These days, most people need a little side-hustle to make ends meet. A survey done by Bankrate found that 43% of $80,000+ income households have a side gig of some kind. That’s a lot of people working on the side to keep food on the table! While you may see advice about working for gig apps driving for Lyft on the weekend or delivering food for Grubhub at night, those aren’t great options for everyone—particularly those without transportation.
This has led many people to get more creative when trying to lock down a second source of income. Enter YouTube. It seems like everyone with a smartphone has a YouTube channel these days. There are, in fact, 31 million YouTube channels worldwide and that number grows every single day.
So what is the appeal of YouTube?
It’s relatively easy to start a YouTube channel using a smartphone and a Google account. While your channel does need to grow to a certain size before you can monetize it by getting approved for a Google AdSense account in order to start earning ad revenue, the startup costs are essentially low to none with only your time being a significant investment.
A lot of YouTube content is also evergreen. By evergreen, we mean it’s content that remains relevant indefinitely, and therefore will continue to rack up views for the foreseeable future. That means a small but steady ongoing income for many YouTubers that requires very little regular maintenance. This is an appealing prospect for many people seeking a second source of income as it will allow them to earn money later for labor they do today.
It’s estimated that the average YouTube ad view earns $.01 – $.03 each. That may not sound like much, but when you start multiplying that times several ads per video and several thousand views, the money does start to add up.
So how do you know if you’re capable of having a successful YouTube channel? Well, there’s certainly an element of luck to having a hit channel, but a good bit of hustle helps too. Getting your channel off the ground can be a bit difficult, but if you have a good friend and family base to help you spread the word about whatever you’re doing on social media, that can help. The more generally social media savvy a YouTuber is, the more successful they’re likely to be by leveraging other social media platform presences into views on YouTube through cross-promotion.
There’s also the question of what content you intend to put on YouTube and how saturated the current YouTube market is with that content. Launching a recipe or vlog channels can be a rough slog given how many of them there are, but if you have a niche area of knowledge that people may look to YouTube for, you might be in luck. It also doesn’t hurt to be smart, funny, and good-looking, but a quick glance around the YouTube platform will tell you that those aren’t necessarily requirements to have a successful YouTube side gig.
