When YouTube Fails To Make Money, Authors Should Teach Them

Imagine the following:

1. You are owned by Google and have access to their resources

2. Your brand is well established and a leader in social media

3. You have one billion visitors to your site – every 30 days!

4. You are constantly covered by the major news media in a positive way

And the best you can do is not turn a profit?

Welcome to the world of YouTube.  The online video unit took in four billion bucks in 2014 – and spent all of it.  Maybe YouTube needs to watch the ideas of its 33 million daily users, especially on finance, marketing, and entrepreneurship.

If you can’t net some money with a huge platform and following, you must be doing something wrong.

Authors turn a profit with tiny social media followings in comparison to their media giant.  Maybe YouTube needs to:

·         Charge users

·         Raise ad rates

·         Get a cut of the sales when videos posted on their site lead to a purchase

·         Charge those who get the most clicks

Whatever, who needs to worry about them?  They’ll figure it out and consumers will eventually pay for it.  But it calls into question how authors make do with a lot less.

If writers can get a few thousand views to one of their videos, they are ecstatic.  Some of those views translate into book sales.  The key is to produce enough content that gets enough views to sell enough books to make the investment of time and resources worthwhile.

YouTube needs to create videos for companies and then share in the sales they generate. It should also help the video get more views.  Now that’s the way to go – and authors, as well as others, would pay for that.

YouTube has visions of being more like a TV network, where people take in their content for chunks of time.  But unless YouTube charges a viewer subscription fee, it will fail.  It will also need to invest in creating content – not just relying on others to supply it.

Authors use social media to build their brand, but they do so with a purpose – to sell books.  Has YouTube been building its brand without an end game to cash in on it?  Amazon, which loses money, also boggles the mind.  These are enormous brands but lousy moneymakers.  The novice author, with a few thousand books sold, is more profitable than either company.

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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2015