How much do I earn from social media?
I've been a wannabe blogger for over four years. Starting from Wordpress, and Facebook, then three and a half years on Hive and whatever it used to be called before that. So how much does one earn from social media? And is it actually worth the effort?
WORDPRESS
A couple years ago, I decided to see if I could monetise my Wordpress blog. I invested about £100 to buy the domain name https://livinguktaiwan.com/ for three years and set up whatever I had to do to monetise it.
Setting up the website for monetisation is a mammoth task in its self. They really make you work for it. It was so complicated, you practically need a PhD. If you ask me to do it all over again, I would have no idea where to start. And if you think building a following on Hive is difficult, you really should try Wordpress. I'd say it's hundred times more difficult. Just imagine you are one of million and millions of bloggers out there fighting for attention, whereas on Hive there's only something like 3000 active authors a day.
To cut a long story short, I started to get some followers and ad revenue, but to be honest it's not really worth the paper it's written on. Scroll down and you'll see how much I get...... and keep scrolling till you see what period that covers.
Yup, that's £3.58 over the lifetime, over the 2 years I've set it up. That's a 3.5% return on the £100 I spent on the domain. Actually, I doubt I will ever see this money because there's a minimum threshold before payout. I don't know what that is, but I doubt I will be meeting that soon.
To be fair, I hardly spend any time on Wordpress, so I really can't expect anything in return. Money doesn't just flow in unless you're a top KOL. I'm actually surprised I still get some views each day, I think they're from the few 'friends' I've made over the years. In a way, they're the only reason I still keep my blog running. With the amount of time and effort I spend on Wordpress, it's no wonder I only have 264 followers.
Next is Facebook, to many, the evilest of them all.
This was my first 'branded' social media account https://www.facebook.com/LivingUKTaiwan set up after I moved to Taiwan to share my new life with friends and families. At the very beginning, Facebook gave me some free credit to do promotions, might have been something like USD10. I set my target audience to the whole of Asia, big big mistake! Within an hour I got 200 new followers - all from Aceh, Indonesia. After the first blunder, and having earned some rewards from SteemHive I decided to invest USD5 to do another promotion. I wasn't really after followers, I just wanted to see how things worked. This time I targetted Taiwan and Hong Kong only and gained a few tens of followers.
My earnings from Facebook? Yeah, you've guessed correctly - zero. Does ANYBODY make money off Facebook at all?
Next is Instagram, part of the Facebook family https://www.instagram.com/livinguktaiwan/
This should actually be the easiest to maintain as it's just uploading images. I always forget about it and I don't know why I didn't cross post my daily lockdown life from Facebook recently. It would have been the perfect opportunity to drum up some traffic. There's a thought, perhaps I can start now....
Instagrammers can earn by promoting products for company, not sure how big a followers you need, but I don't think 40 will make the cut. Again, no effort no rewards, particularly I haven't invested a single penny here. I guess I can call that breakeven?
YOUTUBE
And finally YouTube, I've been spending most of my time here in recent months https://www.youtube.com/c/LivingUKTaiwan.
My YouTube channel started about two and a half years ago when Dlive and Dtube were around. There were practically no viewings, unless you count single digits as viewings. The exception was one that had 1000 viewings about an Ama, a 69 year old lady from Japan who free dives. Not blowing my own trumpet, but this video is definitly worth watching particularly as the number of Amas in the world are dwindling. I sent this video to the tour company maybe that's why it has so many viewings. Apart from no viewings in general, I also had no subscribers on YouTube, well less than 20 I think.
Four months ago I decided to work on my YouTube channel as there was a hot topic that I know I could capitalise on. I started to make a lot of informative videos, targeted at a specific audience. There were many YouTubers making similar content, many of them went viral, of course, that didn't include me. I comfort myself by saying for every one of those that went viral, there are hundreds like me who are swimming at the bottom of the sea.
The target was to reach two magic numbers, 1000 subscribers and 4000 viewing hours within a year. It took me less than three months to reach my 1000th subscriber, and another month to get 4000 viewing hours. That was about 10 days ago. Reaching these targets were crucial as it meant you can start to monetise your YouTube channel. Yah!!!!
Let me backtrack a little about my investment on YouTube first. A lot of people just use their mobile phone to make videos, it seems to work well. I got myself a Go Pro 5 2 years ago (the same one that the Ama took underwater with her in the recommended video). From memory that was around £300. Recently I bought an external mic to improve the sound quality, that was about £20. Total investment is £320.
And now for the YouTube earnings. Four months ago, I used to ask people how much do you earn for each video? No one could ever tell me a precise answer. It was like this secret answer no one wanted to give you, you have to be in the club to know. This is the first response I get when I google the question.
Lots of figures here, what does it all mean? Ignoring the mumble jumble, and just focus on the last sentence a YouTuber can make about $5 for every 1,000 video views, that sounds pretty simple right? I thought so too, and I've been monitoring my YouTube earnings in the past 10 days. The first row below is for my latest video that's been up for three days, I'm earning £5.04 / USD6.73 with 610 views! Sounds great, I'm actually doing better than the top talent! How is that possible?
Of course it's not, because this is only one video. If you look at the next row down, I'm earning £0.99 with 782 views. A massive difference between the two. So what's going on? TL:DR the amount you earn for each video differs depending on the type of adverts place on your video and revenue your video generates. The RPM figure is the amount I would get per 1000 view for my video and my RPM ranges from £9.77 to £0.01. The average for my channel is £0.89.
So how much have I earned in the past 10 days from YouTube? £11.04. 45% of that is from one single video which is my latest one. My two videos prior to that only made less than £1 each, so I don't know if things are improving or if that latest one was a fluke. Either way I'm very pleased with this as I had no expectation at all.
My £320 investment is pretty much a sunk cost and I also got some rewards from Dlive and Dtube previously. It might even have paid back already. Now all that remains to be seen is how my YouTube earnings go. I'll do another update in a few months time.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
