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Four ways to monetize YouTube content

There are four principle ways to monetize content:

  • run ads
  • sell other peoples products
  • selling merch
  • sell your own products

Spencer Corneila, the real estate investor / scam reporter mentioned earlier, makes money by running ads. This works best for some content, especially celebrity gossip.

Selling other people's products with affiliate links is also an option, but it's not going to give you excellent conversions. Here are some examples of sponsored videos:

Sponsored content is often loosely related to the video topic or not related at all. Viewers interested in a South American Geography video are probably more likely to be interested in a product like curiosity stream. But there doesn't seem to be any reason why Philion's audience or viewers of the Trillion Dollar Man video are interested in buying a mattress. These videos get tons of views, so they'll earn the creators some affiliate revenue, but this isn't a very effective way of monetizing your audience.

You can also sell merchandise, like Rampage Poker does in this video. He doesn't always plug his merchandise at the start of his videos, that example was cherry picked. Merch is low margin and competitive. It'll be higher margin than an affiliate link, but not much, and requires more logistical headaches.

Selling your own products is the best way for content creators to monetize their channels. Remember Miss Excel... yea, she's making up to $100,000 a day selling her courses.

Doug Polk is another poker content creator that uses YouTube to market his Upswing Poker site where he sells poker training courses, usually for $1,000 each. Profit margins are really high on digital content. Doug Polk is probably printing cash.

Selling your own products or services seems to be the best way to monetize traffic.