15 Worst Ways to Make Money on YouTube (Do This Instead)

You have been lied to. Gurus have spent years telling you the “best” ways to make money on YouTube while quietly keeping the real secrets to themselves. And if your channel income has felt inconsistent, frustrating, or just plain low, it is not because you are doing something wrong as a creator. It is because you are following advice that keeps you on a content hamster wheel instead of building something that actually pays.

In this breakdown, drawn directly from Alston Godbolt’s video on Platform Proof, we are going through all 15 of the worst ways to make money on YouTube, ranked from least damaging (#15) all the way to the most destructive (#1). If you recognize any of these in your own strategy, that is the good news: the fix is simpler than you think.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A clear-eyed look at why channel memberships started too early backfire almost every time
The real math on why Amazon affiliate commissions usually disappoint
Why giveaways attract an audience that vanishes the moment you stop giving
What a link tree with 15 buttons actually does to your conversion rate
Why brand deals and MCN contracts are traps disguised as opportunities
How email marketing is the single hidden secret behind every successful YouTuber
The one monetization move that could end your channel permanently
How to find the right income stream for your specific channel at finder.platformproof.com

#15: Starting a Channel Membership Too Early

Channel memberships sound like the dream. You set them up once, members pay you every month, and you are getting recurring revenue without starting from zero. That part is true. The problem is timing. Most creators hit 10,000 subscribers and immediately flip on a membership without having the community depth to support it.

What you actually get is two members. Then five. Then one cancels and you are back to three. The frustration of managing extra content for a handful of paying members is real, and it can turn you off recurring revenue for good, which would be a serious mistake long-term. The channel membership itself is not bad. Starting it before your audience is ready is.

There is also the platform cut to consider. YouTube takes a percentage of every membership payment. If you build your membership off-platform using a tool like Skool, Kajabi, or a similar platform, you keep a much larger share and often pay a fixed monthly fee instead of a growing percentage. Alston launched his membership later than most people would, but when he did, it was a strong launch precisely because the audience was already warmed up.

#14: Print-on-Demand Merch as Your First Product

Selling branded T-shirts, mugs, and hoodies feels like a milestone. It is also one of the least profitable first moves you can make. Unless you have built a community with deep identity around your brand, comparable to how people feel about Nike or a sports team, most of your audience is not going to pay to wear your logo.

And the economics are rough. Print-on-demand companies like Teespring or Spring take a significant cut per item sold. You wind up managing constant merch refreshes, designing new products when the old ones go stale, and still making a fraction of what a well-placed digital product or affiliate link would return. Merch can become an income stream later. It should almost never be your first, second, or even third one.

#13: Link Trees With 15 Offers

A link tree page looks like a smart move. You can put all your offers in one place and let the viewer pick what they want. The problem is that the more choices you give someone, the fewer actions they take. Conversion rates drop roughly 25% for every additional button you add. Give someone 15 buttons and you have effectively given them permission to close the tab and come back later, which almost never happens.

On top of that, when the buttons are too similar, like “Free Training to Start Your Channel” next to “Best YouTube Tips,” viewers cannot tell the difference between them. They do not want to make the wrong choice, so they make no choice at all. The right move is to direct people linearly. Take them from your content to one destination: a lead magnet, a specific product, or an email opt-in. One clear path beats fifteen confusing ones every time.

#12: Not Capturing Emails (The Freebie Hamster Wheel)

This one is bigger than most creators realize. If you are posting content without a system to capture your viewer’s name and email, you are building entirely on rented land. The YouTube algorithm changes. Monetization policies shift. Consumer behavior moves. Any of those things can cut your reach overnight, and if you have no email list, you have no way to reach your audience directly.

Every successful YouTuber who has been in the game for a while runs email marketing. The ones who struggle do it inconsistently. The ones who are stuck chasing views and virality are not doing it at all. The setup is not complicated. You identify a specific pain your audience has, create a freebie that addresses it, a simple PDF planner, a cheat sheet, a short guide, and you put a link to it in every video description. Viewers who click give you their email. From that point on, you can sell affiliate products, promote your own offers, and send people back to new videos regardless of what the algorithm is doing that week.

#11: Midroll Ad Spam to Boost RPM

There is advice floating around that encourages stacking ad breaks as frequently as every 60 to 90 seconds. The logic sounds reasonable: more ads mean more money. What actually happens is that your viewer retention tanks. People clicked on your content to watch your content, not sit through a commercial break every two minutes. When they click off early, your average view duration drops, which hurts you in the algorithm and costs you far more in long-term growth than a few extra ad impressions were ever worth.

