 Let's see how well I'm feeding my family with 12 months of money from YouTube. Here is my YouTube studio analytics dashboard and we are now in April 2021 so this is looking back at March and the whole year I've been monetized and in the last month you can see here I've had 21,000 views which is 13,000 less than usual and you can see that in diagrammatic form. Look at this curve oh my word so this block here is March 2020 that was the month I was monetized 109,000 views in that month alone and let's slide all the way down the year down to March 2021 we're at 21,000 wow that is quite a curve isn't it there are two massive reasons why this has happened well actually there's three reasons the first reason is this column here is from a viral hit in one of my videos went nuts and it was an old video of Jean-Claude Van Damme on a program that I worked on and Jean-Claude Van Damme fans went crazy for this video mostly in Venezuela and Chile for some reason I think it was on some forum that's what put me over the edge with the 1000 subscribers which then created a new problem which I'm going to talk you through but you can see that as the effects of my Jean-Claude Van Damme video waned we then got onto a steady level of 42,000 and then in the run up to Christmas the views keep keep going down October 2020 was the big month for me that was the month when I removed 150 videos from this channel that's half the videos on this channel I wanted to niche my channel and make my channel all about YouTube and making YouTube videos and charting my journey on here which meant that my garden videos my how-to's or all my other weird videos weren't actually helping me to do that so I removed them actually the views didn't drop that massively went from about 43,000 to 36,000 which I guess you could look at that sort of and then a massive drop happened at the beginning of February I decided to remove my top five performing videos because I didn't have the guts to remove them so I kept them going because they were bringing in money and I thought well this is this is even worse because I've got five videos that do not match my channel niche and they're bringing in all the views and all the money so I've removed those as well and the drop we covered this in the last video there's a link to that video in the description and on screen now the drop is another third from 32,000 to 20,000 so it's actually really reassuring to be staying on the 20,000 level of views the watch time follows exactly the same curve although there's a big drop here between January and February we halved our watch time so removing those five videos those five videos were quite long and I think they were contributing a lot of watch time I still don't regret it because all of my videos as we'll see in a second below this graph they're all about the same thing and if you watch one video you're more likely to watch a second and third video I hope that's the plan we'll see how it goes this year subscribers 127 that my subscriber growth has gone down and there's another reason for this I think my 3,000 subscribers they all came before I niched and they are really starting to leave now so the net effect of of gaining subscribers and losing subscribers is coming out at about 127 this month that's that's one of the lowest months in fact that is the lowest month for subscribers but I think it's a sign that the old subscribers are leaving oh my goodness look at the revenue so it kind of curves up and down the revenue goes up and sort of peaks around the November level look at that 286 dollars but last month it was 141 so although the views have stayed about the same my revenue has gone up from 127 dollars to 141 dollars if we scroll down this overview page at the bottom it shows the top videos for March and my top five videos they're all on the same subject finally we've we've done it but the views are a lot less my top video in March is how to record a zoom call how to record a failed zoom call recording and that has always been the best it's doing three three and a half thousand views there but at least it's kind of linked to my other top videos now if you're into recording videos and making videos at least there might be something else on my channel to get another view from that one viewer my second and third top videos are how to change your youtube channel name the other video is about how to change your channel name on your mobile phone but i'm getting negative comments from them they those negative comments are starting to get to me but i'm hoping that these comments are a sign that that people care about the subject matter they care about the video also it's a sign that more people are watching those videos and then the the other videos on this top 10 they're all on the same subject apart from this one this video is about how i had a terrible week of journeys on my local train company's service i've now unlisted my train videos i had three videos like this and you can see them falling out of the charts but look at that watch time five minutes 51 watch time that's a really lovely long watch time but that's going now so we won't see that next month just as an aside i'm trying to record this video and i've got my kids going nuts on the trampoline outside but i'm doing this in daytime as well usually i do this in in the evening but i thought we'd uh we'd get a little daytime vibe going here let's click on the reach tab and this is the number of impressions that my videos got the impressions they're basically thumbnails how many times thumbnails were showing for my videos 214 000 but what's interesting about this tab is that you see these peaks here they've got 10 000 there and i got 8 000 here look at the bottom you see that funny icon that icon means that i went live and this is a really strong sign that when i go live youtube offers my thumbnail and click through rates or ctr is what percentage of the thumbnails that are being offered are being clicked on so my ctr has gone up by two percent this month to five point four percent and if i scroll down to my impressions funnel i don't know what else to call