After reading yet another “wow look at me I’m a digital nomad living on a beach comfortably” article I decided to have a bit of a go at seeing just how much money could be made “passively” – after all the idea is to be sitting on the beach sipping pina coladas not slaving away at a keyboard.
the idea is to be sitting on the beach
Naturally my own creative lassitude means that setting this up couldn’t take a large single investment of time nor could the activities required to produce this income be “unpleasant”. Becoming a crime-scene cleaner one day a week wasn’t the plan.
So I thought about my half-hearted efforts with YouTube over the years. Here was a medium that had little to no start-up cost. The time investment was completely manageable and most importantly it would let me try something new and get a tangible personal benefit – i.e. the few hours of footage accumulated over the years of holidays cars and cats could now get collated into viewable moments for our own consumption.
Yes YouTube was going to be the wealth creation vehicle
So I started by moving a few of my early video efforts into a clean and shiny new channel. As my skills with video are limited they struggled for views, but I was at least getting the channel set-up and most importantly pushing myself to actually process our stock of footage.
It’s now taken a couple of months, but between a successful automotive themed video and some new content collected during our recent Vanuatu trip there’s a solid 30-40 views a day happening.
Through the editing and creation of the 33 videos currently online I’ve pushed myself to learn new skills, getting a handle on iMovie and how to cut together scenes that suit the content. Let’s face it we want to see cats bounce & pounce, the idle time in between is just time that people will take to click away!
The travel videos on the other hand are longer and often not trimmed so that the whole presentation is given, but they’re chasing a specific audience, viewers like Kitty and I who are trying to research holidays or catch something we missed out on.
But moving back to the subject, 2.4 cents per day. Yes on a rolling 30 day basis Youtube Analytics indicates a typical $0.70-$0.90 yield. I’m a long way off being self sufficient on this, but I it would pay for one green coconut a day on Espiritu Santo!