Stop Waiting for 1,000 Subscribers to Make Money on YouTube (Do THIS Tonight)

If you're starting a YouTube channel, I'm gonna show you the number one mistake that I see so many people making that prevents their channels from making any money. And if you make this mistake within the first 30 days of starting your channel, you could be stuck making absolutely nothing. And even when you do get monetized, you'll make 1/10 or even 1/100 of the money than you would if you would've watched this video and saw what I'm about to show you today. My name is Matt Parr. I've grown over a dozen different successful YouTube channels, but more importantly, I've also analyzed hundreds of different channels over the years, and I've discovered something that surprises a lot of people when I tell them this. And a lot of people who are brand new to YouTube assume that the only way that they're going to make money from their channel is to join something called the YouTube Partner Program. I've even done videos here on this channel that talks about how much money you'll realistically make per 1,000 views. That's the most viewed video on my channel, actually, because people really want to know the answer to that. And the answer is that Most channels are gonna make anywhere between $3 and $15 per 1,000 views just from ad revenue alone. Now the unfortunate math on that is that if you have less than 1,000 subscribers, you have a very small YouTube channel, that's not much money whatsoever. And even if you grow a big YouTube channel and you get at a $3 CPM, 100,000 views is only $300. So imagine filling an entire stadium worth of people every single month on your channel and only having $300 to show for it. Versus what I'm about to show you you right now, which allows me to make between $100 and $200 per 1,000 views on my channels, meaning that same 100,000 views is equal to $10,000 to $20,000. Now this video is specifically for you if you're tempted to start your channel and just rely on the old-fashioned path of waiting to get monetized, waiting to get 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time, which are the traditional benchmarks that most creators aim to get in order to monetize. And most people do this. They'll upload a bunch of different videos to their channel, making absolutely no money from them, and they do all this free work for YouTube, hoping that eventually it will pay off. And I'm here to tell you right now that this is not a smart thing to do. Now, instead of just talking about this, I'm going to show you a practical example of what I personally am doing on a new channel that I started right now. So I have my main personal channel that you're watching right now, where I do YouTube tutorials and I teach people about doing YouTube. And then I recently started another channel called Stickman Matt, which is an animated version of me where I use AI to make these animated videos. And this channel right here is getting around 50,000 views per month, which as we discussed, if I was just relying on ad revenue, 50,000 views per month times a $3 RPM would be only $150 per month. Let's do the best case scenario where maybe I'm making $15 per 1,000 views from this channel. That's still only $750. So what if I were to tell you that this channel right here is making thousands and thousands of dollars per month? Here's how I'm doing it. The first step actually starts with choosing a type of channel that can actually be eligible for what I'm about to show you. And the best types of channels that are realistically eligible for this are educational YouTube channels. This is due to the fact that ideally with these types of channels, You're solving a major problem that people have in your life, and you'll discover on YouTube you're gonna be paid in proportion to the problems that you solve. And growing a successful YouTube channel is a major problem that a lot of people have, and a lot of people struggle with it, doing it correctly, making enough money from it, because there's so much bad information out there. And also, a lot of people's first intuitions are completely wrong when it comes to YouTube. A lot of people assume that when they upload a video, they should share it with friends and family, which could not be further from the truth, and it'll actually severely hurt your channel. They assume they should rely just on ad revenue, which is why I'm making this video right here to help dispel that myth. And so the key here is that I created a channel that dispels those myths and it's educational in nature. And then this brings me to step number 2, which is something that I like to call PSF. Now this stands for Problem Solution Framework. When you run a channel like this, every video that you post is going to solve a micro problem that people have within your niche. For example, if your channel is about a specific diet that helps people lose weight, then your individual videos will be, for example, what everybody gets wrong about this specific diet, or I tried this diet for 30 days and here's what happened. And if you look at my channel, that's exactly what I'm doing with Stickman Matt. I did a video, I tried faceless YouTube automation for 30 days, here's what happened. I did another video about what every beginner gets wrong on YouTube. And so my videos are going over either common myths Or solving micro problems related to the overall problem of running a successful YouTube channel. This video goes over 5 faceless YouTube niches to always avoid, so that's solving the micro problem of avoiding the wrong niches. This video shows how to make your videos succeed within the first 3 seconds, so it's solving the micro problem of having bad hooks and not keeping people's attention, which will severely hurt your channel. And so all of the videos solve micro problems. But none of them solve the overall problem of actually doing YouTube. But to complete the PSF framework, you need to agitate the problem. So the overall problem that people have is that they don't have a way of cohesively doing YouTube start to finish, and they don't have a way to help them do that. And so at the end of every single video that you upload, you stress the overall problem. And now the way I like to do this is I like to then link to a super long video on my channel that I present as a solution to that problem. And then in that video, I basically give a completely free course to people on YouTube. And you might be saying, okay, Matt, but if you give people a free course, and how am I going to make $100 per 1,000 views? That just seems impossible. Well, here's what you do. At the end of that video, you present the next part of the PSF formula, which is the solution. And you give people the offer of having a way to help you automate a lot of this completely for you. Whatever you're