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Today I got an email from Google inviting me to monetize my YouTube videos by joining their AdSense program, which would allow them to insert their selection of pop-up ads on my videos, for which privilege they would throw me a breadcrumb or two.
I had never intended to do so, and I'm not about to start, but it got me wondering how the numbers work from a business point of view. They don't give any clues up front what the rate per click or the typical click rates are. So I googled (of course!) and found not much to go on, because if you do sign up to AdSense it's a TOS violation to discuss your results in much detail.
The hits I found suggested that per-click rates range wildly from a few cents to a few dollars, depending on the advertiser; a more useful metric is an average revenue rate per thousand impressions of the ad, for which some arbitrarily-googled discussions suggest you're doing well to get $1 unless you're actively playing the AdSense game with your content so you can try to hit the big-paying ads. (It smells rather like SEO, but in a new dimension: rather that trying to get the top PageRank, you're playing the keywords game for somebody else's money, and of course Google take a (rather large) slice of it.)
My most-viewed video - the Middle-Earth weather forecast - has had all of 1137 views in nearly a year since posting, of which half came in the first month. Now, the AdSense TOCs say that they won't regularly reimburse sums earned of less than US$100. So, assuming that each video is good for 1000 hits, a generous rate of $1 per 1000 hits, and that I somehow had the ideas, resources and wherewithal to make one such video per year (yeah right), I'll need to be making videos for a hundred years before Google will cut me that first cheque - supposing the Internet is still around and the AdSense programme is still going. (Inflation will raise that $100 figure, but it'll also raise that return rate, so I'm waving my hands and ignoring both effects.) And then, in order to actually see the money, I'd have to deal with the US tax authorities. Of course, if I were Google I'd want to get that permission to make money from content, and to set the rates such that I'd never have to pay out in most cases.
No, I don't think so.
I had never intended to do so, and I'm not about to start, but it got me wondering how the numbers work from a business point of view. They don't give any clues up front what the rate per click or the typical click rates are. So I googled (of course!) and found not much to go on, because if you do sign up to AdSense it's a TOS violation to discuss your results in much detail.
The hits I found suggested that per-click rates range wildly from a few cents to a few dollars, depending on the advertiser; a more useful metric is an average revenue rate per thousand impressions of the ad, for which some arbitrarily-googled discussions suggest you're doing well to get $1 unless you're actively playing the AdSense game with your content so you can try to hit the big-paying ads. (It smells rather like SEO, but in a new dimension: rather that trying to get the top PageRank, you're playing the keywords game for somebody else's money, and of course Google take a (rather large) slice of it.)
My most-viewed video - the Middle-Earth weather forecast - has had all of 1137 views in nearly a year since posting, of which half came in the first month. Now, the AdSense TOCs say that they won't regularly reimburse sums earned of less than US$100. So, assuming that each video is good for 1000 hits, a generous rate of $1 per 1000 hits, and that I somehow had the ideas, resources and wherewithal to make one such video per year (yeah right), I'll need to be making videos for a hundred years before Google will cut me that first cheque - supposing the Internet is still around and the AdSense programme is still going. (Inflation will raise that $100 figure, but it'll also raise that return rate, so I'm waving my hands and ignoring both effects.) And then, in order to actually see the money, I'd have to deal with the US tax authorities. Of course, if I were Google I'd want to get that permission to make money from content, and to set the rates such that I'd never have to pay out in most cases.
No, I don't think so.
cynical
geeky