YouTube Question Significant Drop in the Monthly Revenue

[cricrazy]

Hello All,

I need some help. I am one of the small youtuber with decent revenue stream. However, Around November 2022, I saw a marked decrease in the monthly revenue. I initially thought, it would be just one-off thing, but it has stayed there 3 months for now. My Channel's Number of Views and Watch times have stayed the same or even increased a bit. What could be the cause of this significant drop in revenue?

I have been thinking a lot of what could have triggered it (if I had a role in that, at all). And only thing, I can think of is that around November 2022 time frame, Youtube asked me to specify my demographics. I reside in US, but my ethnicity is South Asian. Historically, YouTubers from South Asia have made significantly lower revenue compared to other places. I specified my ethnicity in that survey.

Can this be the reason? (I hope not!)

Below are some of my statistics over a year. And You can see a clear drop in Revenue in Dec 2022, while other analytic metrics have remained the same. (BTW, I am TubeBuddy's Pro subscriber).

 

[MattCommand1]

Revenue-wise, I had a steep decline in December. Jan & Feb were similar but a little lower than Dec.

I assumed that many creators experienced this given reports by YT that ad revenues were down in 2022.

 

[cricrazy]

Thanks Matt.

 

[Damon]

Yeah, everyone has experienced a downturn. Given all the craziness over the past three years, we're just beginning to see the effects of all that.

 

[The Jungle Explorer]

There are many factors that affect revenue on YouTube. From a historical perspective, if you go back to before Covid, earnings on YouTube were fairly predictable in the US market. Starting in April, you would see revenue start to go up and peak somewhere in August and September and remain steady until after Christmas. Earnings drop-off after Christmas was so steep, it was universally known amongst YouTubers as the "January Cliff". The reason for this was very simple and logical. The biggest shopping season of the year in the US is between October and Christmas. You have the standard Christmas shopping season, and Black Friday, Cyber Tuesday, in that time. Advertisers are dumping all of the ad revenue budgets into ads during that time of the year so ad space on videos becomes a premium. It is the Super Bowl of American shopping and ads pay more to the creator. Before Covid, YouTube pretty much owned the online User-created video market all to itself.

Then came Covid. Covid changed the only video creator market dramatically. You essentially had a perfect storm where three events occurred simultaneously. Covid caused a complete shutdown of the professional entertainment industry. All these actors and producers were stuck at home with nothing to do. People with Hollywood-level expertise, training, and millions of dollars of equipment, suddenly only had one outlet for their talent. Online streaming video. Suddenly actors were broadcasting shows from their homes. But another thing happened. Smartphones made massive leaps in camera technology, making it so that anyone with a good smartphone could produce seriously good video. But great video is large in size and hard to upload over slow connections. This is where the third factor changed that. 5G also came into existence at the same time, and Starlink broadband satellite as well.

In 2020, as a result of all of this, the number of online video creators went up by 300 hundred percent and has continued to rise ever since. The problem was, YouTube is hard to break into and most people do not want to mess with the complexity of SEO. I mean, think about it. You have 100 characters for a title, 5000 characters for a description, 500 characters for tags, and five pages of other information to fill out just to upload a dang video. Youtube is massively hard to upload to and most people don't want to deal with it. Enter TikTok. It is so dang easy to upload to TikTok, it is ridiculous. TikTok gives you a professional-level smartphone app, that allows you to upload right from your phone, quickly and easily. At the same time, Facebook jumped on the bang wagon with Reels on book Facebook and Instagram.

So today is a very different day in the online video creator universe. Add to this, the fact that US is now inflation double-digit inflation, the soaring cost of food and basic necessities, and supply interruptions to industry causing production delays, and what you get is advertisers being stingy with their limited Ad budgets. And then add the additional factor that YouTube has become obsessed with pushing Shorts on YouTube that are bad for advertisers because the people that tend to binge-watch shorts are generally irresponsible GenZers with very little money to spend.

What do all do these factors equal? Well, there is one thing for sure. If you are looking to make money from ad revenue on YT, you will be sorely disappointed.

 

[MattCommand1]

There are many factors that affect revenue on YouTube. From a historical perspective, if you go back to before Covid, earnings on YouTube were fairly predictable in the US market. Starting in April, you would see revenue start to go up and peak somewhere in August and September and remain steady until after Christmas. Earnings drop-off after Christmas was so steep, it was universally known amongst YouTubers as the "January Cliff". The reason for this was very simple and logical. The biggest shopping season of the year in the US is between October and Christmas. You have the standard Christmas shopping season, and Black Friday, Cyber Tuesday, in that time. Advertisers are dumping all of the ad revenue budgets into ads during that time of the year so ad space on videos becomes a premium. It is the Super Bowl of American shopping and ads pay more to the creator. Before Covid, YouTube pretty much owned the online User-created video market all to itself.

Then came Covid. Covid changed the only video creator market dramatically. You essentially had a perfect storm where three events occurred simultaneously. Covid caused a complete shutdown of the professional entertainment industry. All these actors and producers were stuck at home with nothing to do. People with Hollywood-level expertise, training, and millions of dollars of equipment, suddenly only had one outlet for their talent. Online streaming video. Suddenly actors were broadcasting shows from their homes. But another thing happened. Smartphones made massive leaps in camera technology, making it so that anyone with a good smartphone could produce seriously good video. But great video is large in size and hard to upload over slow connections. This is where the third factor changed that. 5G also came into existence at the same time, and Starlink broadband satellite as well.

