What happens when a YouTube video goes viral 🤑 (and how much money it makes)

What happens when a YouTube video goes viral

Hey there,

In my last email, I chatted about how one of the Google Web Stories on my travel blog went semi-viral.

I detailed how additional traffic it brought to the site as well as how much money it earned.

Today, I’m sharing a similar story as it relates to a YouTube video going viral and how much money it made in ad revenue in just one month. Except this one is BIGGER.

On October 18, 2022 I uploaded a video called the, Most Beautiful Towns in Colorado, onto the Hashtag Colorado Life YouTube channel.

As of today, the video has more than 205,000 views and nearly 350 comments. 👀

Sure, it’s not the most popular YT video of all time and other video creators have videos that go viral in the millions.

But this was our first true experience with virality on our YouTube channel since starting it in March 2021.

What to expect when a YouTube video goes viral

Within the few hours of uploading the video we noticed that it was becoming our most popular video in terms of typical performance after publishing.

Comments started pouring in and on November 8th we noticed more and more views to our videos. Like, double and then triple the amount of views we were used to seeing.

By November 16th the views and comments had peaked, resulting in some of the highest views and ad revenue days since starting our channel.

At the end of November the Most Beautiful Towns in Colorado video received:

• 205,454 views

• 796 new subscribers

• $1,864.22 ad revenue

This is just the statistics from this one video over a one month period! For reference our past videos have received roughly 40,000 views and about $400-$500 per month in revenue.

Our entire channel received even more revenue, views, and subscribers from other videos. But this one video was definitely the catalyst for helping our channel grow exponentially in just one month’s time.

Most of the traffic came from YouTube’s “Browse feature” and had 4.3 million impressions! This means that 4.3 million viewers on YT saw this video, even if they didn’t click to watch.

It’s exciting to see a video or piece of content that you’ve worked 25+ hours on go viral. It makes all your hard work worth it since people are watching it, commenting, and of course, you earn some extra money too.

What to do when a YouTube video goes viral

One of the main things you want when something is going viral is to keep that momentum going as long as possible.

In a future post I might share some tips on how I made this video go viral and some things I learned.

But for now I’m just focusing on what happens and what you can expect during a viral time like this.

Every morning during this three-week period, I logged into YouTube and answered 10-20 comments a day. And then more would pour in overnight so I’d have to answer some in the evenings as well.

The main thing is keep your content’s momentum going and watch it closely so you can reply to comments as quickly as possible.

One thing I did to keep it going was to answer questions with questions. I was also curious what other towns or recommendations people would add to the video, etc.

This kept people talking, and more people spending time on our videos. That’s the secret to success on any online platform, including a blog.

MORE. TIME. ON. YOUR. CHANNEL. More time on your social media profile. More time on your blog. 🤩

Highest income days on YouTube

Up until this past month, the YT channel earned about $12-20 per day. But during November 13-16 the channel had multiple $200+ days!

This caused our estimated revenue for the month of November to have an increase of about 500% from the previous month. 🤑

That just seems mind-boggling to me. We published a video on line and earned $1,800+ from it in one month. WUT!

Anyway, I’m interested to see how this affects our videos/channel going forward. I didn’t expect YouTube to be such a big part of the revenue earned in November, but it’s a nice surprise.

I’ll be sharing the entire November income & traffic report next week, so stay tuned.

Don’t miss future updates and income reports by becoming a paid subscriber. Big thanks to everyone who has already upgraded and subscribed this month! <3

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

- Carrie

And don’t forget, you can comment on this post or reply to this email. I read/reply to all of the comments and messages I receive. :)