How I make Sh700,000 from YouTube monthly

American real estate mogul Grant Cardone built his $1.9 million empire portfolio from scratch, according to Forbes.

One of his favourite quotes in many of his investment workshops is “money follows attention”.

This phenomenon is quite evident when you get to interact with the amiable Everline Mungai Wanjiku, who prefers the moniker Mungai Eve.

The 21-year-old fast-rising digital content creator currently walks home with an average of Sh700,000 every month in YouTube earnings, just seven months after she started her channel ‘Mungai Eve’.

When the month is good, the figure go as high as Sh1.5 million. By the time of conducting this interview, 12 days of July had passed and her YouTube earnings were already standing at $2,103 (Sh225,000).

“As you can see (she shows the account), this is the amount I have already made so far since July started. YouTube pays daily then remits the net sum to your bank account every 20th of the month,” Eve says with a bold smile.

Impressive, right? But how did she achieve this feat in such a short period? Just like Cardone, Mungai had to start somewhere; she had to scratch the surface hard enough and plan meticulously.

Mungai had just joined the university last year to study mass communication when she was forced to drop out after just one semester.

“I was preparing to go back for my second semester when the coronavirus pandemic struck. Things really got bad financially for my father and, being a private student, he asked me to stay at home as he looked for funds to send me back to school,” Eve recounts.

With the turn of events, Eve who hails from Murang’a County, opted not to stay in the village and moved to Nairobi in search of jobs to keep her going.

“Life was really difficult in the city. I was crashing at a friend’s place and getting these odd jobs wasn’t that easy either. Sometimes I would get a job that paid Sh200 a day and when I factor my expenses for the day, I end up using all of it.” she adds.

Boyfriend’s idea

After a few months of persevering and sensing that she had become a burden to her friend, a dejected Eve made the decision to move back to the village.

“I called my boyfriend Trevor (Bonnie) and informed him of my decision. He listened and said, ‘You shouldn’t go. I have an idea, let's first try it out. Let's start Mungai Eve YouTube channel then see how it goes,”

The couple moved in together and started building the channel. Eve started by managing people’s Instagram accounts at a cost of Sh1,000 a week, thanks to the skills she picked from Trevor, a social media manager, photographer and video director.

“I became so good at growing numbers on people's social media accounts and Trevor was impressed. At the time, we had just created the YouTube account but hadn't yet started uploading content. Trevor was still trying to figure out how to go about it and I knew nothing about YouTube,” Eve goes on.

This was sometime in September last year. The government had just eased up the lockdown restrictions and events had started to crop in.

“Trevor attended the Gengetone festival and there was a skirmish leading to the death of one person. He recorded the incident and asked me to do a voiceover narrating what had transpired. That was our first video upload on the channel and it really got a lot of attention.”

Within a single day of the upload, Mungai Eve channel had attracted over 1,000 subscribers.

These staggering numbers motivated the couple to even work harder on getting more content that would attract viewership.

“Our second video was about the ‘sheng masters’ Mbogi Genje, who was trending at the time. We did a voice pop about their music. Then someone introduced us to one of their rivals, Madocho of Gotta City camp, whom we also covered. When we uploaded those two videos, that was it, Mungai Eve channel just blew off. The numbers of subscribers and view time increased significantly, that was our breakthrough.”

Mungai and her boyfriend director then set to monetise the channel, a process she describes as quite easy and complex at the same time.

“There are a set of rules for one to qualify to monetise an account. You have to ensure you don’t have copyright claims on whatever you upload. You must also post original content and, most importantly, achieve 4,000 watch hours on your entire YouTube channel.”

For the majority of well earning YouTubers in Kenya, it took them more than a year to achieve the cumulative 4,000 hours (240,000 minutes) watch time which translates to about 20,000 minutes a month.

Once you meet these qualifications, YouTube sends you a notification that you are eligible to apply for the monetisation programme (YouTube Partner Program).

Eve’s first huge pay she received from YouTube was Sh100,000 that came just a month after they started feeding the channel.

To ensure the channel’s content always attracts attention, Mungai and Trevor came up with their own niche.

“You have to have a signature to the kind of content you intend to put out. We focus more on telling stories about the lives of the youth in the ghettos. I also cover events and celebrities who appeal to my audience and in maintaining that, I have been able to continue creating attention towards my channel despite having uploaded very few videos.”

But away from the earnings she makes straight from YouTube adverts that appear on the videos she posts, Eve has been exploiting the community tab, a segment on her channel.

“Most people ignore this tab and here is where I make my extra cash. In this section, I promote businesses at an agreed fee and it pays really well. Sometimes I get deals worth over Sh100,000 within days or weeks ,” adds Eve, who doesn’t take anything less than Sh5,000 for any kind of promotions.

Sh10 million offer

With her channel growing by leaps and bounds currently standing at 194,000 subscribers with over 25 million views and an impressive 700,000 hours watch time every two days, Eve has received a number of offers to sell the channel.

“People love to jump on already moving wagons. I have received a number of offers from several companies to buy my channel. One actually tabled a tempting offer of Sh10 million but we declined because we have a bigger plan for Mungai Eve.”

Despite her quick success as a digital content creator, Eve is quick to caution people from venturing into YouTube with an aim of making quick money.

“If that’s your motive, please don’t get into content creation. You will be disappointed. We struggled a little bit when we started but we got lucky because the channel picked up so fast. Besides we were passionate about this journey and were ready to wait for as long as it would take.”

Eve is also grateful to her 22-year old boyfriend Trevor whom she describes as the best gift God ever gave her.

She is reluctant to divulge the details on how they split the cash saying “we are family,”. But even as her career as a digital content creator is on the rise, Mungai is already planning to go back to school.

At least this time, she will not have to bother her father for the fees.