Most YouTubers make it big with one channel, but YouTuber Charlie Chang said that he has 50 channels that earn $300,000 per month. He recently uploaded a YouTube video to one of his top channels that details how he built a portfolio of YouTube channels.
"Most channels will fail," he said in the video. "Do volume to find the winners."
He got started with YouTube in 2008 and shifted to personal finance and business in 2017 and 2018. That shift marked the start of Chang's breakout, which has translated into a seven-figure business.
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How Chang Makes Money On YouTube
Chang primarily operates in educational niches and aims for evergreen videos instead of viral hits that experience a spike in traffic before fading into obscurity. He also doesn't heavily rely on Google Adsense, YouTube's advertising platform, to generate most of his revenue.
“A lot of other creators rely heavily on brand deals and AdSense," Chang said in the video. "For me, I don’t really like doing that since that can vary a ton.”
He said that 10% of his YouTube revenue comes from AdSense, 8% comes from brand deals, and 2% comes from miscellaneous sources. Chang said that the remaining 80% of his revenue comes from affiliate marketing, a business model that involves promoting other people's products and getting paid for each sale you make.
This approach boosts the earnings potential of each video, and Chang said on his channel that some of his videos earn more than $100,000 because of affiliate marketing.
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Building The Team
Many professional YouTubers have multiple team members to work on a single YouTube channel, so it's no surprise that Chang has a team of 50 employees spread across his channels.
Chang operates in various industries, but his channels also stretch across multiple languages. For some of his top channels, he hires people to do voiceovers in different languages to boost his international exposure.
"We have a combination of project managers, thumbnail editors, [and] video editors," Chang said in the video. “Almost all of my team is overseas, and I’ve always wanted a remote business like this that didn’t really have an office that people had to come to.”
Chang also has some of his team members promote his content across multiple platforms instead of keeping everything exclusively on YouTube.
"You need to be everywhere," he said. "If you’re creating content, there is so much you can do with that one piece of content to repurpose for other platforms.”
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What Helped Charlie Chang Stand Out On YouTube?
Chang mentioned several factors that helped him grow his visibility and stick with YouTube when the results didn't arrive right away. He prioritized covering topics he was passionate about over making money, and that helped him stay committed to YouTube and build dozens of channels.
Chang also said in the video that he created many YouTube channels, knowing that most of them would fail. Accepting failure as a part of the process made him more comfortable with it, and that helped him launch successful channels that justified the effort that went into the channels that didn't make it.
Part of the benefit of having multiple channels is that it's easier for him to focus on specific niches instead of being too broad. Chang said that having a small niche is a key part of growing on YouTube.
"Don't try to create content that gets a lot of general views from everyone," Chang said. "The more specific and narrow your audience is, the more money-making ability there is."
Chang wrapped up the video by sharing how he would approach building a YouTube channel if he had to start all over.
"I’d pick one topic that I was passionate about," Chang said. "I’d make 50 to 100 different long-form videos about that topic. After that, I would create some type of product or service that relates to that topic.”
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