It is also worth applying basic guardrails around which ads are showing. You can restrict ad categories in your YouTube Studio settings to make sure the ads that do run are actually relevant to your audience, which makes the viewing experience feel less jarring. The goal is a balance that lets you earn without pushing your viewers out the door.

#10: Low-Ticket Amazon Affiliates

Amazon accepts almost every creator into its affiliate program, which is exactly why so many people start there and stay there. The brand recognition is strong. The product catalog is enormous. And the commissions are consistently disappointing. Physical products carry overhead, manufacturing, shipping, and returns, which means the commission percentages stay low. Promote a $15 item and you might clear $0.30.

There are more than 12,000 affiliate programs available. If you spend a few hours researching, you will find products in your niche that pay dramatically better. Digital products in particular, software, online courses, SaaS tools, carry much lower overhead and often pay 30 to 50 percent commissions. If there is a brand you already use and recommend that does not have an affiliate program, you can email them directly. Tell them you have a YouTube channel with X subscribers and your last video got Y views and ask whether they have or would consider an affiliate arrangement. Many will say yes.

At minimum, if you are going to use Amazon, target products priced at $100 or more, or products that require add-ons and accessories so your viewer’s cart value is higher. A $300 camera or a premium kitchen appliance generates meaningful commissions. A phone case does not.

Not sure which income stream is actually right for your channel and audience?

Answer a few quick questions at finder.platformproof.com and get a clear recommendation based on where you actually are right now.

#9: Giveaway-Driven Growth

Giveaways feel like they work because the subscriber count goes up. Alston tried this himself, running PayPal gift card giveaways for his community. What happens is that the people who show up for a giveaway came for the giveaway, not for your content. The moment the giveaways stop, they stop watching. Some of them will message you asking when the next one is. When you say there is not one coming, they disappear.

You also attract bad actors. People will create multiple accounts to improve their odds. Others will have friends and family mass-enter on their behalf. Some will try to impersonate winners to claim the prize. Beyond the logistics nightmare, the fundamental problem is that subscriber count is a vanity metric. A channel with 5,000 highly engaged people who trust you and buy what you recommend is worth more than 50,000 subscribers who are only there because you gave away cash.

#8: One-Off Brand Deals as Your Main Income

Brand deals feel validating. A company reaches out, offers to pay you, and it seems like your channel has arrived. The issue is that most brands lowball on purpose. They know their lifetime value per customer. Alston was approached by a company called Invido during the early AI video boom. They offered $500 for a one-minute ad. If that ad generated 20 customers and each customer was worth $100 over their lifetime, the brand made $2,000 from a $500 investment. And they were not interested in negotiating.

Brand deals are also unpredictable. You get a nice check today and spend the next three weeks wondering where the next one is coming from. Over time, the hunt for deals pulls you toward content that does not reflect your actual beliefs or your audience’s actual interests. Alston cited a creator named Quickslice who regularly runs cologne ads in content that has nothing to do with cologne. The audience notices, and it chips away at trust over time. Brand deals can be part of a diversified income mix, but they should never be the foundation.

#7: Shorts-Only Ad Share as a Business Model

YouTube Shorts monetization requires 10 million views within a 90-day window just to qualify for the ad revenue share program. That is an extraordinarily high bar, and even creators who clear it find that the per-view payouts are significantly lower than long-form content. To make a meaningful income from Shorts alone, you need to sustain viral-level view counts consistently, which means chasing trends, posting 20 or 30 videos per week, and riding whatever the algorithm is rewarding that particular month.

The Shorts algorithm is arguably more unpredictable than the long-form algorithm. Monetization terms can change with little warning. The format has been through multiple policy shifts since it launched. Building your income entirely on a format that requires that volume and that level of algorithmic compliance is a fragile foundation.

#6: AdSense Only and Low-RPM Niches

AdSense income is real, but it is inconsistent in ways that can be deeply discouraging if it is your only revenue stream. RPM (revenue per thousand views) swings based on the time of year, your audience’s location, and your niche. In the fourth quarter, advertisers spend heavily and RPMs are strong. In January, they pull back hard and RPMs can drop by 50 percent or more almost overnight.

Entertainment content in particular runs low RPM almost all the time. Alston notes that in a low-RPM entertainment niche, you need roughly 500,000 views per month just for AdSense to generate meaningful income. That is before accounting for the risk of copyright strikes, demonetization events, or content policy changes that could wipe out your eligibility without warning. If you are in the four high-value categories, health, wealth, relationships, or technology, your RPM is better, but you are still only one policy change away from a bad month.