it you can see how they arrive at that figure so there were 214 000 thumbnails offered and five point four percent of them were clicked on which meant that i got 11 000 views and from that we had two minutes 29s my average view duration for this month let us compare two funnels so the funnel on the left hand side is my average for all of 2020 my average view duration is three minutes 10 so if you compare that with last month that's a massive drop from three minutes 10 to two minutes 29 seconds what i'm hoping is that my new videos are shorter and sharper and that people might be coming back for more than one of them over on the left hand side we've got the traffic source 45 percent of all my views have come from youtube search let's compare this with 2020 my views came pretty pretty equally from from different sources browse features youtube search suggested videos and external all about 20 to 30 percent it's quite an even spread and that's my watch time we're looking at about 25 to 30 hours per day but if i scroll down you get this nice list of the top videos for audience retention so these are my videos that have held the audience for the biggest percentage if we look at the top three videos there's did youtube destroy amazon affiliate marketing how youtube banned my thumbnail twice and how much youtube pays me per 1000 views but this it's all about my drop in revenue this tells me something really useful and that is my top three videos are stories they're not how-to's my top three videos for retaining an audience they're me telling a story and it's something i'm really really wants to do a lot more of partly to retain viewers but also because they're just better videos i just enjoy them more let's click on the audience tab this graph shows the difference between how many views have come from new viewers and how many are from from my regulars i was going to say from you i'm assuming you're a regular if you've reached this point in the video this new graph shows the difference between the two now some have said that it's better to have these two colored graphs being quite balanced because then you've got new viewers coming in and you're retaining those viewers but most of my viewers by a long shot are new viewers we'll see how that changes through the year on the right hand side we have the top geographies the top geography for march is the united states 32 percent of my views came from the states this is a massive change for me have a look at the left hand side in 2020 as a year overall nearly 30 percent of all my views came from the uk and only 15 percent came from the united states this is probably a sign that all of the videos that i've removed from my channel half my videos that i got rid of they are about subjects that affect people in the uk there are two other really big statistics here my watch time from subscribers last month nearly seven percent of my watch time has come from subscribers this is the highest figure i've had in 10 years of running this channel i don't know if i can get you a screen grab now but it used to be about 0.2 percent of all my views were from subscribers so for that to be at seven percent is amazing the other thing that's increased are the ladies i don't know if i can say that my my female views last year as a whole were 22 percent of my audience were were female and that has now blossomed mushroomed into 30 percent of all my views are female i'll just leave these statistics up on the screen in case you're interested in them you want to pause the video and my final tab to share is the revenue tab this is how much i earned last month on youtube 141 there's a lovely reassuring green arrow there that says it was up 11 percent and look at this spike here this spike here came from a beautiful friend dropping a $20 super chat into a live stream and boy does it show this revenue graph shows all of your sources of revenue so the interesting thing for me on that and really useful for the experiment is that it's pushed the overall rpm up look at that look at rpm rpm is revenue per melee which is how much youtube pays me per 1000 views but it divides all the money that comes in across all of the views so the rpm the revenue per melee has gone up by a lot because of that one $20 tip into my super chat and if i compare that with the rpm for the last 365 days the last year my rpm averages out at about four dollars 66 cents let's stay on this statistic because this is how much i earned from youtube in one year it's in the top left hand corner there two thousand four hundred and eleven dollars that's that's incredible and to think this time last year i just become monetized i hadn't earned anything on youtube at all so for a year to bring in nearly two and a half grand in dollars is i just i'm so happy and grateful for that i can't live on that and it probably doesn't reflect the number of hours that i'm putting into the channel but i'm learning so much and i'm hoping that i can beat that this year i don't know how well i do know how i just need to make more videos i think and probably get a bit more strategic and a bit better at making the videos but if i scroll let me scroll the cursor along the daily count you can see how it kind of averages about five to six dollars that goes to sort of eight to ten dollars are long gone are the days of ten eleven twelve dollars i want to see those days again let's scroll down to the revenue for the last six months you can see quite starkly quite clearly my revenue has plummeted partly because we're away from christmas and black friday and so i've got low views and a lower rpm but i i think things are going to pick up i think the more videos that get onto the channel the more that those videos latch onto the algorithm i'm hopeful that this is a good mid-term game to be playing for my videos to actually link to other videos and to get the views that way and right here is my favorite video at the moment this is the story of how youtube banned my thumbnail not once but twice i got into so much trouble and i think you'll enjoy learning from my experience that's on there now thanks for watching