YouTube has become a content phenomenon. According to Statistics Brain, a staggering 1,325,000,000 people use YouTube, watching 4,950,000,000 videos every day. 3.25 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube each month.

YouTubers do not put content on the medium for philanthropic reasons. They have found that it is perfectly feasible to make money on YouTube, and if you manage to break into the ranks of the famous and influential it can be seriously good money.

For instance, Felix Arvid a.k.a PewDiePie, the most successful YouTuber in the world, has channel that currently has 105 million subscribers and 25,867,157,808 views. He has an average salary of over $15 million per year and has earned an estimated $125 million since he began his YouTube career in 2010, or almost Rwf119 billion. Below are basics on how YouTubers make money.

Audience

Making money on YouTube is definitely not an overnight process. It took PewDiePie 10 years of consistent work to be the most successful vlogger on Earth. Basics for making money on YouTube are big audience and quality content.

The bigger the audience, the more the views. With 50,000 daily video views, you could expect to receive up to Rwf52 million per year from videos. The best earners receive substantially more than that.

Just as it takes time to build up a website or blog to the point where it is popular and capable of earning money, you have to build up an audience on your YouTube before it brings any cash in.

You need to build up a library of quality videos, targeted at a specific audience, and work on promoting these videos, through social media or any other means you can think of, to gain a subscriber base, before moving to the charging phase.

Monetising

The first step of this is to join the YouTube Partner Program. You have to agree to their terms, basically agreeing that you won’t do anything fraudulent.

YouTube then asks you to set up an AdSense account if you do not already have one. AdSense account provides a way for vloggers to earn money from their online content. It works by matching ads to your site based on your content and visitors. The ads are created and paid for by advertisers who want to promote their products.

This process is relatively straightforward. You will need to notify Google  markets you intend to use the ads. Be aware that there are some parts of the world where you won’t be able to operate a Google AdSense account to monetise your videos. Google publishes a list of the acceptable countries you can monetize YouTube in.

You won’t get paid just because you have ads on your videos. Your viewers have to actively watch your ads. But, most viewers skip ads. So you need high numbers of viewers first, to have enough of them bothering to click on your ads.

Google keeps about 45 per cent of what advertisers pay. YouTubers will earn somewhere between $1 and $2 per 1000 views. This rate changes regularly. People do have to fully watch the ad, rather than bypassing it, to count as a "view.” Another option is to have cost per click (CPC) ads on YouTube page, where you are, of course, reliant on people actually clicking on your ads.

There are numerous ways YouTube channels can generate money. Apart from earning based on Google ads and views, marketing own or others’ products, affiliate marketing and educational and consulting services can also earn vloggers money.