#5: Paid Shoutouts for Random Small Brands

A small brand slides into your inbox and offers $100 to shout them out. It feels like easy money and technically it is, until it isn’t. The income is completely inconsistent. More importantly, unless you do serious research on every brand you promote, you are putting your credibility behind something you know almost nothing about. If that brand turns out to run a shady operation or mislead customers, your name is attached to it.

Several large creators have been burned by this, endorsing products or services that turned out to be scams or at minimum misleading, and the reputational damage lasted far longer than the $100 or $500 they were paid. Your viewers trust you. That trust is worth far more than a quick shoutout fee.

#4: MCN Revenue-Share Contracts

Multi-channel networks pitch themselves as partners. They promise access to brand deals, production support, and growth resources. In practice, many creators find that the support is minimal and the revenue cut is significant. Worse, the contracts often include content creation requirements, restrictions on what you can promote, and terms around content ownership that you may not fully understand until you are already locked in.

One of the genuine advantages of running a YouTube channel is creative and financial independence. You are not obligated to any employer or contract by default. Signing an MCN deal trades that independence for resources that in many cases do not materialize. Before signing anything, understand exactly what percentage of your revenue they take, what you are required to produce, and critically, who owns the content you create during the contract period.

#3: Low-Quality CPA Offers

Cost-per-action (CPA) affiliate offers pay you when a viewer takes a specific action, usually signing up for something. The temptation is that some of these pay well per conversion and they look like simple income. The trap is quality. A gaming channel might find a CPA offer where viewers enter to win a PlayStation 5. What viewers often do not realize is that nobody actually wins, or the process of “entering” signs them up for spam. They associate that frustration with your channel.

Alston puts it plainly: you might make a few dollars, but you are exposing your entire community to spam, scams, and shady emails. Once you erode viewer trust, recovering it takes many times longer than it took to build it. Some trust, once lost, is simply gone.

#2: Unlicensed Compilation and Reaction Channels

Compilation channels can go viral quickly. That is also the fastest way to build something that gets taken away from you. Using other people’s content without proper licensing or commentary leaves you perpetually exposed to copyright strikes and demonetization. It is possible to build a channel this way and even grow it quickly, but you are always one claim away from losing everything you built.

There is also zero brand equity in a faceless compilation channel. Viewers are not following you. They are following the content you are aggregating, content you do not own. If your channel disappeared, no one would go looking for where it went. That is the clearest measure of how much real value you have built. If you want to make reaction or commentary content work long-term, your face, your voice, and your perspective need to be the primary thing people are watching for, not the clips you are reacting to.

#1: Shady High-CPM Sponsorships (Gambling, Crypto, and Scammy Apps)

This is the worst one on the list, and it is not close. Gambling companies, sketchy crypto platforms, and predatory app developers will pay large sums to creators, sometimes $5,000 or more for a single integration, because they know their products convert and because they cannot advertise through mainstream channels. The money is real. The consequences are worse.

Promoting gambling to an audience that trusts you can violate YouTube’s terms of service directly, which means channel termination. It can open you to legal liability depending on your jurisdiction. And perhaps most lastingly, it permanently changes how your audience sees you. If your viewers came to you for honest advice about building a business or a YouTube channel and you start running gambling ads, you have told them that money matters more to you than they do. That is not a reputation you can easily walk back.

Your brand is the only thing you have that is genuinely yours. It is what earns clicks, watch time, and trust across every video you ever make. Protecting it is not optional. As Alston says: once you lose it, you will work ten times as hard to get it back, and you may never fully get it back at all.

What the 15 Worst Have in Common

Looking at this full list, a pattern shows up. The 15 worst monetization strategies all share at least one of these problems:

They are inconsistent: brand deals, shoutouts, giveaways, and CPA offers all produce income in bursts with nothing guaranteed in between
They erode trust: shady sponsorships, low-quality CPA offers, and irrelevant brand deals all cost you credibility with your audience
They are platform-dependent: AdSense, Shorts revenue, and Amazon affiliates all live or die on policies you do not control
They do not build anything durable: none of them create assets you own, an email list, a product, a recurring customer base

The flip side of all of these is that the better monetization paths address all four problems at once. They produce recurring, predictable income. They strengthen rather than drain trust. They are independent of any single platform’s rules. And they build toward something you actually own.

