A new ERA, or a new passion...
In April 2011, while I was taking care of Jacob at home, he happened to hop on my Roomba vacuum, and since I thought it was funny, I recorded a 15 seconds clip so that I could share it with people I knew. At the time, I thought that YouTube was the easier way to share a video with friends, and so I uploaded the video and then shared the link with my friends on my Facebook page. See video here
At the time, I had a few comments saying it was funny, but nothing leading me to anticipate what was about to happen.
Only many months later did I ventured back to my YouTube account, and being a fan of numbers, my attention was drawn to the views my video had gotten over the course of a nine months period. Five thousands views! Imagine that! I was surprised to find out about that, and I immediately wondered if there was a way to make money out of such a video. This led me to the Ad sense program, own by Google, which also owns YouTube. I quickly set up an account and started to look at ways to better monetize my videos. This can be done by properly using tags and titles, but in the end, all the tags and titles in the world won't make a poor video any better. Nevertheless, I started to capture more things on video, quickly uploading them to YouTube, hoping to be a hit, somehow.
In the month of February 2012, I made 0,38$, and not only did it get me excited, but it gave me hope that I could grow things bigger. The mere 321 views I got for that month absolutely had to grow, somehow, but I did not know how.
Early March 2012, I made a second video of my son on the robot vacuum, hoping to trigger the same level of interest as the first one had. But it was not that simple. I also caught my son falling asleep in front on the TV, while eating, which I obviously captured then uploaded to YouTube.
Views started to climb early March, and I was getting around 100 views a day, which was huge!
Going viral
On March 26th, the views increased to 466 in one day, and the next morning, it was crazy, I was at a thousand even before I left for work. That was my best day ever, with 3500 views. It decreased the next day, and I was not longer viral. I wondered what video it was that had had that effect, and it was actually the one where Jacob was falling asleep. I later found out through YouTube stats that it was in Thailand that my video had temporarily gone viral. Since then, that video has been hovering around 5 to 10 views a day, so I do not have much hope for it anymore.
Having said that, the initial one that had gathered 5000 views in 9 months was attracting more and more viewers. Indeed, in early April 2012, it was getting 200 views per day. This allowed me to make 14.75$ in ad revenue through the Ad Sense program.May to July brought in around 20-25$ per month while it was in August that views started to climb again, for the same initial video. August brought in 34$ while September was better at 50$.
During this period, you can imagine that I got many views to generate that much money. Indeed, the original video generated around 120 000 views between February 2012 and November 2012. Isn't that crazy?
I have gotten payments from AdSense twice, and so far have made 240$ with my videos. I try to upload a video here and there, but it is tough to get views since there are uploading around 72 hours of video every minute as per numbers made available in May 2012. Try and make a successful video, you will see it's not that easy. In my case, sheer luck made it happen, but it is hard to reciprocate and do it again.
I keep trying with going with as many themes as possible, touching on educative videos like DIY kind of videos, or funny video, where I tried to be a standup comedian, which failed miserably (it's tough to be funny).
I will report here, from time to time, updates on how things are going with the videos. They all can be found under my YouTube channel jfguay2 at www.youtube.com/jfguay2.
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