The Next Phase in a YouTube Creator’s Monetisation Journey

We Are Witnessing a Little Phenomenon Across the YouTube Space

Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

Over the last decade or so, YouTube has gone from an online platform to a vocation for young people across the world. What started as an online dating platform with great video upload capacity has now turned into a viable career for circa thousand of people every year.

As that number of people earning a healthy living from YouTube grows so too does the innovation of the YouTuber Creator in monetising their content and the latest phase in the journey is quite an interesting one.

A Brief History of YouTube

In 2005, three intelligent chaps registered the domain name www.youtube.com with the headquarters situated above a pizzeria in Californa. Humble beginnings some would say.

Ex-PayPal employees Jawed Karim, Steve Chen and Chad Hudley had the brainwave to set up an online video sharing platform after having a timely realisation. In 2005, they had failed to successfully create an online dating app which happened to have great video upload capacity at the same time they realised that there was nowhere to rewatch content online. It was an obvious step, to them at least, to reinvent their failed site as a video platform.

That idea then received $11.5 million investment from the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. Karim uploaded YouTube’s very first video at the end of 2005 after beta testing which was entitled “Me at the Zoo”.

By March 2006 the platform was receiving 20,000 uploaded per day and by the end of 2006 Google had acquired the brand for an eye-watering $1.65 billion. At which time it hadn’t even hit the UK.

The exponential growth continued and by 2009 the site was yielding 1 billion views per day and then hit 3 billion views daily by 2011. In 2007 YouTube made it possible for creators to earn money from the platform.

And that’s where this story begins.

Original Content Doing it For the Fun of It

Pre-2007, content creators were making videos online for the fun of it. They were doing it for a few, quite nice reasons: