YouTube manages to capture and retain leadership through an unobtrusive approach to monetization. The company generates income from advertising, subscriptions, and the provision of premium content.
With advertising, everything is clear. You can watch it repeatedly during the course of a video, with the option to skip it after a few seconds of viewing. Profits from this type of advertising are shared between the company and the channel on which it is presented. In addition to this, contextual advertising is actively used.
After becoming a subscriber to YouTube, you can use its functions for free, but for a small fee you can also subscribe to a premium subscription, which allows you to watch videos without advertising. Interestingly, its cost differs depending on your geographic location.
Due to the appearance of popular video content in the network: TV series, TV shows, premieres of movies, the company decided to provide an opportunity to watch them first in high quality by paying to watch one or a series of clips. On average, you’ll pay from one to ten dollars for one video. And for several, such as a season of a TV series or show, about thirty.
Creating your own video hosting, you need to clearly understand where the money will come from. Many ways are unpopular, and the main source of income is the placement of advertising. The main thing is not to overdo it and do not turn viewing videos in solid advertising, you just lose subscribers.
At the first stage, you should refrain from advertising and minimize attempts to monetize it. This will open up a stream of subscribers without limiting it to anything. Over time, you’ll get your audience, at which point you can start introducing ads and charging money for paid content. Pornhub followed this line of development and achieved its goal by introducing both ads and fees for premium accounts later on.
Types of users
It is very easy to make the site popular, and therefore subsequently make a profit from it. It is necessary to consider the wishes and interests of all users: viewers, video creators, advertisers.
Viewers – this is a primary category, which should keep the focus. This is the ultimate consumer video services, and the popularity of the video depends on them. The number of viewers makes a video product or user channel more or less valuable. To attract viewers, you need to take care about the quality of an interesting exclusive video, you should also work on the design and simplicity of the interface, and get rid of annoying annoying advertising or minimize its impact.
The next category is those who produce videos. This can be video bloggers, streamers, music bands, travelers, anyone who will fill the site with video content. It is their work will attract viewers, respectively, for them to make a comfortable environment so they want to be posted at your place, not on the same YouTube.
In addition to the creators of the videos, there is a category of people who can increase interest in them. These can be celebrities, athletes or stars, in short, those that the viewer is willing to watch.
A popular move by video hosting owners is to bring in media stars on a paid basis. This can be a one-time promotion or a regular appearance of a famous person on the channel. Advertisers are another target audience, the one that makes a profit. Through quality content, millions of subscribers and hundreds of thousands of views, hosting owners get close to advertisers. This category, which pragmatically evaluates the service, choosing the most popular channels that meet the requirements of the target audience. It turns out that it is impossible to attract them directly, only through quality content and a growing audience of subscribers.
With all the nuances in mind, the marketing strategy should be built around quality content. Only after filling the site with videos, you can start talking about actively attracting viewers. And only in the last turn will we talk about advertisers and monetization.
