How I monetized a YouTube video with less than 1K subscribers

Social media influencers often do Q&A sessions with their following via Twitter or Reddit posts, Patreon messages or livestreams on YouTube. Often the influencer has issues triaging the questions, shying away from controversial ones, or missing some due to the large amount. Such inefficiencies can cause frustration with their following as they are left feeling alienated as their questions remain ignored and unanswered.

YouTube has the Super Chat feature, which allow viewers to pay to have their question or comment pinned. While this does help, Google’s federates which channels can unlock this feature and of course takes a large 30% cut from each contribution. Super Chat is also problematic in the sense that the highest bidder gets their question answered and those who were outbid essentially gave the influencer something for nothing in return.

Pay to play is not necessarily bad for content creators, it is just inefficient in regard to revenue generation for the creator, moderation and setting expectations with the communities. In efforts to combat these issues, I launched QandA tokens on the RelayX Exchange three days ahead of when I would record a YouTube video answering those questions.

Those who purchased these tokens could send them to me, along with a question that I would answer in the video. 25 tokens were available for sale at 0.04 BSV and sold out within an hour. A secondary market formed, and some did pay a premium to get their question answered.

While pay to play is in full force here, expectations are set with my following, so no one feels left out. The 25 token supply indicates how many questions I will field at a maximum. There is no possibility where a follower gives me money in exchange for nothing. Additionally, market forces indicate the value of these questions as opposed to pigeon-holing myself into being yet another shameless promoter. This is not a perfect solution as some still may feel priced out, but at least they will not feel left out as all had an equal opportunity to participate.

In terms of revenue, mine was 100% (instead of 70%) of the sales, totaling 1 BSV.

In the case someone did ask a controversial question I had a strong incentive to answer it, but if I really did not want to entertain the question I could refund the customer, preserving accountability. A strong incentive to field more incendiary questions exists simply because people love drama and would also promote further Q&A sessions on my YouTube channel.

Lastly, as the irrational NFT craze continues, clearly the market still rejects the idea of ‘real-world value’ tokens. While all 25 tokens sold out, only 7 were actually redeemed!

I theorize this was largely due two reasons:

While the tired narrative still permeates in the BSV space that all tokens launched to date are scams, illegal, and only created to pump people’s bags—this is just not the case. Speculators definitely still have a role in this new token economy, but prices in these markets are not designed to pump just “because.”

The purpose of adding an exchangeable market is to improve the price discovery mechanism so that the price trends towards the actual value of the exchangeable good or service, and that product ends up in the hands to those that actually want it. In this case since the secondary market formed so quickly, I should consider raising the initial price for the next Q&A tokens. People who speculate thinking tokens will just rise in price will face the consequences, like the 18 who spent 0.04 BSV for nothing.

Overall, I consider this effort a large success as YouTube pays me exactly $0 for my videos thus far only because I have yet to meet their arbitrary thresholds. I instead leveraged the Bitcoin network to earn between $150-200 for a single video. I will certainly do this again, so stay tuned.

Check out the video answering the questions below!

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