Creating videos for Youtube and making money from them with Adsense and advertising

How much money can you make from posting videos on Youtube?

This was such a difficult question to find an answer to.  I guess there are so many variables, different advertisers pay different amounts, different types of video might appeal to different types of user who are more or less inclined to click on ads meaning you'll get less clicks per 1000 views.

I set up my videos to monetise and I haven't found any information which suggests I should keep the payment amount and schedule secret, I don't think I was invited into the secret Youtube club where they tell you how much you're going to earn from advertising on your videos as long as you don't tell anyone else!

So I'll tell you what it looks like so far on mine.  And a lot of this is based on assumptions and rough guesstimates!

Basically, I get about 4 pence, £0.04, every time somebody clicks on the advert on one of my Youtube videos.  Yippee!  Actually, I thought it would be even less than that.  I'm sure there are setting you can select which put limits on how ads are displayed which may mean you'd get less.

Anyway, based on the percentage of people who are clicking my ads on Youtube, the prediction they offer me is that I am likely to earn around £3.45 per 1000 video views, I have a click-through rate of just over 8%.  I don't know if that's good or not.

10,000 views = £345.00
100,000 views = £3,450.00
1,000,000 views = £34,500.00
100,000,000 views = £345,000.00
300,000,000 views = I'm a Youtube millionaire!  Think Gotye, Gangnam Style...

So, if you wanted to make a living from Youtube and you had my level of CTR and £0.04 per click, then in order to get a passable young geezer's wage of let's say £20k a year that would mean you would need half a million clicks per year.  At a rate of just over 8% that means you would need roughly six million video views per year.

So that's the answer right there, all very rough but you can work the rest out yourself.  If you start getting a vid with 300 million views, things start to look rather tasty.

My videos are averaging about 5-10 thousand views per year, so, I either need to get a thousand videos on there of a reasonable quality, or do something special that people are going to go nuts over.

So it's possible to make a living off Youtube, especially if your videos are popular.