Why YouTube is interesting for any successful influencer

AfricaWeb, of which GhanaWeb is part, is one of the initiators of Age Africa Agency, which is a Digital Marketing Agency & YouTube MCN. It helps African content creators to grow on YouTube and make more money out of the content creation activities.

This article describes why YouTube is an attractive platform for an influencer. It provides more opportunities to create income than some other platforms. If you are already a successful influencer on another platform, than you may want to consider expanding your activities on Youtube by creating your own YouTube channel.

Reasons why YouTube may be interesting to Instagram- and Tiktok- influencers

Below we discuss the reasons why it would be interesting for an influencer on TikTok or Instagram to become active on Youtube as well.

1. More income – monetization
YouTube offers a very clear and transparent way to advertising income by connecting you automatically to the advertising demand side through their own programmatic advertising ecosystem. One can already earn money with advertising without having to deal with advertisers yourself. In order to generate advertising on TikTok and Instagram you have to deal with advertisers yourself and engage with them on an one-to-one basis. It is noted that TikTok announced the development of an automatic advertising ecosystem but we have not seen anything yet.

YouTube makes you independent from direct advertisers although they may form an additional source of advertising revenue on top of the programmatic advertising revenue.

Next to that, YouTube offers even more ways to make more money from your content, actually more than any other social media platform. This makes the feature of Live streaming Youtube even more different from TikTok.

Youtube is a so-called old social media platform where a lot of things have been worked out in a very professional and organized way. The rules and guidelines o

2. Content Discovery
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. This means your content is more likely to be discovered on YouTube than on other social media platforms.

3. YouTube Shorts
With the introduction of YouTube shorts, you can use vertical and concise content also for publishing and uploading on Youtube. As an influencer on Instagram or Tiktok you can duplicate your content from those platforms easily on Youtube.

4. Music rights / copyright claims
When you upload TikTok or Instagram videos on YouTube, you will likely run into issues with the music. YouTube scans your content to check whether it contains third party music. If so, YouTube will either block or place a copyright claim on your video, thereby preventing monetization.

Age Africa Agency offers copyright-free music from a large library and can also help you replace any copyright-claimed music on your existing videos. This means you can monetize your TikTok and Instagram videos, as well as re-monetize any content that is currently blocked.

5. Content protection
YouTube uses a system called ContentID (CID) to protect your rights as content owner.

YouTube’s CID indexing allows your video to be scanned for content. If (part of) your video is used by someone else, YouTube recognises it as your property. You get to decide whether to monetize that video (meaning all the earnings go to you) or block it entirely. Because it is marked as ‘your property’, you can place a referral card, url or other link in it and direct the viewers to your own channel.

ContentID is a special feature that is only granted to official YouTube partners. By joining Age Africa Agency, you may get access to the feature. (special conditions apply)

6. Leverage your fan-base to accelerate growth
There’s a lot more competition on YouTube than on TikTok and Instagram which means it’s harder to grow a large fan-base. But if you have an existing fan-base on another Social Media platform then you have a huge advantage on YouTube! When you direct your fans to your YouTube channel, you gain credibility with the YouTube algorithm. This means your content will be recommended more often than your competitors.

7. Take charge of your Growth
TikTok and Instagram offer you much less chance of achieving organic growth through SEO. By using SEO on YouTube in description, but also by using chapters, you put yourself – with knowledge of SEO, but Age Africa can certainly support that – in the spotlight. The advantage of YouTube is that it is owned by Google. The indexing back and forth works flawlessly, and your video content that answers questions from users can reach very good positions in Google search results.

8. Long life span
TikTok videos are ephemeral, and Instagram content is not evergreen content for a long time because of the limited impact. On YouTube, your content remains for years and will still generate revenue for you all the while.

9. Reach new fans and grow on all platforms
YouTube has a huge number of users and more over-18’s than any other social platform. This means you can diversify your audience and reach new fans Just like you can do at TikTok and Instagram, you can also ‘send back’ viewers by referring them to your accounts on other social media. This way you create an interaction and you let all your channels grow.

10. YouTube is here to stay!
YouTube is the most successful video platform worldwide and continues to knock out the competition. Remember Vine? Where Vine fell short in providing monetization opportunities, YouTube is constantly working to innovate, improve and expand services. The new standing/vertical videos (shorts), are an answer to TikTok and Instagram reels. In less than a year after launch, views on YouTube shorts have already surpassed the competition.