YouTube Monetization of Video Gaming Footage

YouTube has limited ability to police infringing content that is deemed ineligible for their partner program. If the copyright owner of the content chooses to notify YouTube, the infringing video will be removed. Capcom and other game developers are the rightful owners of the copyright content, however the developers probably perceive combo videos and matches as a form of free advertising/a fan service and ignore the infringement. There's always a future risk that Sega won't allow videos, especially those that are monetized, to remain on YT's network.

The cost to developers to notify YT of every instance of copyright violation would be too high in comparison to the tiny amount that most YT gaming partners earn. If the tables are turned and developers find YT advertising a significant source of income they will likely form a small group of gamers who have written authority to create YT vids.

Since you seem to have recently noticed the advertising in gaming videos and are inquiring about monetization, I'll assume the following information might be useful to you. ATM, only a few hundred among 20,000+ YT partners earn more than six figures a year. The vast majority might earn a few dollars to a few hundred dollars at best per month. YT income is based on a viewer clicking ads served up from Google's ad network, directly as a banner or as an ad preview in your video. Advertisers pay a competitive rate according to relevant keywords associated with your content. The more advertisers competing for those keywords, the higher the cost to the advertiser per click on your content. YT splits that income with you. On top of the per click income, YT also gives you a floating rate per 1000 views on your video, which is also dependent on advertiser competition. The viewing income is based on total cumulative views and not subscribers. One month these rates may be $1 or more per click and per 1000 views and the next month these rates may be .10.

So let's say that you have 10,000 views on a VF video. The average click through rate is around 2-2.5% (Though gamers tend to be more tech savvy so the click through rate may be lower than say videos on organic farming). Let's further form a guesstimate that the income range for clicks is .10-.25 per click. You might get $20-$50 from clicks and you might earn another $10+ from the views. All of this, as mentioned, is dependent on advertiser competition for the keywords associated with the video content. So the above guesstimate might be a higher or a bit lower, but I wouldn't say dramatically by a few hundred percent.

Adding advertising is a good idea, as this is free money, but hardly worth the effort to create supplemental income or to replace a full time job.

 

Hey Myke, I have seen some websites asking for donations to help for paying for their sites. Maybe you can do that too, I'm sure many VFDCers here are willing to help you to pay this site. A few dollars from each members, via paypal, and voilà.

 

woah... now it all makes sense. For a minute I thought VFDC got hijacked.

Thanks for the info Azusado. My old YT konjousan account got accepted into there partnership program for a street fighter 4 vanilla video a few years ago. It eventually got turned down for monetizing after they reviewed it though. The reason for turning it down of course was that I didn't own the content.

I recently logged into this same account a few weeks ago to make some changes and noticed that I had the option to turn monetizing on for the SF4 vid and another vid that had reached a substantial amount of views. Weird huh? Well since it's free money I guess I'll turn them on then lol

I've played around with Google ads before and it's definitely hard to build that $50-$100 bucks per week / month / etc. If you are able to make any cash from this I recommend letting the money sit and accumulate over time. I recommend requesting the money from your G-ad account every 6 months or once a year depending on how quickly it's building.

 

yo papa johns is pretty amazing. At least the one around my way is.

 

One quick question, do we really need to click those ads?

 

That's the point, so we do need to click to make credit. Well, I don't mind to click those ads once in a while, as long as it towards benefit to VFDC. If there's no one actually click those ads, it becomes useless and occupies our web space, isn't it?

 

Still in the realm of advertising, this like streaming VF related matches/tourneys/training mode practicing for q&a (a la Juicebox Abel) will put you out there and people interested enough can very well donate. You don't necessarily have to be a "big name" to get donations per sé. I mean you're big in the VF world, but outside of that, if no one saw those EVOs that had VF in it, they might not know about you or the site for that matter, and that's a missed opportunity to get monetary support.

It's also not really the youtube ads that matter. Many sites are relying on outside sources to put ads on their site. It kinda sucks, but at the same time, if you play your cards right, you can have fighting game related sites and online stores advertise on the site and both you and those cats come out getting some dough in the end. For some it's looked down upon, but that's another route to take. SRK used to have just fighting game related things, but now it's got a ticker at the bottom of the page, adidas ads and all kinds of other "distractions"...

Besides, you gotta have stock in youtube or make some goofy vid and post it all over place in an attempt to become the next meme to get any type of real dough...