YouTube Channels For Dummies. Rob Ciampa

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СКАЧАТЬ before you film. Great videos begin in preproduction. That means having an idea of the shooting location and working with some sort of script (or at least a storyboard of the kind of shots you want for the video). Great planning leads to great production.

       Know your audience. When you’re just getting started, you try to make solid videos with good descriptions and hope that your audience finds you. After you have attracted a following, it’s still important to understand who they are and whether your content is right for them. For example, if you start a channel that talks about SAT and college prep, you should use language that’s consistent with a high-school-age demographic. Don’t overlook the importance of being highly aware of your potential audience.

       Keep viewers entertained. Regardless of the subject matter, it’s important for viewers to enjoy the experience so that you hold their attention. Remember that hooking a viewer’s attention starts with the first five seconds of the video. (Why? Because viewers may leave before the good stuff starts!)

       Let them learn something. People generally click on a video description link in search of information. If they find it quickly and they were entertained, chances are good that they will love you and click through to products or services mentioned in the video.

      Building an audience

      After you create great content, you have to find people to watch it. After all, isn’t that the entire purpose of sharing your video with the world? Whether it starts with the ten people who just happen to run across your student film or a million people viewing your talking puppy video, building your audience is essential.

YouTube is no different from other media when it comes to emphasizing the importance of building an audience. For example, you may have the catchiest song of all time, but if no one has ever heard it or even knows it exists, then that song cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called a success. The same is true for your videos — you need to work at getting as many people as possible to watch them.

      Successfully building your audience depends on understanding their needs and making sure you can deliver on what your channel promises. Catering to your audience — whether it consists of one person or ten million — centers on understanding them and satisfying their appetite. (For more on building your audience, check out Chapter 10.)

      Building a business

      In addition to letting you upload your videos to satisfy the fun side of your personality, YouTube can work wonders for your business side. You can easily set your account to monetize video content, as mentioned in the next section; as long as you meet the minimum requirements for monetization and enough viewers watch your videos, you can earn some extra money. If you have something to sell or a service to offer, you can also leverage YouTube for some pretty cool and powerful advertising. As you can see in Chapter 13, it’s simple enough for anyone to do it.

      Monetizing

      You can earn money with your YouTube channel every time someone views a YouTube ad before watching one of your videos. The more people who view your content, the more money you can potentially make. The minimum eligibility requirements to turn on monetization features for your channel have dramatically changed over the past couple of years, primarily because of what are referred to as brand safety issues with advertisers.

      So, what's all this about “brand safety”? Actually, it's not that complicated. An advertiser wants to place its ads on videos that are suitable for its brand image, culture, and vision. An advertiser doesn’t want its brands associated with bad press or negative content. What is suitable for one brand advertiser might not be suitable for another brand. For example, a video game manufacturer might be okay with advertising on first-person-shooter videos, but a beauty brand may find that kind of content inappropriate for its video’s ads or just not relevant for its target audience.

Your first hurdle for making money on YouTube is to get accepted into the YouTube Partner Program. To apply for the program, you need to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 public video watch-hours over the past year.

      Now that users have found the potential to make money on YouTube, it’s become like the California gold rush of 1849. Motivated entrepreneurs are setting up shop in the hope of striking it big with their YouTube channels.

      As you might expect, not everybody will strike it rich. In fact, very few will strike it rich. Nevertheless, it’s possible to earn a side hustle, especially if you take advantage of the multiple ways you can make money by way of your YouTube channel, including advertising revenue, channel membership, your merchandise shelf, Super Chat and Super Stickers, and YouTube Premium Revenue. Just keep in mind that slow-and-steady wins the race — making money takes time, or at least it will take time until you build a massive following. (For more on monetization, check out Chapter 14.)

Chapter 2

      The Basics of YouTube

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      

Navigating the basics of the YouTube interface

      

Watching YouTube videos

      

Creating a YouTube account

      

Setting up a unique channel URL

      

Checking out the YouTube Partner Program

      In the simplest sense, YouTube is a website designed for sharing video. Before YouTube’s founding in 2005, posting and sharing a video online was difficult: The bandwidth and storage needed to stream video were expensive, and many copyright risks were involved in letting people upload whatever they wanted. Because YouTube was willing to absorb the costs and ignore the risks, it provided, for free, the infrastructure for users to upload and view as much video as they want. This proposition turned out to be a popular one.

      Google acquired YouTube in 2006, and YouTube’s growth continued. As of 2019, viewers watch more than a billion hours of video per day, and more than 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute.

      Let us say that last part again: 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Given that amount of content, you, as an individual, could never watch everything that’s available on YouTube. For every minute of video you watch, you’re 500 hours behind. For every work of genius, such as “Cat in a shark costume chases a duck while riding a Roomba,” YouTube has literally tens of thousands of poorly shot, poorly edited videos of family vacations, dance recitals, and bad jokes that could possibly be of interest only to the uploader. This chapter serves as your (essential) guide to finding the good parts while skipping the bad. (Hey, it’s a tough job, but somebody had to do it, and that somebody was СКАЧАТЬ