Who isn’t but wants to learn more about how it works? This is a snapshot of my affiliate income from Amazon in the last 30 days. It fluctuates, but $18.57 for not doing much ain’t bad! This can be a powerful income strategy when coupled with the right YouTube strategy. Who is interested in learning more about this? What would you want to know first?

If you have questions about what happens after you publish your video, you might find this helpful. I’m warning you now, this is a long post, but I promise if you are new to YouTube, it’s worth the read! And FYI I used AI to break it into cohesive sections, but it’s still 100% my own words. First, let’s go back to the uploading portion. As tempting as it might be to set your video to public right off the bat, this is not what I recommend. The reason for this is that it takes time for YouTube to process your video in standard definition, high definition, and 4K, as well as run their copyright checks. Standard definition usually processes first, and then some viewers might watch your video before the high definition or 4K processing is completed, meaning that they’ll think your video quality is not so great. This period of time where your video is private is also when YouTube looks at all the components of your video—including the title, thumbnail, tags, description, and transcript—to see what the content in the video actually is. And I’m sure there are a host of other things they look at that we don’t even know about. But you want YouTube to be able to gather all of this data before the video actually goes live. Everyone has different feelings on this and it’s certainly not an exact science because we’re not really sure what YouTube is doing behind the scenes, but I typically like to leave my video private for at least 15 or 20 minutes, if not a few hours. Some people even like to schedule it to go live the next day. Once Your Video is Live… Nothing Happens At least that’s what it might seem like at first! If you uploaded a long-form video, it might be a couple hours or even longer before you start to see any impressions for this video. If it’s a YouTube short, this waiting period might not be as long, but I have seen it take as long as six hours. So what is an impression? Well, an impression is every time that YouTube puts your video in front of the eyes of a potential viewer. Anytime they see your thumbnail—whether that be on the browse page, in search, in a list of recommended videos, or anywhere else—as soon as your thumbnail comes on the screen, YouTube counts that as an impression. You’ll start to see a few impressions trickle in at first, and you might think “what the heck is going on,” and then out of nowhere you might see a large surge in impressions relative to what came before it. This is YouTube testing your video with an initial audience. If you’re a small channel, then this first surge of impressions might only be between 100 and 500. But as you post more videos and gain some subscribers and viewers who have seen your videos before, then YouTube knows who to put your video in front of the next time, and so this initial surge might go into the thousands, tens of thousands, or even higher as you become a more established channel.

...the second one in two weeks. This is not about the monetization requirements, although if you missed last week's update I'll tag it in the comments. This is about how they will count views for long form videos in the analytics. Your views will go up... but it doesn't mean what you think it means. I break it all down here: https://youtu.be/taDdrSSf5V8