Top 5 MISTAKES Car YouTubers Make
When I say top 5 mistakes that car YouTubers make, I mean how they miss opportunities to make money from their YouTube channel. And when I say car YouTuber I mean channels with 100K+ subs.
1 – Advertising
Or lack thereof. I’d say the majority of car YouTubers rely on Google advertising. This is a mistake. How to make money from magazines (print/online/written/video) is a well trodden path. There is an ad department and their mission in life is to get you advertisers for your publication.
YouTube pays around thirty cents for every 100 views. Which is great considering you don’t have to go out there and find advertisers but it’s crap when you compare it to advertising in print media (which is untrackable!). A magazine with a circulation of 20,000 might charge 600 dollars for a full page ad. That works out at thirty three views for every dollar of revenue (equivalent to three dollar per 100 views, 10 times as much as YouTube!). But the traffic from advertising online (on YouTube) is trackable so arguably its worth more than adverting in print media.
In Short – YouTubers/large YouTube channels need an advertising department
2 – Free access
Nothing that’s worth anything is free. Yet car YouTubers are giving their content away for free. For the best content, there should be a charge to view it.
And Drive channel showed how not to do this.
They went from a free model, to charging ten dollars a month. This didn’t get them to where they wanted to be so they said paid content is a dead end.
In my opinion the model wasn’t to blame, the price was. Ten dollars a month was simply too much. Consider how much content you can get from cable or Sky for sixty dollars a month. It is orders of magnitude more.
Instead they could have charged a dollar a month, I for one would have signed up. What car nut wouldn’t?
That’s one subscription model. If that seems a bit risky, another model is to advanced release videos to subscribers, say two weeks in advance, after two weeks the content is available for free to all. (This one seems like a no-brainer for any channel)
Yet another model is to release a low res version for free and have the full HD version available for a dollar, for example. (There may be some push back with this one but you get the idea)
And these are just three I can think of off the top of my head. The point is there are ways in which people will pay for content that simply aren’t being explored.
YouTubers need to start trying different methods of getting people to pay for their content. One dollar per view, is 300x more than what YouTube pays, it is worth the effort.
3 – Building Funnels
How many car YouTubers have a website that you visit. Promoting YouTube channels is part StrikeEngine’s business and we can think of not a single channel that has a website we visit.
A website is yet another way people can be funneled to videos. A website gives people the chance to spend more time interacting with your channel. And it’s more real estate to sell to your advertisers/investors. And it’s also good for the YouTube ranking algorithm. A win-win-win. But again, few, if any car YouTubers appear to be doing it.
4 – Crap Advertising
Connected to point 3. Those YouTube channels that do have a website do a horrible job of promoting it. The best example I can think of is The Intercooler. Fantastic YouTube channel with quality videos but I expect the channel loses money rather than making it. (Why do ex-print media types treat TV as a marketing expense?!)
Some key things The Intercooler doesn’t do:
Don’t show enough screenshots of their magazine
Constantly offering discounts and freebies
Push people to the website as much as they push people to subscribe
And the big one, maximise revenue from the video using the example methods mentioned above.
JayEmm and Harry’s Garage give a flavour how to get extra revenue with their advertiser overlays at the start of the videos but there is so much more potential.
5 – Being the Face
If the business/YouTube channel, can’t operate without you, you don’t have a business, you are an employee. (Quote from the book The E-Myth Revisited).
At the start of a YouTube’s channel life, one person is usually “The Face” of the channel. There is simply not enough money to employ people. But as the channel grows, and if the plan is to one day sell the channel or perhaps even take it public, the channel needs to be able to operate without the channel’s “Face/Founder”.
Huge YouTube channels still have the founder being the key person in every video. If the “Face” leaves, the channel’s future revenue growth is effectively zero.
When the revenue-per-video gets to something more reasonable, new “faces” can be brought in (freelance or permanent) to make more videos per week (more revenue), different styles of video (appeal to different segments of existing market, more revenue) and different types of content (wider audience, more revenue).
We create a virtuous circle of revenue creating more content, which creates more revenue.
Car YouTubers – In A Nutshell
There are two key differences between a TV network and a YouTube channel. A TV network’s reach is much smaller and the results of it’s advertising is untrackable. The last point on it’s own should make YouTube channels advertising more expensive than TV. Couple this with the fact the reach of YouTube is bigger than ESPN and you have a multiplier effect.
The goal should of every large channel should be that if YouTube stopped paying them tomorrow, it would only make a minor ding to their income
Hopefully the ideas in this article can help make that a reality for at least one channel!
