Why my teeny YouTube channel is already worth $10,000 to me

Dec 02, 2023

You wouldn’t think my tiny YouTube channel (1,500 subscribers) would be worth much just 2 weeks after monetization.

But I’m going to explain why I already consider it to be worth $10,000 and how you should value your own digital assets.

Now I love investing in dividend stocks that don’t actually require me to do anything but cash cheques.

I buy the stock, and every once in a while, my trading app informs me that I’ve been paid a bit of cash.

Easy!

In a lot of ways, my YouTube channel is similar to a passive income investment like that.

Only instead of it costing me large sums of my own money to generate more cash, all it cost me was my time.

Let me walk you through what I made in my first two weeks monetized on YouTube, and then I’ll explain why I already consider my tiny channel to be worth $10,000.

A woman smiling while holding a coffee and a smartphone. — When you start to value your digital assets like your other passive income investments, you realize you’re richer than you think. (Licensed by the author under the Unsplash+ License)

How much I make each day on YouTube (first two weeks)

Prior to getting monetized, I hadn’t published a video in about a month and a half, and that really slowed my momentum down.

But even with that little content, you can see that in my first two weeks, my channel threw off about $1.09 per day in passive income.

Graph showing my earnings from my first two weeks monetized on YouTube — Earnings my first two weeks monetized on YouTube. (Author’s image)

So you may be wondering at this point, “James, how on earth can you claim this channel is already worth $10,000?!”

The true value of digital assets

Let me explain how I look at the true value of a digital asset like a YouTube channel.

Instead of a portfolio of stocks, I have a portfolio of videos.

Here’s a look at some of them.

What some of my YouTube videos have paid me since monetization in mid-September.

Like stocks, almost all of my videos pay me a small daily dividend.

And like stocks, some investments have higher returns and some are relative duds.

But at the end of the day, once I’ve invested my time in a video, it’s like a little employee who marches off to work every morning and brings home a bit of pay at the end of the day.

And while my video dividends seem small, they start to look very impressive when you consider how much money you’d have to invest in passive income stocks just to generate the same return.

Everyday pay, no capital invested

Now most popular dividend income stocks — stuff like banks, energy companies, REITs — pay you about 4% per year to own them.

So that means if you invested $10,000 at a 4% yield, your stocks would pay you $400 a year in passive income.

And what does that work out to per day?

That’s right: $1.09 per day, exactly what my tiny YouTube video paid me over my first two weeks.

Now consider my writing on this platform. Here, I’m averaging close to $50 per day over the course of the year.

In order to generate that kind of income from standard dividend investments, I would need a portfolio valued at almost HALF A MILLION DOLLARS.

So I hope you’re starting to see the real value of creating digital assets — videos, articles, courses, and anything else that can be monetized online.

The daily payoff might seem small at the start, but I think your work is more valuable than you think.

I hope that inspires you to keep pushing and building a content business you can be proud of!

Publish Every Day project update: Day 29

I’m trying to make enough money to retire from commuter life within a year by publishing every single day on different platforms and investing my earnings into passive income vehicles.

How much I need to retire: $250 CAD per day

What I earned on Day 29: $36.64 (writing) + $0.98 (YouTube) + $2.71 (affiliate income) = $40.33 total