Lauren Bateman explains how much revenue a small YouTube channel can generate by sharing her personal earnings from YouTube ad revenue and sales of her Teachable guitar courses between April 2017 and early 2020. She compares modest ad income (hundreds of dollars) with course sales (hundreds to thousands per month), shows a growth spike after one viral video, and recommends creators prioritize selling a product over relying solely on YouTube ads.
Chapters
Hey youtubers, welcome back. In this video I'm going to be answering the question, how much money can you make as a small YouTuber.
Now the answer to this question is going to vary depending on your niche. Whether you're going into a course, whether you're doing coaching, whether you're just banking on YouTube ads. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you my exact experience as I worked through and grew my YouTube channel and the amount of money I was making in that process. So I'm going to hop on over here to my computer and I've pulled up the timeline of when I would consider myself a little bit of a smaller channel. So you see here about 30 or 3200 subscribers. So not too, too big here. These are the views. The time period here is April 1, 2017. That's when I uploaded my first guitar video to October 31, 2019. And that was before my first video really took off. So I thought this would be a really appropriate data for you guys. So for those of you guys banking on YouTube ads, you can see here, I only made $562. And that was from August of 2018. So a little bit over a year now. A little later in the video, I'm going to show you what happened when my channel started growing and how these numbers are moving up. But I want to keep it here where I'm a smaller YouTuber. So let me show you guys my teachable platform where I host my course and the money I was making in this same time period. So here I am in the teachable platform and you can see, see I'm in the same time period. This is November 22, 2017. That's when I first put my course in teachable here. And you'll see I don't really have much sales in the beginning. This is month to month. So but I mean I've already made, it's August, I've already made more money than I did on YouTube ads. But you can see here as my channel starts growing, I'm making 400, 500, 600, $700 a month, which is great. And then you all of a sudden notice this spike here in November. That's when my first video. So that's. We're going to take you back to YouTube now. Hey guys, real quick, if you're enjoying this content, make sure to subscribe to the channel this way. You'll see when I release new videos just like this one. Alright, so what I've done here now is I've pulled up my channel after my first video, started taking off and getting some traction for my channel. But I stopped it at the end of the year. This way we don't mix in any of the COVID shutdown stuff. So you see, within that last two month period, I gained an extra 6,000 subscribers just in two months based on one video being taken off. You'll also notice that my estimated revenue went from, you know, $560 to $1,600 in two months of earning time. Now if you guys are interested in learning more about really monetizing your channel, like I'm going to show you right now with my courses, just go to fulltimeyoutubers.com that's my website. You can check out the course offerings that I have over there. Alright, so I'm back over in teachable now with my courses, my guitar courses. And you can see this was October, $820 for the month. That's still a good am. I'm sure $820 would change your life and help you out a lot. November $1900, December $1400 and then January, $2600 a month. So if you add up the $800 in ad revenue and about $2000 a month in core sales, you can see even as a very small YouTuber, I was making anywhere from, you know, 2,000 to $3,000 a month off of my YouTube channel. So it just goes to show you what can happen when you're someone who has a product that you're selling online and your YouTube channel starts to grow. So my recommendation would be not to focus on the YouTube ads because YouTube ads right now is probably only about 10% of my top line revenue for my YouTube channel. I highly recommend, especially when you're starting small, focus on selling a product. You'll be able to do that way faster than you can with YouTube ads. And you might be able to make a few extra hundred dollars a month by doing that before your YouTube ads are eligible and kick in. If you guys found this information helpful, make sure to leave me a comment below and ask your questions. Maybe I'll make a video to answer it for you. YouTube's gonna pop up a couple more videos over there. Make sure to go and check those out. Hope to see you guys in another video. I.
