How much do South African YouTubers earn?

A lot of South African’s are considering YouTube as a source of passive income. However, they are still not sure about how much money they can realistically make on YouTube. Let’s dive into how much South African YouTubers earn.

There are different factors that affect how much a YouTuber earns, these are some of them.

Audience

Not all audiences are created equal, some audiences are worth more than others according to YouTube. A YouTube channel with a lot of viewers from USA will make more money than any other country on average.

Your audience is also defined by the type of viewers you attract to your channel, a channel that attracts teenagers will not make as much as the one that attract adults. Similarly, to the type of content you produce, a channel posting tiktok videos will not make as much as one that produces content about tech gadgets or real estate.

Video views

You need to have at least 1 000 subscribers and 4 000 watch time before you can monetize your YouTube channel from ads. After that, the only thing that matters is views, you don’t get paid for the number of subscribers you have but for the views that you get on videos.

YouTube pays you an amount of money for every thousand views that you get on your videos. This is known as the RPM (Return Per Mile). A YouTuber that does pranks and tiktok videos will not earn a lot from RPM. YouTube may pay you R16 per thousand views that you get. However, if you are in a niche that talks about finance and investing then you can make close to R100 per thousand views.

Monetization

A lot of people think that you only make money through ads on YouTube, that’s not the case at all. There are other methods that you can use to generate money from YouTube. These methods are ads, affiliate marketing, sponsorships, selling courses.

Ads are the default way to make money on YouTube but you can also get sponsorships and do affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing will usually make you more or less the same amount of money that you receive from ads. The other way to make money is selling courses, especially if you are in a niche that is based on providing information.

Your subscribers will pay a ton of money to buy your course or e-book if you provide them with helpful content. Another way you can leverage the audience on YouTube is using it to promote your own business, which might make you a lot more money.