teaching, whether it's weight loss, you offer them a way of tracking all of their meals and making sure that they're going down a checklist. If you're helping people retire early, you give them a checklist where they can fill out their budget and finances and everything else. Or if you're helping people with YouTube like I am, I offer them an AI software that allows them to generate great video ideas and do market research and upload and optimize their videos completely for them. And you might be saying, Matt, that's great, but there's a major problem with this, isn't there? Which is that Doesn't it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a software? And isn't it just incredibly complex? And is it something that I realistically could even do? And in the past, this was true. In fact, I paid over $100,000 to build a software for YouTube specifically that I could sell from my channels called tubemagic.com. This was a software I paid 6 figures for, and this was just a couple of years ago. It's a great software. It helps people enormously. We have a Huge active user base on there, and it's awesome, but it was incredibly expensive to make. But AI has now gotten to a point where you can make software like this within literally just a couple of minutes, no matter what type of channel you run. As long as it's educational in nature, meaning it helps people solve a problem, you are going to then be able to monetize a channel like this. Now you might be saying, Matt, what if I already have an entertainment YouTube channel? What in the world do I do then? What if I've already invested years into this entertainment channel? What should I do? Well, the YouTube channels that have gotten me play buttons like this for getting over a million subscribers are all entertainment channels, and that's because it's easier to get lots of views and subscribers if you're entertaining people with your videos. But that's not where the money is. I have channels that are 1/100th of the size of those channels that make a lot more money, and that's because they're educational. So the move, in my opinion, if you already have an entertainment channel, start an educational one on the side and then use the money that you make from the educational one to invest in the asset that's gonna take a bit longer to take off, which is the entertainment one. And now I'm gonna show you exactly how to do this where you can watch over my shoulder and see me actually do this start to finish. So the first thing I'm going to do is copy the link to my YouTube channel, Stickman Matt, that I would like to monetize. If your channel isn't already up and you don't have videos up, just find a related channel within your niche that uploads videos similar to the ones that You want to upload and then go to the AI of your choice. I'm going to use Claude for this, but feel free to use ChatGPT or Google Gemini. They all work great. I'm going to paste in the link and then I'm going to say, please come up with the perfect software that I could make and sell from this channel that would help people solve The biggest problem they have related to what I teach that would convert the highest amount of people to subscribing to it. And then we'll click enter. And Claude says that Stickman Matt teaches people how to grow on YouTube, monetize correctly, and build a YouTube business with a heavy focus on doing it in a faceless way. The audience is mostly people with zero channels dreaming of their first monetized one. Their journey dies at 2 predictable points. They can't confidently pick a niche or a video idea that will actually get views, so they never start, or they upload a bunch of videos and quit. And now the new part, they're terrified of getting rejected or demonetized. So the biggest problem your viewers have, in their words, is tell me exactly what videos to make that will get views and survive monetization. And so the idea is a greenlight engine for faceless channels. It's a web app where a beginner types a niche or takes a 60-second quiz and instantly gets proven video ideas and a monetization safety score as well that flags any inauthentic content risk factors. So this is a great idea and it's even telling me how I can differentiate this software from the others in the space like vidIQ or this other one right here. And now to actually build this software, we're gonna be using a tool called Base44. Now Base44 is actually the sponsor of this video, so I'd love to thank them for that. There's tons of different AI app generators out there, but Base44 is genuinely genuinely really good, and I only take sponsors that I genuinely believe in here on the channel. And so then I asked Claude to make this software something that I could build within Base44 and give me the prompt to build it within that. Go through what's actually possible to build with it, and please give me something that is realistically possible to build and charge for, etc. And then Claude went ahead and gave me this prompt right here, where I can simply literally just copy this prompt and then go into Base44, Paste it in. I like to keep it on the auto mode right here and then click send. And now instead of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to developers to build a tool like this, I literally have AI doing this completely for me. And it's pretty incredible what this can actually do. Now, in order to set some of these things up, as you can see, it's giving me the prompt that I need to actually install Stripe, which is an app that connects to this. That I'm going to be able to charge money for this in order to actually make money from. So I'm just going to simply click install and it's doing all the backend connecting for me by doing test purchases, making sure it's working, everything else. Eventually I will have to actually then sign up for a Stripe account to actually collect money from this. But this is how we're going to make money from this. At the end of that video, we're going to link to this app and people are going to genuinely be able to buy this and it's going to actually be genuinely good as well. And just like that, we have a completed app. And it's called Greenlight. And it allows people to know that their video will work before they make it. And it gives them monetization safety scores, AI content packages, and RPM ranges per niche. So it's a collection of different niches. And you could even have the AI go out there as well and like update it with new niches as new ones pop up on YouTube and so forth. And it even put together our pricing for us as well with 3 different pricing plans. If we do the math on this, let's say for example that we're getting 10,000 views a month on our channel, which I would consider to be a huge failure, but If you're monetizing correctly with an app like this, you can still make a