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Why Are YouTube Earnings so Unreliable (and How Are They Fixing It?)

YouTube’s monetisation is notoriously unreliable, but why? And are they doing anything about it?

John Bullock
4 min readJun 13, 2021
Picture: lukasbieri — Pixabay

Since its inception in 2005, YouTube has made a lot of people very wealthy — even millionaires. One of the remarkable things about the growing number of people who make thousands of dollars a month on YouTube is that many of them would likely not have had that success without YouTube. Sure, you can look at people like Dodie Clarke and think, “she’s very talented, she would have found a way to do this without YouTube”, but could you really say the same for someone like PewDiePie?

But despite all the wealth that YouTube has been able to generate for its users, it is often maligned as an unreliable source of income. Ask some of the most financially successful YouTubers for advice on making a living, and they will likely tell you to find ways other than YouTube’s built-in methods to monetise your content. So why is that? First, we need to understand how YouTube’s core monetisation works. On the surface, at least.

How YouTube Monetises Videos

YouTube earns money by displaying advertisements before, after, during, and beside videos. The amount of money they make depends on things…

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John Bullock
John Bullock

Written by John Bullock

Freelance content writer with an eclectic employment history and an interest in game development. Find links to things at https://linktr.ee/johnbullock

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