A small programming blogger and YouTuber sharing his income after 6 months

My background

I am a Danish software developer with an education that is translated to “data technician specialized in programming” and luckily got out of the 5 year education with the highest grade of them all. I have two kids and live with them and my girlfriend in a smaller city north of Copenhagen called Humlebæk.

Why did I start ZetBit?

Shortly, money, however it turned out to be more a passion because I of course love programming and sharing new stuff and useful code that a lot of people can use. I thought it would be easy to make a lot of money now that I know what I was going to create and I knew what I was doing. But let’s be honest, there is no quick way of making money just like that. My goal was to be able to live of the income by running my own blog and YouTube channel, and that is still the goal. My YouTube channel is actually 5 years old and when I started it I also had these goals, but I only created like 5-6 videos and then just acknowledged that I would never be something for me. However over 4 years later I began to release new videos just as a hobby and now after 6 months I slowly begin to see some growth.

How much do I earn after my first 6 months?

I have two places right now I could earn money from. Google Adsense and YouTube’s Partners program. YouTube’s Partner program is not a topic yet, now that I “only” have around 370 subscribers and 1200 hours watch time within the last 12 months. With that I have to say that I am fully grateful for all the support on YouTube I get at this point and just happy to see that people can use the information I provide. But now that the requirements for YouTube’s Partner program is 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours watch time I still have a long way to go. You should notice though, that the watch hours and subscribers count is increasing month by month faster and faster, so I hope that within 3-6 months I can get monetized and be a step closer to my goal of being able to live from the YouTube and blog income.

Here are the current watch hours stats I have for the last year:

As you can see the stats are going slowly and steady up. I really see the graph as, that I am not making any viral videos, and I really don’t think programming videos could go viral so that is also fine by me, but what I do is to try to look at it as I am lifting the bottom of the daily views. So my focus is to lift the bottom and not so much to explode the top because I know programming videos are hard to get views on. The videos I provide are informational and not entertainment. And it is a lot easier to watch 1 hours of Mr. Beast than how to creating an API in ASP.NET Core.

So the conclusion for YouTube is that I hopefully earn money in 3-6 months and then I will try to share that, when that happen.

When it comes to Google Adsense I am beginning to see some small amounts of money every day. Not a lot, however around $0,02-$0,03 daily. That is just the smallest amount every day. I had a really good day where I could enjoy myself because I earn $1,70 in one day on my blog alone. That was amazing because someone clicked on an ad. I have also tried $1 on one day, however it is not often it happens. The last month I tried it 2-3 times. But how many visitors do I have right now then? In these days it is going up and up, but it is around 25-30 a day, but it looks like it could soon be a lot more. Hopefully!

Right now I am apparently targeting USA and India mostly as my country views tells me.

I do not count the Danish views at all in my head, because I just think that they are me.

What is the plan now?

It is pretty much to just keep going. I have around 30 articles in my blog right now an trying to make 4-5 articles every week and the same amount of YouTube videos. It might be ambitious, but I think it will pay of in the end. The nice thing about having a blog and a YouTube channel is that they can give traffic to each other. My blog is developed in ASP.NET Core by myself and I created a feature where I can tell that there is a related YouTube video to an article. And on my YouTube videos I can link to my blog if there is a related article. Overall I am confident that I can make it. If it will be in 6 months or 6 years only time will tell. Please go and support me by subscribing to my YouTube channel if you are interested in primarily C# programming (nobody knows what the future brings, I could make videos about other things in the future also). You can also subscribe to my newsletter I will try to release once pr. month.