$3,500 From YouTube For Zim Internet Commedians, Bustop TV. Not Much But They Have A Good Business Going On

The monetization of the popular YouTube comedy channel Bustop Tv resulted in the guys making $3500.

With a subscriber base of almost 22 000 people, it makes sense that Bustop TV decided to monetize their YouTube channel. The monetization program has been going on for a while and enables uploaders of content to make revenue on their channel by allowing the presence of ads on their page. The $3500 was obtained from monetization of videos from 2016-2017.

Bustop did not have a problem qualifying for monetization since they have the required 1000 subscribers and +4000hrs of watched content. This monetization criterion is also a recent update and it’s ensuring that Bustop TV is facing less competition from pirates who would download content on their page and harvest seeds they did not sow. The old monetization setup only required 100 subscribers so it was easy for pirates to compete with the originators of the content.

Bustop TV founder Lucky Aaroni had this to say to The Sunday Mail:

We monetised our YouTube channel in 2016. Unfortunately we knew about monetising a bit late and it is only when a friend, Munya Blogo told us about the whole process that we then monetised the channel. During our days of ignorance regarding this money making idea, I believe we lost a lot of revenue as many people who were aware of how to make money from YouTube were busy uploading our content on the channels whilst we were celebrating resounding views on Facebook. After monetising the channel and the subscribers were increasing on a daily basis, we realised that there was need to jealously guard our content from people who were uploading on their channels. To curb losing revenue from the pirates, we made it a policy that each week we would reserve time to hunt the pirates down and report them, resulting in their channels being shut down if they had ignored the warnings from YouTube. The most viewed skit in 2017 had over 200 000 views but the money was an accumulation of all the videos we uploaded from 2016 when we monetised.

The problem content creators face in Zim

$3500 for all those views and all that time is not much though. This is the predicament that content creators face in Zimbabwe. The way YouTube revenue works mean local creators are always at a disadvantage as adverts that are on their page are usually irrelevant.

Local advertisers have not embraced digital marketing fully so there are rarely any ads from local guys on YouTube. The domino effect here is that lack of relevant ads leads to less interaction from viewers, which in turn leads to less revenue for content creators.

Bustop TV is, however, making money from other avenues as they are now a registered, fully integrated production company that ‘caters for all aspects of creative audiovisual communication.’ Aaroni also mentioned they are developing ‘a number of new concepts and among them is a collaboration with PO Box Reloaded and Dream State Pictures.’ The income from YouTube is probably just a welcome addition to their revenue sources.