From Barely There to Top Rated: The Youtube Growth Arc

Case Study: How to Grow on YouTube to Have Millions of Subs

Shanoon Cox

Oct 26, 2023• Proven solutions

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You’ve probably heard of stories about individuals who managed to find financial success on YouTube. If your dream is to make money on YouTube it’s important to remember that regular people are doing it.

Jesse Ridgway is the owner of the vlog McJuggerNuggets , which has grown to over 3.4 million subscribers. He makes enough money to live off of YouTube alone. Here is a case study of how he made his first $10,000 on YouTube:

Case Study of McJuggerNuggets

Jesse was one of the earliest YouTubers. He started his channel on December 9, 2006. Jesse never guessed that he would make enough money to live off of the videos he was creating. Here are some of the ways that he monetized his channel:

AdSense

Monetization of videos through AdSense is one of the easiest ways that you can start to profit off your videos. Registering for a Google AdSense can earn you between $0.30 and $2.00 per thousand ad impressions (an impression is a click, not a view). How much you make per ad impression depends on a lot of things, including the time of year. There are good months for advertising revenue and bad months. December is usually the hottest month for making money through AdSense because of the holiday shopping season. Some of the other months where you can see huge profits include September for back-to-school, June, and March.

More popular channels get higher paying ads, and it is harder to earn ad revenue in popular vlogging genres (i.e. gaming) than in more obscure niches.

Target the Right Demographic

Some of the largest YouTuber success stories are creators who primarily target younger audiences. Others target men or women specifically. Think about who you want your audience to be and make videos that will appeal to them.

Multichannel Networks

Once you hit a certain level of subscribership and views you will start getting invited to MCMs. In some cases, multichannel network promotions could entitle you to discounts on merchandise and products. Be careful: a multichannel network will always want you to sign a contract, and they will take over your AdSense account.

Social Blade

This site will provide details about your subscription count, which of your videos has the best watch time, and more. It will give you a good impression of what you should be including in your videos and how you can make more money from your channel.

Uploading Your Videos at the Right Time

Uploading videos at the right time will make sure that you are on the front page of recently uploaded videos when people are let out of school or taking a break from work. This will earn you lots of views. Set an upload time for all of your videos each day and stick to that schedule.

Check out Webinars

Looking into webinars and videos of what other popular YouTube experts have done will help you model their success.

Collaborate with Other YouTubers

When you create a collab video you and your partner are each introduced to each other’s subscribers.

Keep Quality Up

Putting time and effort into every upload will ensure that you won’t lose subscribers or viewers because you got a bit lazy.

Do Follow-Up Videos

If you have a particular video that has a lot of views, you may want to consider creating follow-up videos. This can be a great way to generate lots of views.

Complete Regular Research

Regular research into your target market will help you to create the trendiest new content.

Don’t Get Discouraged

Timing and luck are definitely two of the biggest factors in becoming a success on YouTube. If you are willing to keep working and don’t get discouraged you will eventually earn profits.

Edit Your Videos with High-Quality Video Editor

Shanoon Cox

Shanoon Cox is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Shanoon Cox

Design Revolutionaries: Discovering 6 Icon & Logo Banks Online

6 Completely Different Places to Get Icons and Logos for YouTube Videos

Richard Bennett

Oct 26, 2023• Proven solutions

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Whether you need YouTube icons and logos to use as pop-up graphics in your videos, to serve as your channel icon, to use as watermarks, or to liven up your channel art or video thumbnails – don’t worry. There are lots of places to get them.

We’ve made a list of 6 sites where you can download icons and logos for free for YouTub videos, and explained how they work.

• Flaticon.com
• Freepik.com
• Seeklogo.net
• IconArchive.com
• Logaster.com
• Icons8.com

You might also want to check out these YouTube channels offering free profile picture templates .

1. Flaticon.com

Key Points:

• Great selection of icons/logos
• It’s easy to change the colors before you download

I’m putting Flaticon.com right at the top of this list because it has something that really sets it apart from the other sites on this list – it lets you edit pre-made icons before you download them.

You start out on Flaticon by searching for a theme like beauty, gaming, flowers, or emojis. I searched for ‘birds’ and found these cuties.

These aren’t all the birds on Flaticon, just a few. They had a huge selection in all the different searches I tried.

I clicked on the brown bird to open up the download screen, and then clicked into ‘Edit icon’. There may be a pop up that tells you editing tools are only available to registered users, but it’s wrong. Just close it and keep going, unless you want to register.

You can edit the colors in your icon just by clicking on the color you want to replace, and then clicking on the color in the color selector you want to replace it with. I made my birdie FLY.

I never apologize for puns.

Once you like the look of your icon, just click Download. You will be prompted to choose a format. PNG is the most popular because it is supported the most places (including on YouTube), and because it allows for a transparent background.

After clicking on a format you will also be prompted to choose a size for your image. It’s always best to go with the largest image you can – its way easier to shrink things and keep them looking good than it is to have to enlarge them.

Flaticon has a great selection, it’s free, and they make it really easy to edit your creations. I would strongly recommend this site to anyone in the market for an icon or logo.

Flaticon asks that you include an “Icon made by [author link] from <www.flaticon.com> ” somewhere (i.e. video description, channel ‘about’ section) when you use their icons for free.

2. Freepik.com

Key Points:

• Good selection of icons.
• No way to customise them on the site.
• Attribution requried.

On freepik, you start off by searching for a theme (like the genre of your YouTube title or the topic of a video, i.e. ‘makeup’ or ‘music’). I searched for ‘cat’.

A few of the sets available on freepik. The crown icon means you need to be a paying Premium member, but most things are free.

