If you’ve been on YouTube lately you probably noticed the ZW “attached” to the YouTube logo. That’s actually a locale identifier, something that you will notice if you are, of course, accessing the video platform from Zimbabwe.
The question that most people have had though is what this means for Zimbabwe.
It turns out this change is a result of YouTube enabling monetization for Zimbabwean content. This change has happened silently, YouTube is yet to make an announcement for this.
This monetization means that you can get paid by YouTube for content that you upload on the platform. It’s the same arrangement that a host of other countries have had all along, something that Zimbabwe YouTube content creators hadn’t been able to do until now.
Previously, the only way Zimbabwean content creators could make money from YouTube content was to approach potential advertisers and enter into arrangements based on the views registered for videos and the potential displayed by this reach and quality.
It’s pretty much the same angle being used for publishers of content on Facebook. We have seen content creators like Nafuna TV and P.O BOX working with these workarounds, along with with other custom strategies to model revenue streams.
Enabling monetization (its optional, you have to activate it) means that you will get paid for ads that YouTube places on your content. This makes it easy to create an additional revenue stream. The challenge though, is that you need to garner a lot of views for the payments to offer the huge returns that most people normally associate with the hard work behind content creation.
How do I enable monetization?
‘The process of enabling monetization on your videos involves doing the following
One response
This has been a long awaited development. A combination of this and other revenue streams online will usher a new era of Zimbabwe internet companies. I believe internet opportunities in Zimbabwe is the future. Thanks for the great post and great insite