Why Some Viral Videos Don't Make The Creators Any Money

Making money online seems easy, but it's actually harder than many believe. Not everyone who makes money online makes a full living from it, and obstacles can quickly arise when producing content and working with brand deals, too. How much money brand ambassadors really make is one factor, and how Instagram models really make their money is different as well. And even when people want to work with brands, you have to learn how to tell if an Instagram brand message is real or not.

Perhaps even harder is making money on YouTube. While it's not incredibly hard to become monetized on the platform — channels must reach a certain subscriber count and overall views thresholds, per The Verge – channels have to receive large amounts of views consistently to earn a living from uploading videos, and a single viral video can't often make one well off forever. In fact, according to Mint Life, one ad only generates about $0.01 to $0.03 per view.

Even when channels are monetized, their viral videos may make no money for a few reasons. It's incredibly unfortunate for creators who put a lot of time and money into their videos, but it happens all too often.

There are a few reasons why some viral videos don't make money on YouTube despite garnering millions of views. Of particular note is YouTube's ever-changing policies. Videos that don't follow the policies — despite their evolving nature — get their monetization privileges revoked, and some of these rules include excessive profanity as well as mentions of sex and other "adult" content (via Game Rant). YouTube wants its content to be accessible to everyone and even has creators mark each video upload as being safe for children or not safe for children.

The other major reason viral videos don't make money is because of copyright claims. A copyright claim is when a video gets tagged for including copyrighted materials. This can include anything from music heard in the background while vlogging to music intentionally played for reaction purposes. According to Dummies, YouTube can automatically flag videos for this, and anyone can report videos if their music or other copyrighted materials appear in them in excess. The worst part is that numerous copyright infringement claims can lead to channels getting taken down forever.

If you see a viral video but notice it doesn't have any ads enabled, watch the video with this information in mind. Is there music in the background? Is there a lot of profanity? These are some of the biggest factors leading to disabled monetization.