In 2020, as a result of all of this, the number of online video creators went up by 300 hundred percent and has continued to rise ever since. The problem was, YouTube is hard to break into and most people do not want to mess with the complexity of SEO. I mean, think about it. You have 100 characters for a title, 5000 characters for a description, 500 characters for tags, and five pages of other information to fill out just to upload a dang video. Youtube is massively hard to upload to and most people don't want to deal with it. Enter TikTok. It is so dang easy to upload to TikTok, it is ridiculous. TikTok gives you a professional-level smartphone app, that allows you to upload right from your phone, quickly and easily. At the same time, Facebook jumped on the bang wagon with Reels on book Facebook and Instagram.

So today is a very different day in the online video creator universe. Add to this, the fact that US is now inflation double-digit inflation, the soaring cost of food and basic necessities, and supply interruptions to industry causing production delays, and what you get is advertisers being stingy with their limited Ad budgets. And then add the additional factor that YouTube has become obsessed with pushing Shorts on YouTube that are bad for advertisers because the people that tend to binge-watch shorts are generally irresponsible GenZers with very little money to spend.

What do all do these factors equal? Well, there is one thing for sure. If you are looking to make money from ad revenue on YT, you will be sorely disappointed.

My original plan was to roll out my new YT channel early 2020. I was prepping, researching, experimenting, etc. in late 2019. When Covid shutdowns hit, I was definitely thrown off balance. I ended up spending my time doing other things when I could have got some of the 2020 wave of traffic. I missed out a whole year when I finally rolled out in early 2021 and trying to make up for lost time. Hindsight is 20/20 pardon the pun.

 

[The Jungle Explorer]

My original plan was to roll out my new YT channel early 2020. I was prepping, researching, experimenting, etc. in late 2019. When Covid shutdowns hit, I was definitely thrown off balance. I ended up spending my time doing other things when I could have got some of the 2020 wave of traffic. I missed out a whole year when I finally rolled out in early 2021 and trying to make up for lost time. Hindsight is 20/20 pardon the pun.

You didn't miss much. There was a hug bump in views during the shutdown when people had nothing else to do, but it caused an opposite reaction, once people could start getting out again. They were experiencing digital media fatigue and wanted to be out actually doing things, instead of watching people do things online. I still think there is some of this psychological shift going on today.

 

[Xavier De Buck]

I need some help. I am one of the small youtuber with decent revenue stream. However, Around November 2022, I saw a marked decrease in the monthly revenue. I initially thought, it would be just one-off thing, but it has stayed there 3 months for now. My Channel's Number of Views and Watch times have stayed the same or even increased a bit. What could be the cause of this significant drop in revenue?

I have been thinking a lot of what could have triggered it (if I had a role in that, at all). And only thing, I can think of is that around November 2022 time frame, Youtube asked me to specify my demographics. I reside in US, but my ethnicity is South Asian. Historically, YouTubers from South Asia have made significantly lower revenue compared to other places. I specified my ethnicity in that survey.

Thanks for sharing those stats - as mentioned by other members above, there's been a general 'squeeze' happening for a while. I'd seriously doubt specifying demographics would have impacted your numbers like that?

I'm located in South Africa, so I feel your pain wrt lower CPM & ad revenue vs being based in USA.

 

[MattCommand1]

I'm located in South Africa, so I feel your pain wrt lower CPM & ad revenue vs being based in USA.

I've heard that CPM's are pretty bad outside the U.S. and a couple of European countries so many of us in the U.S. are quite fortunate. A lot of U.S. creators would do well to remember how good we have it here in the U.S. in comparison the rest of the world regarding economic opportunity. You have to do the hard work, take the hits, and roll with the punches. If it was easy, everyone would do it. But creators are among a very tiny segment of the world.

And this is why so many experienced creators say to develop another source of income besides Adsense. Mere mortal creators like myself have to work for more than Adsense revenue if we are going to keep playing on YT.

 

[Xavier De Buck]

I've heard that CPM's are pretty bad outside the U.S. and a couple of European countries so many of us in the U.S. are quite fortunate. A lot of U.S. creators would do well to remember how good we have it here in the U.S. in comparison the rest of the world regarding economic opportunity. You have to do the hard work, take the hits, and roll with the punches. If it was easy, everyone would do it. But creators are among a very tiny segment of the world.

And this is why so many experienced creators say to develop another source of income besides Adsense. Mere mortal creators like myself have to work for more than Adsense revenue if we are going to keep playing on YT.

True that - I'm looking at $5.21 CPM here in SA.

100% something ALL creators ought to do - niche-dependent, it can be merch, brand or collabs, courses etc. I'm gaining foothold in that department over on IG as Suckerberg isn't doing much $$ wise for his creators on that side.

 

[Aialaden]

Hello All,

I need some help. I am one of the small youtuber with decent revenue stream. However, Around November 2022, I saw a marked decrease in the monthly revenue. I initially thought, it would be just one-off thing, but it has stayed there 3 months for now. My Channel's Number of Views and Watch times have stayed the same or even increased a bit. What could be the cause of this significant drop in revenue?

I have been thinking a lot of what could have triggered it (if I had a role in that, at all). And only thing, I can think of is that around November 2022 time frame, Youtube asked me to specify my demographics. I reside in US, but my ethnicity is South Asian. Historically, YouTubers from South Asia have made significantly lower revenue compared to other places. I specified my ethnicity in that survey.

Can this be the reason? (I hope not!)

Below are some of my statistics over a year. And You can see a clear drop in Revenue in Dec 2022, while other analytic metrics have remained the same. (BTW, I am TubeBuddy's Pro subscriber).

View attachment 13352

It could be alot of things, but none likely in your control. I would suggest maybe making another stream of income if you haven't already. It sucks having only revenue from ads. They are very unpredictable.