Gimme all the monees!

If I had a valid idea, I would fucking capitalise on it myself.

Good point =/

I'm usually quite inventive, maybe I'll think of something beyond a 'Let's Play' series, seems just about everyone is doing one of those, I'd like to try something a little more unique.

Do a documentary about your bees entitled "The Rise and Fall of the Agnostic Apiarist" or something.

That's... a lot of money.

A few grand a year? Ha, yeah good luck with that. If it were that easy, everyone and their dog would be doing it. Not for a lack of them trying, mind you. But it takes more than a webcam and a microphone to earn 'a few grand a year' with Youtube. Hell it takes more to just earn 10 bucks.

Well yes, I know it is, but when I meant, a lot of money, I meant a proper salary. Hell £3,000 a year to me would be a lot of money, about £2910 more than I currently make. XD

Not a bad idea Oddjob, but unfortunately, it'd be a very short documentary, and I don't have a camera. XD

E: Yeah I know Havoc, tbf this is probably just a temporary impulse, since I don't have much of an attention span, but if I get lucky, maybe I'll make a few hundred quid. Just gotta get that USP, and then shameless self-promotion.

Either random vlogs with decent editing and sound, or playtroughs of videogames, though I'm not sure what YT's stand is on that at the moment when it comes to ads and copyright.

But what I meant was that anyone making any sort of money on Youtube has actually gone trough a lot of effort and investing to get their first paycheck. Going down the vlogging route you better get yourself a 1080p camera and a good microphone (no headset). Properly editing it (not Windows Movie Maker) is another requirement, so you'll need (semi-)professional editing software and the skills to use it.

Those things alone will probably set you back 200 bucks or more, depending on the editing software. Then to actually make money you need an audience. Keep in mind here that the payout ratio for Youtube ads is something like 50 cents to 2 dollars per 1000 views, so just sending your video to friends and family isn't going to work. To build up an audience big enough to rake in the cash, you'll need dozens if not hundreds of high quality video's and hundreds of long term subscribers.

Needless to say you won't get that overnight, so there's a lot of work involved before you even start earning a buck. Unless you have the time and know-how to pull it off I'd start looking for a different project. Either that or start a channel now without ads and start building an audience so you can start making money in a few years.

This reminds me of the many times Neil Gaiman has posted on his blog emails from people boasting about how they have the Best Idea Ever for a novel and if he were to just do the easy job of writing it, they could share the profits. As he points out, ideas are the easy bit; executing them is the challenge.

Let's Plays don't get you far anymore I'm afraid. My brother and his friends tried that and realised it wasn't getting them anywhere.

I believe they did Minecraft timelapses at the time that Minecraft was at it's highest popularity point (like 1.8.1 or whatever). They got popular then and got with Machinima Realm for a while. Now they do LPs after they have most of what they wanted to build off of. Although they intend to keep on what they started. They just have decent recording software and know a bit about editing. Not professional by any means but enough just to make the video look good.

Also, jump-cuts are not good editing skills, and it looks retarded, I wouldn't fall in that trap.

Jump-cuts can work depending on how often you use them. Some vloggers use them way way way way too often. Moderate use you can get away with, but it's still best if you can tell your story in one go rather than having to edit out your own uhm's.

I actually came across an idea, and it's something I think I'd be half decent at, I don't need fancy recording equipment, but it relies on my microphone being good, I'm not sure if it's up to standard, but I'm about to check. =)

This is something I've been thinking about and I got a question for those of you in the know - I do stuff like this as a hobby, not to make money. However since I have a small following now, I could be making a little bit of money from it if I enabled monetising on my account.

However, YouTube says that video game footage isn't legible for monetising, yet people with lets plays and machinima have monetising anyway. Can someone explain this? Also, if I enabled monetising for a video like the Abe's Oddysee Intro in Minecraft, wouldn't that break some kind of copyright law?

I think you could get written consent from Mojang AB and J.A.W

Or wing it.

The last time I checked the actual video footage of the game is fair use, as long as there is some point to the video beyond a simple playtrough showing the gameplay. So it has to be something like a walktrough, guide, showing something you made, stuff like that. Adding a comment track often helps.

The thing that kills monetizing video game footage most often is the music and sounds that go with it. 99% of music in video games is copyrighted either to the game studio or to the composer and thus you are not allowed to use it without explicit consent. Getting permission for each video is impossible so you can't monetize them.

So to comply with all the legal requirements from Youtube, you'd have to turn off all forms of music in-game. You won't be able to use any sort of cutscene (well not decently anyway without sound). And you will have to properly credit everything that is shown in your video (the actual copyright holder of the content you are showing, which would be Mojang in the case of Minecraft and Oddworld Inhabitants in the case of AO, I think).

Your AO intro in Minecraft is most likely blocked for monetizing because you use two soundtracks that are copyrighted and detected by Youtube. Unless you get written permission to use these tracks from JAW/the composer that clip can't be monetized.

Well, there goes any ideas of getting some money by doing what I'm doing - Good thing I'm doing it as a hobby and never really planned to make money from it. Maybe later though if I actually end up producing something original or simply doing LPs which nobody will watch. :P Maybe it can also be applied to WIP videos of the stuff I'm building in Minecraft now if I don't add music.

Thanks Havoc for giving me the info though, that's interesting to know.

The reason most of them are enabled for monestising is because they're not directly with YouTube.

Take a look at Lazy Game Reviews. He said he was blocked off because he had game footage but if you look now he's a partner. This is because people can go with companies other than YouTube, in his case, it was the people who ran the Minecraft wiki and stuff like that. They're less strict about copyright in gaming. You most likely won't ever get partnership with YouTube however you're more likely to get it with some other company related to the content you put out.

*Hand* Question.

Couldn't you just make two videos, one with images and one with audio, monetise the images one, and just ask viewers to play them at the same time?