You can’t edit on freepik, and in order to download for free you need to include an attribution/credit to freepik where you use the images.

You do not choose what format to download your images in on freepik. When you hit ‘Free Download’ it will automatically download a zip file which will contain both a .jpg and a .eps. The EPS is editable in any ‘vector graphics editor’, like Adobe Illustrator, and YouTube supports .jpg files.

3. Seeklogo.net

Key Points:

• Logos from major brands
• Great for channels that do product reviews

Seeklogo.net has a slightly more corporate slant than some of the other sites on this list. It has logos for a lot of major companies and brands available for download.

In the ‘search’ on Seeklogo.net, you can type in the name of a brand or industry and see if the well-known logo you’re looking for is available. This may be especially useful for people with sports related channels since they have a lot of logos for major teams.

I searched for YouTube – you never know when you might need the YouTube logo.

Although the site does not advertise PNG in the list of formats on their front page, downloads do include PNG versions (which is useful if you need transparency and don’t have a program which can edit vector files, like .eps).

4. IconArchive.com

Key Points:

• Site has an office/business slant.
• Detailed search tool lets you sort by color, theme, etc.

IconArchive has a huge selection of icons with somewhat of an office/business slant. I searched for ‘flower’ and half the results were of file-folders with flowers on them.

Could be cool for a lifestyle video about school or work?

My favorite thing about IconArchive is its search features. It allows you to filter results by color, size (down to the specific resolution), category, background color, style, and a lot more.

Color is under ‘Display’, meaning that it won’t filter out results that have different colors it’ll just list the color you select first.

The ‘Category’ filter is useful because there are some genres you probably recognize there, like ‘Lifestyle’. However, you should be careful not to over-filter. This site is pretty literal in how it categorizes. For example – there are no ‘flower’ images under ‘Lifestyle’.

Downloads are available in different sizes and formats including PNG. PNG is always a good option because it is supported by YouTube and includes transparent backgrounds.

Note that all of your different download buttons will be located underneath your image. They favor those ads that look like ‘download’ or ‘start now’ buttons, and the ads sit right next to the images on the right, so it’s easy to get confused and click on the ad.

5. Logaster.com

Key Points:

• You’ll have to pay for larger images.
• Focused more on businesses.
• Incorporates your channel name.

Logaster is really a service for businesses – they make and sell business cards, letterheads, and other office-y things like that. However, they are still a good choice for YouTubers because they have a free logo creator. Sort of.

You actually have to pay $9.99 to get larger images and remove the watermark, but the process is free.

When you arrive on Logaster there’s a button right on their home page that says ‘Create a logo for free’. Click on it.

In Step 1 it’ll ask for your company name and an activity type. You just need to put in your channel name and choose something from the activity drop down that you focus on in your videos.

My heart burns with the secret desire to be YouTube’s Neil Degrasse Tyson (it doesn’t really, but he is super cool) so I tried ‘Katie Does Science’ and ‘Science, Studies, Education’. Here’s what it came up with:

There are 10 pages of suggestions!

You can see how, unless you have a short channel name, you’re probably not going to be able to use any of these as an icon, but a lot of them would look cool on a banner. There’s an ‘Edit Logo Concept’ button which allows you to make changes to the layout, but you can still only choose from preset layouts. For example, some logo concepts allow you to choose whether the icon is above your text or next to it.

After you click ‘save’ in the last step you’ll be prompted to provide an email address and password. Once you sign in, you’ll be able to download a small logo for free, or purchase the higher resolution image.

I personally wouldn’t recommend buying an image from here unless your channel is for your small business and you need things like branded business cards and letterhead. This site might be better for gathering inspiration than actually downloading a logo from.

6. Icons8.com

Key Points:

• You need to link back to them to use their icons.
• You can edit the colors on the site and even add details.
• There’s a size limit on the free service (100x100px)

At Icons8 they have free and paid services. If you download an icon for free it will be a PNG file (which should be fine, YouTube supports PNG and it’s good for transparency) that is no larger than 100x100px. This is not ideal since YouTube recommends 800x800px for profile pictures, but it’s not necessarily a deal breaker either. Profile pictures render down to much smaller than that.

You will also need to link to Icons8 if you use their icons for free (i.e. in the ‘about’ section of your channel page).

To get started on Icons8, type something into the search bar on the home page that you think might work as an icon or as part of whatever graphics you have planned. I typed in ‘game’ for this one, since gaming is the biggest genre on YouTube. Here are a few of the results that came up:

Lower down in the results there were different kinds of sports balls, hand-held gaming systems, playing cards, joy sticks, baseball caps and more.

After you find an icon you like, click on it and it will appear on the right side of your screen where you’ll be able to make a few changes (an editing screen will pop up once you start clicking on things). You can edit your colors, overlay small decals, add text, and add a border, change your background and adjust your size. Here’s the editing screen:

You can give your icon a pretty different look from its default. Check this out:

You cannot download your icon from the editing screen. You need to click Save, and then download it from the main display screen here:

You can change the size with that drop down menu, but you’ll be limited in your options if you don’t want to pay.

I downloaded my image and tried to see how it would look as an icon/profile picture. As you can see, it was pretty blurry in the preview:

However, the preview is larger than the actual profile picture. Once I set it, it looked alright.

Looking for somewhere you can build your own icon/logo from scratch? Check out this list of logo makers .

After downloading the icons or logos, it is time to add them to your YouTube video. Here I recommend our Wondershare Filmora video editor . Below is a video tutorial about how to add a logo to video in Filmora . Remember to download the free trial version to test.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett