We are thrilled about our success in content, specially in video content. 2019 was a breakthrough year for the Slidebean Youtube channel, and since we don't get to be on Youtube's Rewind (yet), we figured we'd do one of our own. 

If you are new here, my name is Caya. I’m the CEO of Slidebean. We have an AI-powered presentation platform with over 10,000 (paid) customers worldwide. 

So, this Rewind but this won't be just random intercut videos. We want to add some value.

Slidebean 2019 Metrics

How much money do we make from YouTube?

So, we are big believers in transparency. We've opened our 2015 financials for your review, told you how much these videos cost to make, and, overall, are happy to discuss where we are as a company- without getting into the specifics that our competitors could leverage. 

But Youtube is a not-so-secret weapon, if you, stalker, really wanted to know, you could probably figure out how many views we get, and how much money the channel generates. (It's about $1,000/mo in ads and around $25,000/mo in business, but we'll get to that). 

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Youtube has become a fantastic channel to engage with our customers, we've developed a really cool and engaged audience, it's motivated me to start a personal channel to talk about non-Slidebean stuff, and most importantly- we get tons and tons feedback on how our videos are useful for your entrepreneurial journey.

Let's dive right in, these are our channel metrics! 

SUBSCRIBERS

We always want more of those, I mean YOU-  and we want that Youtube plaque on our wall. 

- We've added over 30,000 subscribers this year and went from adding around 10 per day in January to about 100 per day in December. We started the year with less than 5,000! 

- Our most successful video subscriber-wise was the Startup Forensics WeWork, which gave us around 300 subs per day the week it was launched. 

- Around 25% of our views come from existing subscribers, while a nice 75% comes from new people that discover our brand. 

- 13% of you have enabled that bell, to get notified when we release a new video- and we just came up with a new reason to do so

What's new?

Starting January, I am going to be doing a live Q&A session for one hour after each video goes live. We are going to host that on our new Discord channel, so go to slidebean.com/live to join! 

VIEWS

- Our channel accumulated 1.9MM views this year.

- 45% a lot of those views came via ads, mostly promoting our launch video for the new Slidebean AI system. Still, that's over 1MM organic views, a 10x increase over 2018. 

In the early days, our focus on the channel was optimizing for Youtube SEO (Search Engine Optimization). We targeted high-volume keywords that didn't have a lot of quality content to answer them. And that worked pretty well. 

The best examples are our first Pitch Deck Video, and our Seed Funding video, which added over 500,000 of our views this year. 

Still, we eventually discovered how it's Youtube's almighty algorithm that really makes or breaks the channel. As we close the year, 42% of our views come from Youtube promoting our content- while only 13% come from search. 

This 'algorithm' takes into account how long you watch, whether you comment, like or share videos, and how likely the video is to be clicked when shown on the suggested video section- and we seem to be doing pretty well in all of those, thanks to you. 

REVENUE PART I

We started this channel to promote our company, and our super easy to use presentation platform; and our pitch deck writing service. And it works great! - but we'll get to that. 

Let's talk about Youtube Ad Revenue first, 

For the longest time, we refused to let other people's ads run on top of our videos- which are also promoting our company. Then, we woke up with dollar signs in our eyes one morning and enabled pre-roll and thumbnail ads- and we never looked back.

It turned out that the CPM for our channel is very high, based on the standards I've found. Our average CPM is $15.63- that means advertisers are willing to pay $15.63 for every thousand ad impressions on our videos. 

I understand that an average CPM on Youtube is on the $2-4 range. Still, ours seems to be higher because of the audience watching our videos: you- are a valuable, competitive audience. 50% of you are in the US, followed by India, the UK, and Canada. 80% Male, mostly Millenials. So, like me? 

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Anyway, we made over $4,000 in ad revenue from the channel- but most of it came in the last few weeks. November alone was $1,000+. 

This has been the proof that our Youtube MVP worked, and now we are doubling down on it. We are going to start 2020 with three weekly videos! 

We are keeping our Startups 101 series, our new Startup Forensics series, and adding in The Slidebean Office. This is a mini-sitcom we produced a while back as a Facebook Video series- but Facebook didn't really care for it. So- you might. And once again, after each video, we'll have a live Q&A session!

REVENUE PART II

Last but not least- Slidebean Revenue. 

As I said, this channel was originally built to get our brand name out there, and we weren't sure if it was going to be just brand awareness, or if it would actually translate to revenue. 

It turns out this channel brings around $25,000 in revenue to our company every month. That is a combination of customer subscriptions and pitch deck writing projects. We know because we ask all our customers where they heard about us, and we get Youtube as an answer more and more. 

Learn more about our Slidebean Pitch Deck Services

This is now our third-largest source of business, only beat by Google SEO and friend recommendations. 

As always, you can get one free month on Slidebean by going to slidebean.com/youtube and creating your account. 

And that is all I'm allowed to say. 

TEAM 

Last but not least, I wanted to do a shout out to our production team. Paula, who stands behind the camera and edits every video. Elena, who took the less-cool animations I did on the first few videos and evolved them into what they are today! It takes her a full week of work to do the post-production (animations) of these videos, using Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects. 
Then, Gustavo, who leads the marketing team and pushes me to ensure I deliver my scripts on time, and everybody else so we don't miss our release deadlines. We are expanding the team in 2020 and hope we won't be able to fit here next year!