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to your audience — whether it consists of one person or ten million — centers on understanding them and satisfying their appetite. (For more on building your audience, check out Chapter 10.)

      Building a business

      In addition to letting you upload your videos to satisfy the fun side of your personality, YouTube can work wonders for your business side. You can easily set your account to monetize video content, as mentioned in the next section; as long as you meet the minimum requirements for monetization and enough viewers watch your videos, you can earn some extra money. If you have something to sell or a service to offer, you can also leverage YouTube for some pretty cool and powerful advertising. As you can see in Chapter 13, it’s simple enough for anyone to do it.

      Monetizing

      You can earn money with your YouTube channel every time someone views a YouTube ad before watching one of your videos. The more people who view your content, the more money you can potentially make. The minimum eligibility requirements to turn on monetization features for your channel have dramatically changed over the past couple of years, primarily because of what are referred to as brand safety issues with advertisers.

      So, what's all this about “brand safety”? Actually, it's not that complicated. An advertiser wants to place its ads on videos that are suitable for its brand image, culture, and vision. An advertiser doesn’t want its brands associated with bad press or negative content. What is suitable for one brand advertiser might not be suitable for another brand. For example, a video game manufacturer might be okay with advertising on first-person-shooter videos, but a beauty brand may find that kind of content inappropriate for its video’s ads or just not relevant for its target audience.

      Now that users have found the potential to make money on YouTube, it’s become like the California gold rush of 1849. Motivated entrepreneurs are setting up shop in the hope of striking it big with their YouTube channels.

      As you might expect, not everybody will strike it rich. In fact, very few will strike it rich. Nevertheless, it’s possible to earn a side hustle, especially if you take advantage of the multiple ways you can make money by way of your YouTube channel, including advertising revenue, channel membership, your merchandise shelf, Super Chat and Super Stickers, and YouTube Premium Revenue. Just keep in mind that slow-and-steady wins the race — making money takes time, or at least it will take time until you build a massive following. (For more on monetization, check out Chapter 14.)

      The Basics of YouTube

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      

Navigating the basics of the YouTube interface

      

Watching YouTube videos

      

Creating a YouTube account

      

Setting up a unique channel URL

      

Checking out the YouTube Partner Program

      In the simplest sense, YouTube is a website designed for sharing video. Before YouTube’s founding in 2005, posting and sharing a video online was difficult: The bandwidth and storage needed to stream video were expensive, and many copyright risks were involved in letting people upload whatever they wanted. Because YouTube was willing to absorb the costs and ignore the risks, it provided, for free, the infrastructure for users to upload and view as much video as they want. This proposition turned out to be a popular one.

      Google acquired YouTube in 2006, and YouTube’s growth continued. As of 2019, viewers watch more than a billion hours of video per day, and more than 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute.

      Let us say that last part again: 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

      You’ll find, in a word, videos on YouTube. You’ll find, in several words, just about anything on YouTube. We would say that you’ll find anything you can imagine, but even we never would have imagined that anyone would make a compilation of animal clips from the defunct app Vine, and we definitely would never have imagined that the compilation would have been viewed over 214 million times. The best way to describe what’s on YouTube may be to start with the categories that YouTube lists on its home page.

      Managing your identity

      Your entire YouTube experience is driven by whether YouTube knows who you are. It doesn’t use any magic to figure it out. Instead, YouTube simply determines whether you’re logged in or logged out. When you log in, YouTube can make video recommendations based on your viewing behavior. In other words, after YouTube knows what you like, it does its best to bring more of that great video content to you.

      

YouTube and its parent, Google, are in the advertising business and are not promoting online video for the betterment of mankind (though some channels on YouTube actually help achieve that goal). By understanding your viewing behavior when you’re logged in, YouTube and Google are able to serve better and more relevant ads to you. That’s good for them, for the advertiser, and for the viewer. Sure, most people don’t like ads, but YouTube is truly trying to do a better job of targeting ads. (Chapter 13 covers this topic in more detail.)

      As you can see in this chapter and throughout the book, you need to be logged in to do most of the important things on YouTube. Sure, you can watch videos without being logged in, but you’ll miss a good part of the experience. You need a Google account to log in, and we show you how to set up one of those a little later in this chapter, in the section “Working with a YouTube Account.” You also have the option to create a YouTube channel for an existing Google account.

      

You don’t need a YouTube channel to log in to YouTube — you just need a Google account. Having a channel though, as you’ll soon find out, helps you organize your YouTube viewing without

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