How Much YouTube Paid Ali Abdaal For 10,000,000 views
How Ali made $1,054,053.74 from just YouTube Adsense.
Ali Abdaal is a Youtuber, a former doctor, and an entrepreneur. He started making videos in 2017 about productivity and finance. Since then Ali Abdaal has amassed about 3 million subscribers on Youtube and just crossed $1,000,000 in revenue through AdSense alone. Pretty crazy don’t you think?
Ali will be sharing with you the revenue of his top 5 best performing videos on youtube and lessons he has learned along the way that you can apply to your side hustle and he is also going to break down how many views it will take for you to make a living off youtube.
The first lesson is “The Long Game”.
We can learn from all this that all good things take a long amount of time to see results. Every good thing in life benefits from compounding. The more effort you put into it over a long time, the more likely it is to return good results. Ali didn’t make a penny until after nine months of uploading about 85 videos.
The second lesson is “It just takes one piece of content to change your life, you just never know which one that’s going to be”.
Had he quit Youtube at 84 videos not making any money up until that point thinking that this Youtube thing isn’t working, he would have not made the 85th video that changed everything.
The third Lesson is “Your choice of Industry can be a multiplier”
For any kind of business owner, or anyone starting a side hustle, often the choice of industry or niche you are targeting is going to be a huge multiplier or not on the amount of money you can make from that business.
So here are the 5 Best Performing Videos
1. 9 Passive Income Ideas — 9.8m Views -$191,258.16
Ali shared two points
- We should kind of treated these youtube videos as digital assets. They are investments and investment is something that puts money into our pocket. It is generating him passive income which is the definition of investments.
- Putting more effort and time into your videos can make a difference and pay off big time.
2. How to Invest for Beginners — 5.2m Views -$87,200.08.
This video did not do well at all in the first few weeks after it was published, it was the worst performing video he has had in the previous ten. The lesson here is that you shouldn’t worry about things that are outside of your control. This also applies to everything in life, not just youtube videos as well.
He said we always have that kind of anxiety and fears and concerns about things that are outside of our control but if we can figure out where that line is, then it just makes life much easier and more fun.
3. How to Build a Website in 2022 — 866.3k Views - $42,132.72.
The revenue was high because of the RPM which was $48.86 per thousand views which is the highest rpm video on his channel. The reason the rpm is so high is probably that companies like Squarespace, Wix and other website builders are trying to run ads on it and competing against each other, all of these companies have so much money that’s why the ad prices go higher and higher.
Ali almost didn’t make the video because it was outside of his niche. The thing he was thinking about at the time was “will this video be useful to at least one person out there,” that’s why he made the video.
4. How I take Notes on My Ipad in Medical School — 5.9m Views- $24,479.80
This was video number 85. That means it was the video that out of anything Ali has ever made, has most changed the trajectory of his youtube channel and changed his life completely. There was no guarantee the video was going to be successful.
5. How I Type Fast 156 Words Per Minute — 8.2 million views- $25,143.17
Ali had no idea this video would do well, he just made the video because he knew how to type fast and he has been working on this skill for the last 10 years. So he decided to make the video breaking down the tips and tricks he has learned along the way.
How many views would it take to get to different levels of wealth?
It depends on different things like the location, niche, and whether you have monetization sources outside of just AdSense. But to keep things simple he would just use only AdSense as the primary source of monetization.
How many views do you need to make some pocket money?
In other to make any money at all, you have to join the Youtube Partner Program which requires 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time. So how much effort do you have to put in to get to the point where you are even making this pocket money?
For Ali that was 52 videos and 6 months to reach his first 1,000 subscribers. For some people it takes less for others it takes more but if you look at the average stats provided by Tubebuddy, the stats show that the average channel with 1,000 subscribers has 152 videos. It takes quite a long amount of time and effort.
Once you’ve monetized on average you probably need somewhere in the region of about 15,000 views/month to be making $5-$10/day.
How many views do you need to go part-time on your job?
For example, let’s say you are making $35,000/year in your day job, that means that if you are working 5 days/week, then for every day a week you are working, you are making $7,000/year. If you want to cut down from 5 days to 4 days/week, you’ve got to figure out a way of making up that extra $7,000/year and that means that every month you need to be making $600/month from Youtube.
How much money do you need to quit your job?
To answer that, let’s look at a YouTuber called Silicon Valley Girl, now she is in a highly profitable niche essentially targeting tech-focused people in the west and when her channel was making 500k views/month, she was making around $3,000/month or $47,000/year which is enough for you to quit your job.
Marina also has another 1.5m subscriber channel in Russia which is a lower rpm channel because it is Russia and fewer companies are advertising in Russia than there are in the west. Now that channel has 2.3 million views/month which is around $4,000/month which is around $50,000/year which is enough to quit your job.
Using Marina as an example is interesting because she’s got these three separate youtube channels, she’s got the same skills on youtube, but one channel is 16x more profitable than another channel purely because of the niche that she has picked.
Now in Ali’s case, it was about two and half years into the journey of making youtube videos, when he probably made 100+ videos when his channel was making enough money for him to quit his job i.e around $4,000/month.
How many views do you need to become rich?
That massively depends on your definition of rich. Ali felt rich when his channel was making over $100,000/year and around 3–5m views/month.
Conclusion
One of the mistakes Youtubers and creators in general make today is that in a way they don’t treat their thing like a business. They treat it like a creative outlet, which is fine, but businesses have been trying to figure this stuff out for decades if not 100s of years.
There’s a lot of stuff we can learn from the world of business about how to appropriately monetize our Youtube channels, Instagram, and Tiktok and how to turn them into sustainable businesses where we are potentially even hiring people, being able to delegate those stuff that we don’t want to do.
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