Hawk attacks Drone: The Hype Dies Down
Posted in Web Publishing, YouTube on October 14th, 2014 at 23:04:14It seems like my 15 minutes of fame are mostly coming to a close. I’m still getting some 6000 hits/hour, but it’s nowhere near what it was — it peaked at over 130000 hits/hour right after the Daily Mail published their article. All of the other metrics have died down as well — Twitter posts, news articles, textual abuse at the hands of Joe Rogan and Anthony Cumia fans…
As some of you have seen, it’s my intent to donate advertising revenues from the video on YouTube to the Massachusetts Audubon Society. (Just seemed like a good cause to me; I don’t generally believe in advertising for padding my own pockets, but I’m happy to use advertising for good — and frankly, I’ve always wondered how advertising on YouTube worked, so this seemed like as good of an opportunity as any.) As you may have seen in my tweets, a couple of bogus ContentID claims have resulted in some of that revenue/earnings being missed out on: when a video is being disputed under ContentID, *nobody* can run ads, which means that the revenue is lost.
All the stats below are based on rough estimates of views from the YouTube views analytics dashboard combined with a timeline of activity; none are based on any AdSense data.
A brief summary of my monetization history:
- First million views: Only display ads in-page, starting around 100k views. These are the ads on the upper right corner of the page. Since much of my content was in embeds, rather than visits directly to YouTube, these were not particularly lucrative, but due to the overall popularity, I did have something like 800k monetized visits on the watch page (this excludes around another 250k of non-monetized visits due to ContentID.) These ads are the only ads that have been on for the majority of the time.
- At 1 million views, I enabled overlay ads. In total, I believe that I have had something like 1.5M monetized views with overlay ads enabled. (Another 800k have not been monetized due to ContentID claims.) Towards the end of this (at around 1.8M) there was a content ID claim, which was later cleared up.
- At 2.2 million views (after my first ContentID dispute was resolved), I enabled Trueview ads. There have been approximately 600k monetized playbacks with TrueView enabled.
I don’t actually have any real earnings statistics yet, because those things can take up to 7 days to process. (I also don’t know if I could share them if I did have them; a quick read of the ToS suggests probably not.) A quick Google search points to this article on YouTube CPM, but explains that it varies significantly depending on what your ratios are of videos getting pre-rolls. (With the vast number of embeds, and short content, I think it’s probably fair to think I’ll have a lower TrueView/skippable ad ratio than most videos would, but again — no numbers available yet.)
This is by far the most common question I get about my experience: “How much money are you making?” With the numbers I see reported on the internet, I think the answer is that you can expect to see about $2 in revenue for every 1000 views. (55% goes to you, 45% goes to YouTube.) So if I had been running ads on my channel for the entire duration, and had had no ContentID claims, it would be approximately $3500 in ad revenue thus far. With the actual reality of the situation, I’m probably significantly less than that, due to not advertising aggressively at the start, the type of video I actually published, and other issues.
Overall, this is just one component of what has been an eye-opening, thrilling, and exhausting experience. I’ll be doing more write-ups about how things have gone over the coming days and weeks — I can certainly say I’ve learned a lot about what having a viral video looks like, and as might be clear from the opening paragraph, it hasn’t all been sunshine and roses.