lot of money over the course of a year. That's 120,000 views. Say we only get 500 people signed up for this software and say everyone is just paying $29 a month. That's $14,500 per month in recurring income. Now obviously churn is a thing, so people will unsubscribe as well, but still you're making way more money than you would be if you were just relying on ad revenue. And if we take a look at the actual app itself and go ahead and open it here, it the app with all of these different proven niches, and it gives us a score of the niches, the estimated RPM range of how much these niches could make per 1,000 views. And I just thought of another idea as well that would just take this even to the next level. You could also have it set up so if you open any of these ideas, in order to make even more money, it could recommend people affiliate products to promote for each of these different niches. So they could open that up and then find affiliate products to promote all directly within the app. And then just have another income stream like that as well. And if you go ahead and click to view the ideas on any of these, like this future tech explainers, as you can see, it populated with all these different ideas. And then it also allows you to then unlock more ideas. But of course you have to pay and you have to subscribe to the app. And what I would actually do is show like, I don't know, maybe 10 different niches or 20 niches for free. And then I would go into Claude and say, you know, come up with 500 different niches. And in order to get the full 500, you'd have to subscribe to a plan and you'll get tons of people subscribing to your plans if you do that. And so let's say you find an idea that you like, like for example, why Costco sells hot dogs for $1.50 and always will. If we go ahead and click View and Generate on this idea and I go ahead and click Generate My Version, it prompts us to upgrade the app, which is exactly what we want. But just for this example, I'm gonna ask it Please let me do it for free since I'm an admin of the app. And then we'll go ahead and click Generate My Version. And just like that, we have a monetization safety score. So this should be perfectly able to be monetized. It gives us some title variants, which are very good. Gives us a thumbnail concept. We can go ahead and paste this into an AI of our choice, like GPT Image 2, to come up with a thumbnail. We could even integrate that within here as well if we wanted to. It gives us our hook, the outline of the actual script, how we're going to make this different than all of the other videos out there as well. And this is all incredibly valuable. Like just looking at this right now, this is something I might realistically even use myself. And then we can go ahead and save this idea if we want. And if we go to the sidebar, it actually has a pipeline thing right here. So we can then keep track of our video ideas. So it has like a Trello thing built into this where we can take it from ideas to scripting to voiceover editing. To published. And it's all built within this app that people can use. And it also even made us an admin console so we can see how many active users there are, how many active per week, how many people then subscribe to the paid plan after being on the free one. And then it allows us to add new niches over time that we might find out there on YouTube directly within the app. And so this is epic. Then we can also connect a custom domain to this. We can connect our Stripe account to actually start making money from this. And so if you think, you know, that you need to be some technology wizard to make an app like this, you don't. You literally just need to know how to type messages to a platform and it can do it all completely for you. And so now I want to show you how you can take this to even the next level. You already have an app that can potentially make you a lot of money. And what you'll do is link this app in the description of all of your different videos and in that super long video that you have that is basically a free course. You also link this app. And now you'll be getting people to subscribe to the app and to enjoy using it, but it doesn't solve all of their problems. For example, this app isn't generating people's videos completely for them. And so what you could do is find a related product, like for example, I have a tool called vid.ai, which is another software tool I have. And if you go to mattpar.com/affiliates, you can actually go ahead and sign up to be an affiliate for this tool and get 33% recurring commissions for it. And so you could go within Base44 and say, please add a button where people can, in the sidebar, to generate videos with vid.ai and link them in a new tab to vid.ai. And of course, you would then go ahead and put your affiliate link right there. And now if we open up the sidebar, You can see this button right here. So if we click Generate with VidAI, it opens VidAI in a new tab. This will be your affiliate link. And so you get people to sign up to a related software that solves a problem that your software doesn't solve, because no software on earth is going to solve every single problem related to a niche. And so you can then also be an affiliate for similar software. Let's say also you wanted to sell education. You could sign up to be an affiliate for my course, which I'm gonna be opening the affiliate program for that very soon. So you can join the waitlist for that if you'd like. And then also put that in the sidebar of your app. And so you're just getting an extra $400 to $500 for every single sale that you get on that since the price of the program will be $800 to $1,000. And so you've got recurring income coming in from your Base44 app, you've got additional income coming in from affiliates on top of that, and now your channel is monetized correctly. And if you wanna check out Base44, feel free to do so down at the link below. They're an incredible app. I love how easy it is to set everything up incredibly fast. And now monetizing your YouTube channel is one piece of the puzzle. You also need to make sure that you're generating videos that will actually perform good on YouTube in a way that YouTube is actually okay with so your channel doesn't get banned. And you need to make sure that you have the right niche. And in this video right here, I'm basically practicing what I preach. This video right here is going to delve deeper into that exactly. It'll show you the best niches that are working right now, how to generate videos in a safe way, and some new 2026 updates for how to do this in a way that will prevent your channel from getting banned with some of the new YouTube changes. Check it out right here. This is a must-watch if you're running a YouTube channel. My name is Matt Parr, and I will see you there.