How to Get Monetized on YouTube with Just One Video

Getting monetized on YouTube is often seen as a challenging journey that requires consistent content output and a solid subscriber base built up over time.

However, with the strategy outlined in this article, we will be breaking down not only how to get monetized, but to do it with just one video.

Understanding Your Market

Your first task is to determine if there’s enough interest in your niche to support your monetization goals. To do this, we need to calculate a rough estimate for your Total Addressable Market (TAM). This is the total number of viewers who watch content in your specific niche.

If your niche is too small, getting the necessary views and subscribers to meet YouTube’s monetization criteria might be challenging.

A good way to see if you have a large enough TAM is to see what the top 20% of creators in the niche are averaging in views.

If their average views are high enough (the target should be in the hundreds of thousands), you can model 80% of their views as the potential TAM. Once you have validated the TAM, you need to find an idea to reach this new audience.

Next, identify what content works within your chosen niche. This isn’t about copying—it’s about understanding successful trends within your niche and why those videos performed well.

The best way to do this is to look at outliers from all of your competitors and find patterns in their ideas, titles, and thumbnails. You can easily do this by using 1of10 or the free extension .

By pinpointing these outliers, you can discover patterns that resonate with the audience you will be targeting.

Once you find a good outlier format, it's worth taking some extra time to validate it. This can be done by seeing when the outliers were made and how many there are. If they are older, it may be worth skipping over them as they may no longer be relevant, and if there are many similar outliers with the same format, it's likely too saturated. Your goal is to find a concept that is popular but not worn out.

Ideally, you are looking for some validation in the form of 2-3 videos that were outliers but still have room to create your own twist and be interesting to the audience. Another way that you can do this is by still using outlier ideation and adopting style transference. Taking one style from another niche and just adding it to your own. Again, following the previous steps above, look outside the niche rather than inside.

Once you have validated the TAM, found an outlier format to create a video around, and validated that idea, you’re nearly there to getting monetized with your first video.

The last thing you must do is focus on the audience and what works. This includes average video length, editing style, cuts per minute, cadence, b-roll, and everything else that makes up the actual video.

After nailing this down, you can press upload, and if you have done everything to the best of your ability, there's a high probability you will be monetized with one video.

And if this attempt doesn't hit the mark, you will have gained so much experience that you will be monetized much faster than you would have before.

However, this is all easier said than done, so you can see some recent examples of channels that have successfully monetised after just a few videos here.