Do ya'll have any idea how hard it is to get monetized out there?
Just in case you've been tunnelvisioning hive too much lately and have forgotten, figured I'd mention and remind people how things are out there compared to Hive which once after you overcome the current potential hurdle of creating a hive account - you can instantly start monetizing your activity here.
Miu shellshocked in Counter Strike created using Sora.
Now of course monetization on hive is not the same as adrevenue earnings on youtube, Instagram, facebook, tiktok, X, etc. They're only sharing with you a percentage they get from advertisers.
Here you're earning 50% stablecoin $ and 50% staked stake in the blockchain, if the ecosystem is doing well, so will your rewards. People buying and staying staked in the ecosystem are the ones making rewards possible for you, not advertisers, not a small portion of "profits" the blockchain might be making - you're diluting investors of their value so you better bring something to make up for it.
Anyway, let's take a look after a month's worth of Youtube activity trying to get monetized. Before I show some stats, keep in mind I'm kind of a "somebody" on Hive, I'm active all the time, I run quite a few projects and am involved in many, so I'm fully and well aware that this may give me an edge in starting out on youtube similar to how it may have done on X in terms of followers and attention. I'm not saying this to brag but keep in mind for others trying to get monetized it may be a lot harder - even though it's not going to be easy for me either.
Views and Watch time (hours); this is some of the things that matter on the road to becoming monetized on youtube.
As you can see, my watch time is doing quite well lately as I've been streaming more over creating videos. Streams last longer so it's enough to have a few active viewers and you may get quite a nice amount of watch time and according to some searches both live streams and views on the video of the livestreams count towards your total watch time. Compared to say making a 15-25min video and getting 100-200 views on it with many not watching the full video, it's going to result in a lot less watch time usually.
Here's a comparison to the videos/vods/shorts with most views and their watch time (keep in mind shorts views+watch time don't count towards monetization):
Now some things to keep in mind, I'm still "starting out", I won't be committing too much time/resources/attentiont towards youtube as the end-goal here is not to get monetized and earn a few cents from adrevenue but to get a bigger reach to bring new users and traffic towards hive. In general also maybe to connect with hivers on a different level through live stream chat discussions, etc.
Alright, so how close am I to getting monetized after 1 month of videos + livestreams + a few shorts?
There's 2 levels to monetization, first one is to allow people to subscribe through memberships to you, meaning they'll pay like $2/month with youtube taking 30% or 50% of it. This then allows you to create different roles/levels for your viewers, it also allows viewers to drop "superchats" where they pay to write a message that may be visible in the chat longer, etc.
Although this data may be up to a week delayed (it mentions that in the [i] button), this means that I'm still 339 subscribers and 2835 watch time hours away from even being considered for this type of monetization (not yet adrevenue).
For adrevenue, it looks like this:
So yeah, quite some time and energy and effort away from that. Basically if I were to stream/upload a video every day, I'd need people to watch at least 10 hours worth of it on average just to hit the lower threshold of watch hours to get monetized. I don't even dare getting into how little adrevenue that'd be after crossing that line and getting 10 watch hours per day. Okay I do dare, after a little searching I stumbled upon this comment from a year ago:
I don't think many of you are ready in the ways hive rewards can scale given things start picking up and we start getting users and attention. Given that adrevenue can be a small little icing on the cake on top of it all.
Thanks for reading, if you haven't subscribed to my new channel yet, I'd appreciate it if you do! (You'll also earn some loyalty points that can be exchanged for hive)