Tag Archives: views

Are Donations A Viable Business Model

16 years of making content I was monetized just with donations, and to my surprise it did work to some extent, but the sheer amount of work it required to do was just ridiculous.

Over 16 years I just made around 2000€ from donations, these included direct deposit, not PayPal.

So to have a rough estimate on traffic and donations. It would approximately take 100000 YouTube views for 1 donation of 5-10€. You would make 1000€ from ads alone if your channel was monetized and you’d follow the guidelines, unfortunately my channel was not monetized.

The problem is that most people consuming your content are indifferent. They might enjoy your show and all that, but only handful of people will actually donate any money.

I didn’t get any grants to advertise my IBAN for free, so I relied on organic traffic from the content I created.

Donations could work if you’d be Wikipedia and push donations hard but if you just leave an IBAN or PayPal link on the sidebar of your blog, you wouldn’t get much because most people are in and out as soon as they milk you.

Is It Worth Investing Money Into Free Content

I can create content, my problem was that people weren’t willing to support my projects directly.

I wrote two Lithuanian books by myself and actually paid money to voice them and then I put them on YouTube. So I invested 200€ for 2 audio books and put them onto YouTube.

All I got back was comments “nice book, will there be more?” and bunch of likes.

My YouTube channel was not monetized.

So, if you are thinking about investing money into content that you will be giving for free on YouTube or any other platform – I suggest you don’t do it, unless you don’t want return on the investment.

You could invest 1000000€ into piece of content and give it away, but you wouldn’t basically earn nothing back from YouTube.

Most people do not earn from YouTube as their content is not monetized, or their monetized content doesn’t get much views and the ad return is ridiculously low.

If you have 200€, create a product that you will sell instead of giving it away for free. On YouTube you will get views, but views =/= money back.