A Practical Decision Framework: Before You Pick a Monetization Strategy

Before you commit to any income stream, run it through these four questions:

Is it recurring? Income that resets to zero every month is stressful. Look for strategies that build on themselves.
Do I own the customer relationship? If the platform shuts down tomorrow, can you still reach your audience? Email lists say yes. Subscriber counts alone say no.
Does this align with what my audience actually came for? Cologne ads on a video game channel break the implicit promise you made when viewers subscribed.
Could this cost me my channel or my reputation? If the answer is even “possibly,” the upside is almost never worth it.

Find Your X

Every creator has a different channel size, a different niche, and a different relationship with their audience. The right next income stream for someone with 800 subscribers in the personal finance space is not the same as what is right for someone with 40,000 subscribers in the cooking space. Knowing the 15 worst is useful. Knowing which of the better options actually fits your situation is what moves the needle.

That is exactly what finder.platformproof.com is built for. Answer a handful of specific questions about your channel, your audience, and where you are right now, and you will get a clear, personalized recommendation for what to build next instead of guessing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is AdSense income ever worth pursuing at all?

AdSense is worth having as one layer of a diversified income mix, not as a primary strategy. If you are in a high-value niche like personal finance or software and your audience is primarily in the US, UK, Canada, or Australia, your RPM will be solid enough to make AdSense meaningful alongside other income streams. The risk comes from treating it as your main source of revenue, where every algorithm or policy shift directly threatens your income.

When is the right time to launch a channel membership?

There is no single subscriber threshold, but the right signal is community depth rather than channel size. If your comment sections are active, your viewers know each other by name, and people consistently ask where they can support you more directly, you have the foundation for a membership. Launching it off-platform through a tool with a fixed monthly fee lets you keep more of the revenue and gives you more control over the member experience.

How do you find affiliate programs that pay better than Amazon?

Start with the tools and services you already use and recommend in your content. Search for “[product name] affiliate program” and see what comes up. Affiliate marketplaces like ShareASale, Impact, and PartnerStack list thousands of programs with commission rates, average order values, and cookie windows. If a brand you love does not have a program listed, reach out directly and ask. Many companies, especially in the software and education space, will set one up for the right creator.

What makes a freebie actually work to build an email list?

The freebie needs to solve a specific, immediate problem your target viewer actually has. A broad guide called “Everything About YouTube” is too vague. A one-page checklist called “The 10-Point Thumbnail Audit” solves a concrete problem in a format that feels fast to use. The more specific the pain point, the higher the opt-in rate. The delivery needs to be instant, because delayed freebies kill trust before the relationship even starts.

Can you make good money with Shorts at all, or should you skip them entirely?

Shorts can serve a purpose as a top-of-funnel discovery tool, bringing new viewers to your long-form content and your email opt-ins. As a primary monetization strategy, the math simply does not work for most creators. The 10 million view threshold for monetization eligibility, combined with low per-view payouts, means the effort-to-income ratio is poor compared to building a course, a coaching offer, or an email-based product funnel.

How do you evaluate whether a brand deal is actually worth taking?

Start by estimating what your audience is worth to that brand. If they have a customer lifetime value of $200 and your video typically influences 50 people to try something, you are delivering $10,000 in customer value. A $500 deal significantly undervalues what you are providing. If you do take a deal, make sure the product is something you have genuinely used, something that is directly relevant to your audience, and something you could recommend to a friend without hesitation. If any of those three criteria are missing, pass.

What are the signs that an MCN contract is more trap than opportunity?

Watch for revenue share percentages above 20 to 30 percent, content creation minimums or style requirements, exclusivity clauses that prevent you from working with other networks or brands, and any language about content ownership transferring to the network. Legitimate support from an MCN should feel optional and additive, not like conditions you have to meet. If the contract requires more from you than it guarantees for you, negotiate or walk away.

What does “protecting your brand” actually look like in practice?

It means asking, before every monetization decision: “If my most loyal viewer saw me doing this, would they be surprised or disappointed?” That question is a reliable filter. A loyal viewer expects you to recommend things you have personally used. They expect you to be honest about drawbacks. They do not expect you to promote gambling apps or unlicensed content compilations. Your brand is the aggregate of every impression your audience has of you. Each decision either adds to it or chips away at it.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “15 Worst Ways to Make Money on YouTube (Do This Instead)”, Platform Proof YouTube channel
YouTube Partner Program policies and monetization eligibility thresholds, support.google.com/youtube
Amazon Associates commission rate schedule, affiliate-program.amazon.com