YouTube Just Made a Major Shift That Will Change EVERYTHING!
Every time there's a really big shift in the video marketing landscape, I always want to make sure that I'm here for you. I want to make sure that I'm here to help you out. And there was a gigantic shift taking place in the YouTube landscape and we've known about this for a while.
I think it was announced back in November, but just now are we actually going to start feeling the effects of it. June 1st, it's going to roll out and this is a pretty big change and it has huge implications for video creators like me and like you maybe, as well as big implications for advertisers also like me, maybe like you.
You are probably going to get monetized...
Now, if you don't think that your video is monetized, you're probably going to get monetized, basically every video he's going to be up for grabs when it comes to monetization.
So what does that mean?
Generally the way that it works is that if you're a small creator, you are generally not part of the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) and being part of that program is how you can show ads on your videos. To be part of the YPP, you have to have over a thousand subscribers and a certain amount of watch time, then you apply to be part of the program. Once you're in the program you can get revenue share for it. But if you're not in the partner program you can't monetize. That's changed now.
This opens up a huge amount of possibility and potentially a huge amount of frustration. One of the things that's a little bit crazy about this news is that a lot of people have talked about how frustrating this could potentially be.
Potential Frustrations
I don't see this as frustrating at all. I get it. There's some frustration potentially there because you're saying that if I am having ads on my videos and I'm a small creator and I'm not going to get paid for it, then that sucks, I deserve to get paid. I completely understand. I understand where you're coming from.
You want to get paid to do this? Once you get up to be part of the YouTube Partner Program, you'll be in there and you'll get royalties for it. You're almost there. You'll get there. It's no big deal. Another reason I suppose people might be frustrated is if you don't want ads on your content, but that's just part of the model. YouTube is not a nonprofit. They host massive amounts of server space for you to just host your video on for free. The least you can do is allow them to put advertising on it. It just makes sense. I think that this is where a lot of creators and other folks, they just don't understand the business model.
This is a business model. If you really want to be able to control the advertising that's on your stuff, build your own platform or do your own thing, or host it on Vimeo. But if you're on YouTube and you're a smaller creator, there's no reason for you to be able to control that. And it's a good thing. It's a great. It helps you to grow, helps Google grow. Ads on YouTube are great. They're a wonderful thing.
The other huge upside of this...
From a YouTube advertising perspective, this is fantastic news, because your ability to find placements for your advertising is now going to be bigger than ever. You're going to be able to find people no matter what video they're watching and they're going to be grouping smaller creators into these topics as well. Before you could only advertise on monetized videos, so only bigger creators. But there's billions of views that are just left out there, that advertisers were not able to place their ads on because they weren't monetized.
Just think about the possibilities now.
From an advertising standpoint, one of the things that we think about all the time is something called CPM and that means cost per 1000 impressions. This is basically how much the advertising placement costs. For example, if it's $7, that means that it costs you $7 to reach a thousand people on YouTube. Generally this is higher in business to business. So if you're trying to get the attention of entrepreneurs, for example, it's more competitive. The more competitive spaces that you have, the more people fight over them; supply and demand. And the price goes up on that, so the CPMs are higher. There's just less videos to go around for those ads. If it's something like B2C (business to consumer) something in the health and fitness realm where everybody's fighting over advertising dollars, the CPMs are high. But in the learning musical instrument realm or something, they're nice and low.
Everybody's CPMs are almost definitely going to go down as a result of this because the space has gone up like crazy. Think of it like a bunch of billboards. If all of a sudden New York City had five times as many billboards in Times Square than they have now, what would happen to the price of those billboards?
The prices would decrease on those billboards because supply and demand, there's just more of these billboards to go around. Now, of course it's all relative. As soon as those billboards have people fighting over them, then that drives the price back up. But ultimately that's how it works. The amount of placements is going to go up on YouTube. So everybody's CPMs are going to go down. It's going to be cheaper to advertise on YouTube. Probably across the board and over time as more people come to YouTube, it will start to go back up.
Figure out how to make video work for you, now...
I will say though, that YouTube advertising adoption is definitely much slower than I've seen on any other platform, because it has a higher barrier to entry. Let's just be honest, I've run so many YouTube ads and the biggest thing about YouTube ads is your ability to make great creative, to drive sales, signups, whatever you want. A lot of people get intimidated by that and they just don't want to make video for it, or they get intimidated by early results not being amazing. And they don't jump on it. So what I would highly recommend is, get on it right now.
If you're a coach, a consultant, anything - especially if you're in the B to C realm - if you have a topic that is advertising to people that are not necessarily current, like big business owners or those who do spend a lot of time on YouTube trying to learn their craft and get better, you should absolutely start breaking in to figure out how to make video ads work for you because it's extremely powerful. They can be very powerful. The power of video, this is why we charge high prices for this video content, because it builds "know, like, trust" and we can we can sell stuff easier.
Great time to start selling video services...
If you have thought about starting a YouTube advertising business now is a great time to go into it. It is a great time to start selling stuff like this. "Hey, I'll make a YouTube ad for you." Because there is going to be a lot of people that are intimidated by the barrier to entry.
You can use this news from YouTube around June 1st as an opportunity to say, "Hey, listen, this is huge. You're going to be able to advertise on YouTube cheaper than ever before. The biggest thing that differentiates a good YouTube ad from a bad YouTube ad is not targeting or anything like that, it's your creative. If fear of making the video is what's been stopping you from doing YouTube ads in a serious way before, now is your moment; I'll make that video for you."
There's never been a better moment to do that. There's never been a better moment to start selling YouTube advertising as a service. That is definitely a very viable business model. I would highly recommend that those of you who are interested in that, check it out a little bit and see how, because there are a lot of businesses out there that want to be on YouTube ads so bad, but they feel so completely daunted by it. It's not like Facebook ads where you can just throw up an image. People feel completely daunted by the idea of starting a YouTube advertising campaign. And it makes a lot of sense.
If you're interested in learning how to build a business for your video creation interests, if you want to turn video into your job and you want to make $10,000 a month doing it, that's what the Peak Video Creators Program is for.
I have a free training for this program, which goes pretty deep into a training on how to build videos that sell and build a business model to attract clients to you on autopilot using video. So check out that training, it's just 20 minutes long totally worth your time.
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