--- title: 'How to Make a Million Dollars on YouTube: Chris Du''s Strategy' source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=6dakIcXUQ2c' video_id: '6dakIcXUQ2c' date: 2026-07-14 duration_sec: 0 --- # How to Make a Million Dollars on YouTube: Chris Du's Strategy > Source: [How to Make a Million Dollars on YouTube: Chris Du's Strategy](https://youtube.com/watch?v=6dakIcXUQ2c) ## Summary In this interview, YouTube creator Chris Du shares his strategies for building a successful channel and generating significant income. He discusses the 'content triangle' of expertise, utility, and trends, and reveals why he's shifting away from YouTube Shorts despite their massive view counts. ### Key Points - **Content Triangle: Expertise, Utility, Trends** [00:00] — Chris Du explains the three pillars for viral content: expertise (10,000 hours), utility (solving audience pain points), and tapping into trends for massive reach. - **Multiple Revenue Streams** [02:30] — He advocates for multiple income buckets: AdSense, brand deals, affiliate sales, digital products, and consulting services, comparing it to catching rain with many buckets. - **AdSense and CPM Optimization** [04:00] — Chris notes their channel earns ~$11 CPM, but finance/business channels can get $35-40 CPM. Last year they made $350k from AdSense, but it doesn't cover all expenses. - **Brand Deals and Affiliate Sales** [06:00] — Brand deals pay $10k-$60k per integration, but only for products he genuinely uses. Affiliate deals offer commissions per sign-up without upfront payment. - **Digital Products and Consulting** [08:00] — Chris highlights two top products: a group coaching community (Future Pro, $150/month, 650 members) and a $5k business boot camp (50 students per cohort). - **Success Story: From $500 to $10k** [10:00] — A new member of Future Pro used the '100 to 100k' learning track to increase their client fee from $500 to $10k in just three days. - **Shorts vs Long-Form Content** [12:00] — Shorts drive massive subscriber growth (e.g., 40M views on one short) but earn very little ($113). Long-form content is more profitable and builds deeper audience relationships. - **Shifting Strategy Back to Long-Form** [14:00] — Recent data shows a shift: top 10 videos are now 70% long-form, 30% shorts. Chris plans to focus more on long-form content based on algorithm signals. ### Conclusion Chris Du emphasizes that while Shorts can rapidly grow an audience, long-form content remains more profitable and sustainable for building a real business. Diversifying revenue streams and focusing on high-CPM niches are key to maximizing income. ## Transcript chris du started a youtube channel that's generated millions of dollars so i called him to ask him how he does it he told me the things he wished he knew when he started to make money faster revealed what is actually possible for you in terms of income and what he said might just make you realise you're ready to do the same but the thing that shocked me the most was when he revealed why he's abandoning a strategy that picked up almost 100 million views what would be the first three things that you did to sort of set you on the right path to generating a million dollars there's this content triangle if you can hit the content triangle you can have your content be seen by more people i'll refer to it as maybe your viral quotient obviously you don't want to make a video on youtube for only a few people to see it because why be on youtube in the first place you want people to see your art your concept your educational material whatever it is and you want to inspire lots of people it begins with one what is your expertise what are the things that you put a lot of time into studying developing and have put in your what malcolm gladwell will call you like your 10 000 hours of practice so that you're really good at something and if you have multiple areas think about the overlap of those two things for example if you're a lawyer and you're also an aspiring architect that might be the intersection between those two disciplines that make you really unique that's your expertise ideally if you're going to make content on youtube you should have some foundation of that expertise or practice it doesn't mean you have to be formally trained at this but it does mean you need to put in the necessary work to develop and own your craft number two is utility what will be useful to my audience in order to be able to answer that you have to define your audience who they are you have to identify their pain points and challenges and figure out what is it that i can do to help ease the pain that they experience on a daily basis this will be utility it could be inspiration it could be educational it can be motivational there's a lot of different things that you can do but it has to provide utility to your audience otherwise they won't watch it utility could be simply you made me laugh today and that's a good thing the third thing and this is the critical part the part that i don't follow very often to my own dismay which is to tap into trends if you are able to do something that you're an expert at or have expertise in that provides a lot of utility for your audience you'll get views you might get tens 100 000 views but if you want to get millions or tens of millions of views you have to tap into a trend what is the world buzzing about today there are a lot of different ways for creators to make money online from your experience is there a best way to get from zero to a million dollar turnover um i think there are many ways i'm not sure there's the best way i think it's like many buckets catching rain the more buckets that you have the more likely it is that the aggregate total of all that is going to add up to something substantial the easiest way to make money as a youtube creator as a content creator is to turn on adsense and then you don't have to do that much however you can design your content so that it appeals to higher advertising rates so for example we're kind of in middle of the pack i think we're about 11 cpm which is what they pay you per thousand views and that's not too bad eleven dollars but i know people who get thirty five forty dollars they get paid that per thousand views so they have a an audience that's one fifth our size yet they generate as much or if not more ad revenue from the same kinds of videos so a couple things are impacting this they're creating content that appeals to people in the finance and the business sector so i have a friend his name is hector garcia he's doing content to teach people how to use quickbooks and accounting so naturally that's going to appeal towards companies who want to advertise to people who want to spend money either growing their business or that it's a much more business focused channel because we're under a broader category of education and sometimes we talk about design sometimes we talk about marketing it's a little bit harder for an advertiser to say yes i know the audience is worth a lot of money to me and so they're therefore when they bid the ads it's not going to go that high so design your channel to appeal towards an audience that is growing or spending money real estate business finance those things tend to generate a lot more cpm so last year i think we made something around 350 000 in adsense now for some people that's a lot of money for us it is a good amount of money but it's not going to nearly cover the kind of expenses we're spending to produce content for the channel and how we can run our business but it helps out a lot moving on from that if you have brand deals where people are paying you anywhere between 10 to 15 000 to sixty thousand dollars to integrate their product and service into your content you're gonna do much better for yourself where brand deals make a lot of sense is if you're using those products or services