How to get rich using YouTube

I am not an expert on social media. To my way of thinking, there are no credible experts, so that shouldn't matter. Either way, I do have some notions about how to make money with YouTube. This information can be of great practical use to a cinematographer far from home.

Like most people bloviating about ways to make money online, obviously I have not done it successfully. If I had, I would be fishing in the Sea of Cortez and I would not have time to offer my valuable insights. Actually I'm giving them away at no charge, so clearly they're not valuable. I would like to expand my potential audience beyond one comprised exclusively of the gullible, so I'm making this information available for free.

Here are five easy ways to use YouTube to enhance revenue.
  1. Do not spend any money.

    Purchasing a lottery ticket offers significantly better odds for a return and, in all likelihood, considerably more enjoyment for your dollar.

  2. Don't concern yourself overmuch about quality and/or good taste. Typically, these cost money.

    YouTube offers attractive opportunities and monetary savings to DIY-style amateurs who would like to reach an audience while avoiding the traditional costs of hiring people capable of executing quality creative content and effective media distribution. Even if you already know how to do these things, don't waste time and energy trying to make something good for YouTube. Just make something popular.

    People watching YouTube are not paying for the content, therefore, one assumes, do not have high expectations for quality. That they possess enough free time to watchYouTube at all also calls into question whether or not they might benefit from employment which provides disposable income and/or adequate supervision in the workplace. The comments on YouTube videos may provide helpful insights regarding the demographies which these videos are successfully targeting.

  3. Spend two or three years building an online brand.

    Post content on a regular basis. Content should be creative, engaging and/or humorous. Or cats.*

  4. The mystical /.???

    Once you have a reasonable expectation of achieving 1-2 million views per post, cast an attractive and recognizable female to appear minimally clad in your video (you can spend money on this) and pose provocatively for a risqué thumbnail. In my experience, this should be good for up to 45 million additional hits over the course of two years.

  5. Move to Spain.

    I occasionally receive YouTube links as visual references from directors. I have received links which lead me to believe that the YouTube policies in Spain allow for a rather more clothing-optional kind of content than is permitted by the service in the rest of the world.

    Anyone who says they are serious about monetizing YouTube video content but has not already uprooted their family and moved to Spain because of this anecdote is not truly a serious Webtrepreneur and does not have what it takes to be successful in this realm.


  • MAKE EXTRA CASH.

    Making money with YouTube is all about working from home and being your own boss. For what follows, you will work for clients and probably can't work from home so that puts it more in the framework of a profitable hobby:

    Moonlight as a Social Media Expert and promise clients to do for their YouTube channel what you did for Old Spice. It can safely be assumed that any company hiring a Social Media Expert lacks the resources and expertise to fact-check your résumé. This little secret has been successfully and demonstrably used to considerable remunerative advantage.

    If you don't think you can get away with taking credit for the Old Spice campaign, cursory research should reveal several videos with 1 billion or more unverifiable views from a source which also cannot be verified. You can probably take credit for one of those instead.

    Keep in mind that when you say "Do what I did for Old Spice" you mean that you watched the video, clicked the "like" button, added a comment, and shared the video on your facebook page. One should never misrepresent oneself on a résumé, though that need not preclude a judicious use of ambiguity.

    As you prepare for interviews, understand that it takes a special kind of credulity to hire anyone claiming to be an expert in a field which has existed for less than ten years. Who's to say the countless hours you spent watching YouTube while unemployed haven't made you as much of an expert as anyone else?


NOTE: It would be fair to say that I cribbed most of this from The Ad Contrarian. He does it better.

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* Many YouTube users try to mimeograph the "flavor of the month" as an alternative to posting videos which contain quality content. Or cats. Wrong time-scale. In the icy glacial fjords of the inernjets, popular trends are called memes. Memes have an average half-life of approximately 72 hours and become considerably more unstable and unpredictable as they decay. They may explode. They may implode. Due to the potential for disaster, "memeographing" content should not be regarded as a sane way to conduct business. Cat videos, in contrast, are reliably popular. Consequently, cat videos demonstrate the highest degree of mental stability yet to be consistently observed in the YouTubes.

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