Is Gaming On YouTube Profitable? (With examples)
The major reasons streamers start on YouTube are to increase traffic to their stream and make money
Before starting anything with the goal to make money, you need to know if your idea is profitable
Gaming on YouTube has a lot of potentials to be profitable if you are willing to put in the time and effort. Gaming is a huge section of YouTube with millions of viewers. Gaming on YouTube is profitable with time, consistency, a good niche, and good SEO.
We can take a look at many examples by looking at the gamers that are already on YouTube
You can learn a lot from gamers that have already been successful, and you can learn a lot from gamers that aren’t growing well on YouTube
There are lessons everywhere
But make sure you don’t copy anyone!
You can take inspiration and then create your own thing
But do not copy what other creators are doing
For one, it gives you a bad name when people figure it out
And two, there are copyright laws on your creations
If you take anything from other gamers and use it for your channel, you might get shut down by YouTube
So take inspiration, but be original
How to start making money on YouTube
To be able to start getting paid by YouTube, you need two things
- 1000 subscribers
- 4000 watch hours within one year
You need to reach both of those to qualify to make money on YouTube
If you don’t reach it, nothing will happen except you don’t get monetized
Once you reach that goal, then you start getting paid per 1k views
The average is $4 per 1000 views, and you make a little more if viewers click on the ads on your videos
How much you make depends on many factors so it is best to create content for a couple of months and find out how much you make per 1000 views
YouTube only sends out payments when you reach $100 from views, so don’t expect that first paycheck until you have at least $100 earned
Once you have done all of that, you are making money on YouTube!
Keep looking at your analytics to see what is working and keep posting content on a regular schedule
Find out what days and times work best for your growth and schedule your videos for those times
You can also grow faster by interacting with the comments of similar channels
Just be helpful and kind!
People will be curious and click on your profile
Examples of other Gaming YouTubers that are making a profit
There are many gaming channels that are monetized, but I am only going to go through some of our favorites
Rhykker is a great YouTuber for Diablo 3 and 4
You can see right away that his channel is monetized because you have an option to join his channel
There are also notifications that he has paid sponsors so he gets more money outside of YouTube
Sponsors pay creators to tell their audience about a product
Using the average that YouTubers make for views, we see that Rhykker makes about $2,372
We don’t know exactly, it is just an estimate
That doesn’t include sponsors
We see that he posted 7 videos between September 1st, 2022, and September 28th, 2022 that got a total of 592,000 views
Divide that by 1000, then times by 4
We get about $2,372
Extesyy is an Apex account that is popular but doesn’t show anyone’s face
But it does show his controller and you hear his voice
There is no join button, but he is verified so I assume that he is monetized
Going through the same process, I see that he created 7 videos between September 1st, 2022, and September 28th, 2022, and got a total of 1,580k views
Taking the average of $4 per 1000 views, we estimate that he made $6,320 this month
As you can see, creators have a lot of potential on YouTube to make money
What do they have in common that you need to get inspiration from?
One of the major things that I saw in common was they had a specific niche
Their channel wasn’t a “gaming” channel
It was an Apex channel or a Call of Duty channel
Even more specific was the type of content that they posted
Many of them post tips and tricks for other people to improve their gameplay
Or walkthroughs to help people complete a challenge or puzzle in the game
My husband uses YouTubers all the time when he is stuck in Sea of Thieves
There are some difficult puzzles in that game and sometimes a little help is needed
We see that most successful creators either show their face or their hands in their videos
And we can hear their voice most of the time
This brings a human element to your gaming channel
If you look at their thumbnails, they are similar enough that they look like they go together but different enough that you can tell if you have seen the video or not
If you make thumbnails too similar, even raving fans will miss some because they think they have already seen it
Extesyy makes himself stand out because he is a controller player
Standing out from the crowd is important
You need to figure out what you have to offer that is different than others in the beginning
Once you have a highly successful channel, you can start competing for the large search volume parts of YouTube
But it takes time to get there
In the beginning, you will need to target search phrases that have little or no competition
This could mean that there is no one answering that question or it could mean that there are no good answers to the question
The more you post and show YouTube that they can trust you with their viewers, the more you will be able to compete with the bigger players