In 2019, YouTube creator Shelby Church had a marvelous year in terms of finance when she made double the money of what she earned in 2018 by making YouTube content. She has 1.4 million subscribers on YouTube, some of which she earned by buying views on YouTube, and she says she earned around $140,000 from YouTube ads in 2019.
Shelby’s No. 1 source of revenue as an online creator is brand sponsorships and No. 2 is Google-placed ads in her videos. She did some addition and subtraction to arrive at firm decisions on how she will be placing these ads in her videos. The most important point was to pay attention to the right length of her videos and how it can be edited to place the right no. of ads in one single video.
She understood that one key to earning better money from a particular video is by placing ads before the viewers skip it. It is habitual to just skip the ads to see the real content. Shelby understands this human behavior so she placed her ads in such a way that they could not be skipped. If the viewers do not watch the ad, the creator does not get money. That is how YouTube works.
Next she made her videos longer so they can contain more ads. Contrary to what she did in 2018 (she had less than 10 minutes video) she this time in 2019 made videos of 10-12 minutes thus she could include multiple ads. Short videos can include one ad only. She realised this in mid 2019 and got to making longer videos to place more ads and earn more.
