After 4 years of creating gaming videos, I have finally become monetised on YouTube!
I'll be writing about my journey to meet requirements, the income sources, and what I learned.
The Journey to Monetisation
I started publishing YouTube videos in 2021. That year, I primarily focused on Temtem PvP videos. Having been a part of the online community, this was the initial start of gathering subscribers and consistent viewers.
4,000 Watch Hours
In 2022, my biggest success was a Nuzlocke run of Monster Sanctuary. I was still far off from the requirements. In 2023, I shifted my style from let's plays to do more tutorial-focused videos with the release of Cassette Beasts. A couple of videos performed well enough to give me a newfound motivation and direction.
Between the Temtem end-game and Cassette Beasts, I reached the 4,000 watch hours requirement in 2023. I had built a consistent, loyal viewership by narrowing down on a few games in a particular niche.
However, it felt like I was exhausting a lot of the recurring viewers, with little subscription gain.
1,000 Subscribers
The biggest challenge was changing my mindset to gain more subscribers.
Last year, I started exploring more games. I tried out Roblox CCG games Doodle World and Tales of Tanorio. The latter, I focused on creating accessible guides as promptly as possible, which utilised the game's hype on release.
I continued to cover new games, like Ova Magica -- which I pidgeon-holed myself a little too deep in for a few months. This year, I continued to work on experimenting and providing new types of videos.
To my surprise, my first video about Planetary Life's demo, a Spore/SimEarth like game, helped me get the last subscriber push to 1,000. Despite not being in my general niche, it was just the right fit.
Monetisation Sources
Now that I have become a monetised creator, where does income get generated from?
Memberships and Super Chats
One of the income generators could be memberships and super chats. As a part-time creator, I find it hard to provide membership value, as consistency is not something I can promise. Despite having them enabled from Early Partner program, I never had any members register; and reasonably so.
Super Chats can be substantial income, however, I do not have a live-stream oriented channel. Youtube's algorithm makes it hard to get discovered as a streamer, so you can safely assume this is not a reliable avenue from my end.
Ad Revenue
My income in the past week has been purely from ads running on videos, gaining €4.48 in 1-week. It's not a lot, but it's also more than I anticipated.
One thing I learnt is that youtube is a long-game. If I look at the revenue sources, only the largest-earner is from 2025.
The 2nd to 5th best earners are videos from 2022 and 2023. This suggests that creating evergreen videos that continue to perform well is a good source of recurring income, even if recent videos flop.
SEO vs Browse videos
Most of my views come from Search. SEO - Search Engine Optimisation - is an essential skill.
These videos often are tutorials or guides, which gather views both from Youtube and Google searches.
On the other hand, there are videos that are recommended by youtube while viewers are browsing. These videos can have better performance, but are harder to achieve. My 100,000 Years of Planetary Life did achieve this success, but I have found it difficult to replicate.
The ideal channel has both kinds of videos, with Browse having the most reach while SEO-based videos have better long-term consistency.
The Long-Game of SEO Videos
With youtube, I experienced a lot of delayed gratification.
For example, this week, when Definitely Not Fried Chicken went on a 70% sale on steam, my views per hour skyrocketed, despite the video being almost 2-years old.
A bigger surprise was a 12-second short for Slime Rancher 2. For years, it had almost no views. Despite most shorts relying on youtube recommending them in the Shorts Feed, this one started to gain traction through search.
Lessons Learned
The biggest lesson I learned is never to give up. Even when things don't seem to be working, consistency is important.
Because most of my videos don't do that well, I was not expecting that 2-year old videos would be as pivotal as they have been.
In addition, experimentation is key. If I wouldn't have branched out and try something completely different for the Planetary Life video, I'd be weeks away from monetisation with half the motivation that I had throughout May.
With compounding views on videos, I would expect income to only grow as I continue to produce more videos.
Plan Forward
Now that I have reached the requirements, it's time to rethink the strategy. I'll be focusing on experiment new types of videos to understand how I can achieve success with browse recommendation videos. Quality is more important than quantity.
Then, I'll work on consistency in what I provide, and explore if I can incorporate that into ways that help me gain memberships.
At the end, I'm still a small creator with lots to learn. Have you got any advice?