Making money from publishing your music video on YouTube

In two months, Yemi Alade’s ‘Na gode’ video raked in almost two million views on YouTube.

As an artist, you distribute your music video to television stations and upload to online video sharing sites like YouTube, Daily Motion or Vimeo. You’ve spent big bucks creating this new video to promote yourself, market your music and engage with your fans but did you know you could also use this video to make money?

READ: Seven tips for getting the best out of your YouTube channel

On YouTube you can earn $5 - $8 per 1,000 views on a video monetized by commercials before music videos (rollout ads) and 80 cents per 1,000 views monetized by banner ads on an average.

SEE: Photos from video shoot for swahili version – ‘Na Gode’

Using Yemi Alade’s ‘Na gode’ video as a case study, the singer has a rollout ad before her video. The video has exactly 1,876,461 views as such the ‘Johnny’ crooner has a chance of earning between $9,382 to $15,011. If her video was produced for an estimated three million Naira, she stands a chance of making back at least a third or more of the money spent on making her video (if there is no revenue share with anyone else).

Revenue generation is available on original content only. To make profit, what you simply do is enable revenue generation on your YouTube account.

Just because you have ads activated on your account does not automatically mean you generate revenue. There are different earning setups on YouTube. With ‘True View’ for instance, the owner of the video gets paid when there is some form of interaction with the advert. If the ad plays for over 30 seconds you get paid or if a viewer clicks on an advert, you get paid. This is known as Cost Per Click.

In many cases, musicians host their videos on YouTube via video hosting service Vevo. This service is “owned and operated by a joint venture of Universal Music Group (UMG), Google, Sony Music Entertainment (SME) and Abu Dhabi Media”, according to Wikipedia. The catch to using Vevo is that advertising revenue is shared with the service and Google.

WATCH: Swahili version of 'Na Gode'

Alade’s video is hosted via Vevo on YouTube so there is some form of revenue sharing in place hence she might not be making as much as we estimated earlier. Despite this the ‘Tangerine’ singer will still be making a bit of profit as her ‘Johnny’ video uploaded almost a year ago currently sits at over 36 million views.