I created it initially just to share videos with friends and family. After a while, I realized I could earn money by monetizing my videos. But I never really took it seriously. After about 5 years, I reached the $10 threshold where Google will send you a payment. But I never turned it on, just because I'm not American and I didn't want to have to deal with earning a few bucks in the US.
But then, in 2016, I started to take it a little more seriously. And in 2017, I bought a GoPro Hero4 Session camera and started going crazy with making videos.
Within 3 months, my balance went from $18 to $52. And this was without any kind of advertising. I would just post my videos on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus.
Even still, with all these example of videos that I've posted, I have trouble understanding why some are much more popular than others.
Some of the videos I've posted I think are REALLY cool. For example, I attached my GoPro to a selfie-stick and then stuck it under water in the St-Lawrence, near Kingston. And created a really beautiful video (in my opinion). Yet, in a 2 month period, it's only had 26 views. You can see it here and judge for yourself:
On the other end, I used my GoPro to film my drive home from work, during a snow storm. Nothing particularly interesting happens during the drive. No accidents or anything. Yet, the video was viewed over 1000 times within a few days! Check it out below:
So far, I haven't been able to figure out a relationship between how interesting the video is and how many times it's viewed.
I've played with the tags and the titles. I've tried changing the thumbnail picture of one video to be a woman in a bikini. I figured "sex sells". Yet during the time that the thumbnail was changed, not a single person viewed the video.
Another weird example: I placed my GoPro inside a birdfeeder outside my house. I managed to capture a couple of cardinals feeding. In one video, it's shown in real time. In the other video, the arrival and departure of the birds is done in slow motion so you can see them flapping their wings. In my opinion, it's super cool to see them flying in slo-mo. Yet, the real time video was viewed 25 times while the slo-mo video was only viewed 10 times.
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