time up until right now. There are definitely so many factors that go into how much money you are making each and every day. A lot of people think that having a lot of subscribers and a lot of views is how you make money on YouTube. It's not always true, although having subscribers and a good amount of views is very important and very helpful. But there's so many factors that go into that. If you can see this number right here, it says playback based CPM. CPM stands for cost per meal. And it basically tells you how much advertisers paid per thousand monetized playbacks. And this CPM number is really an important factor in how much money you are making. So a lot of people choose their niche on YouTube based on the fact that the CPM for that particular topic or that particular niche is high. So the higher your CPM number is, the more money you make. So you can see right here on my CPM overall is $13.61, which is not bad. I'm happy with this number. So just to kind of tell you that this CPM number dictates how much money you are making, whether you have a lot of followers or a lot of subscribers, or you don't. Also, if you scroll down right here, there are a lot of useful information in the revenue tab really, especially if as a small content creator on YouTube, you want to set strategies, this is going to be helpful to make some informed decisions. There is this section right here with monthly estimated revenue. So as you can see, I have the last six months, January, I was making no money. And the February is when I got monetized on YouTube. So I'm making a little bit of money there. And then March, things are starting to pick up. April, it went down a little bit. And then May, June, things are picking up nicely. It also shows you what are your top earning videos, what videos are bringing the most money. So I have here Alaska Travel in 2021, how to apply for citizenship. These are the two videos that I'm making the most money. And so obviously, as a YouTuber, if your goal is to make more money, you want to double down on this type of content that is bringing you the money and the views. So a lot of helpful information here. There's also some information about what type of ads is bringing you the most, the most views or revenue. So there are skippable video ads. These are the ads that you would see on in the beginning on the middle of some YouTube videos. And you have the option to click skip. So it seems like most of my YouTube ad revenue is coming from those. And then there are some information here about revenue sources and transaction revenue. I'm not going to go through those. So with that being said, I'm going to go actually to my bank account so that I can share with you exactly the number and how much I was paid from my first paycheck on YouTube. It says that it's coming from Google Adsense, like I was saying earlier from my first paycheck on YouTube, I made $254.50, which is a good number. I didn't expect it to be this high by small YouTuber standards. And I just want to take you back to my revenue tab to show you exactly the date. So I chose from February 20 to the end of March. And my estimated revenue is actually showing us $240.51. The reason why the number is higher on my bank account is because I have my website trekintals.com that is also linked to my Adsense. And that was a couple of dollars that I made a long time ago. So it kind of added to the $240 amount. But to be exact, the amount of money that I made from my first paycheck on YouTube is $240.51. So now am I leaving my job to pursue YouTube full-time? If you live in the US, you know that you can't really live off of $240 a month. On top of that, I have a lot of expenses and a lot of money that goes into maintaining my YouTube channel and growing my YouTube channel and learning the skills that will help me to become a better filmmaker, a better storyteller, a better YouTuber. And some of the expenses that I can think of are editing software for image editing, filmmaking, Adobe Creative Suite, access to no copyright music, access to tools like vidIQ that helps with keyword research and stuff like that. And it can easily add up to $200 very easily. And on top of that, everything that goes into mortgage, monthly expenses of living, no, I am not leaving my job to pursue YouTube full-time, at least not right now. Now, I also want to mention that this is just YouTube ads revenue. I also have some revenue coming from Amazon affiliate marketing. As you guys know, I always share the gear that we are using when we go out hiking and backpacking or car camping and even filming gear when we are on the trail and I am here at home and I have all of that listed out on kit.co slash cracking pals. If there is any piece of gear that you are interested in, you can go in there and you can find it. And if you use any of those links, we will make a commission from Amazon. And that is another source of income for our YouTube channel. I hope that you guys found this to be useful or helpful. And I hope that it answered some of the questions that you might have as a new content creator or just as someone who is curious how much do YouTubers make on YouTube. If you guys liked this episode, give this video a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. My name is Habiba. This is Tracking Pals and I will see you very soon on a new adventure.