let's say it's software the software i normally use over its hardware camera manufacturer wanted to sponsor this show i would say great i already have to love your product or i'm going to need to love it before i agree to anything because i'm putting my name on it and i'm not going to sell my relationship with my audience for something i don't truly believe in oftentimes they can do an affiliate sales deal where they don't give you any money up front but for every person who signs up they might give you 25 or 100 or something like that that's another way for you to make money moving on from that you can probably start launching some kind of product that's going to be a natural extension of what it is that you do on youtube so if you have an educational product if you have presets or color correction tools or templates or things like that people watch your channel like love this how can i get my hands on that i want to save some time so you can sell your own products either on your own platform or some third party where you make a little bit less but you won't have to deal with any customer service and then lastly you can look at creating some kind of consulting service so if you're a youtube optimizer people watch your channel they get a lot of value from that they want to grow their channel they can book you hire you to do some consulting for them and then you can do something like that how you do consultancy services you have mastermind groups you've got digital products you have to pick just one to offer forever from a business point of view which one would it be and why it's a toss-up between two of our highest performing products one is a group coaching community called the future pro people pay us 150 a month to join i just looked at the numbers recently the lifetime of the products generated 1.6 billion dollars in revenue currently we're at 650 members who are paying us 150 a month if you do the math it's a significant amount of money and it requires only for me to work two days a month and those two days i work for two hours so in total i'm working four hours a month to generate that kind of revenue there are a lot more things going on in there but the core of it that's the promise is i'm gonna show up twice a month and i'm doing two hour live coaching call with people and they're happy to join and so if you could do something like that with a smaller community or maybe a few whatever dollar amount that works for you and the value you want to deliver i think that could be really good for you so that's one number two i run something called the business boot camp that's a five thousand dollar course and our last enrollment we had 50 people in it so that's 250 000 in revenue we see this group growing into like 100 students but it's something i do live training with it's eight weeks long it's not scalable because i can't do an infinite number of these you've been in business for for a while working with creators what's the most inspiring success story that you've ever come across in terms of a creator building a business i'll tell you one that happened a couple days ago somebody just joined the feature pro group they're three days into it they used to charge 500 for what they do and they just told me they watch some of the videos that are part of this learning track called 100 to 100 000 which is our commitment this year to get a hundred members to earn a hundred thousand dollars this year this person was just dipping their toes into a few their videos heard what they needed to hear and was thinking about asking for five thousand dollars from the next client and they said to the hell with it i'm going to ask for 10k they said it the other party paused thought about it overnight agreed to it so they went from 500 to 10 000 in three days of being a member and they just posted this testimonial right on our site so we're going to be telling that story pretty soon you've been on youtube for quite a while now and recently you've switched a lot to using youtube shorts they seem to be playing a big part in your channel i know that you've mentioned on other interviews and on twitter that they are growing the channel what i wanted to know is how are they impacting your kind of like sales funnel and business are you seeing them convert to business those views um it's hard for us to track youtube audience and video views to actual revenue because we have almost 2 million subscribers to our youtube channel if each one of them gave me a dollar i'd have 2 million dollars every year it's not even close to that so what you're seeing is a massive drop-off and it's really super hard to track because our videos aren't designed as part of a funnel despite what a lot of critics and trolls might think this is not one giant sales funnel there are a couple of videos that we put out there that are meant to make you aware of our products and services how we keep the lights on but for the most part it's just content and i don't even tell people who i am so what's happening with shorts is it's got really broad reach it's showing our content to people who aren't even searching for it it's hard to search for for shorts you just either see it or you don't you're at the mercy of the algorithm so you're getting first-time people into your ecosystem and depending on the video they they have no idea no context of of who you are what you're trying to do so those people might watch it your subscriber count might go really high but it's not actually them diving into the content in fact it's the people who show up for the longer format videos that i consider more of our audience and so it's a combination of two different things one is expansion of the audience potential and conversion into people watching the longer form content so that we can build a real relationship with them when we started using shorts and they started to hit our channel got a massive boost of people tuning in i want to put some things in perspective it took us two years to get i think 10 000 subscribers to our youtube channel or maybe 20 000 we do those kind of numbers in a month and then some days we'll get as many subscribers that it took us two years to get in one day and so for sure it's growing the audience pretty fast now it seems like based on the latest data that i have on my channel specifically we're starting to see a return of our audience to longer format content because when we look at the top 10 highest performing videos in the last 28 days it used to be dominated by shorts and now it's it's more like 30 70 30 short seventy percent long form content and i think it's a signal at least if i'm just looking at the tea leaves from youtube that shorts is not where they want to bank their future so it's gonna be part of your ongoing strategy then shorts for the foreseeable future or you're going to go back to more long form i might be switching gears pretty soon one of our highest performing videos on on shorts for youtube has 40 million views has barely made us any money at all whereas this live stream that i did from the show floor at adobe max three years ago that's earned 32 000 which is kind of crazy and this short that has 45 million views i think it's made like 113. so tried shorts unsure going back to long-form content for the future yeah i mean i just go where the data tells me right so in the last 28 days we just saw a massive shift from all shorts performing to like only three of the 10 performing so it's probably signal from from youtube and the algorithm that things are changing again there are so many ways for creators to make a living via youtube and thrive but in order to get there you obviously have to build the following and there are without doubt some ways to do this a lot faster than others so if you really want to speed up your growth watch this video next as a youtuber reveals the secret to getting 500 000 subscribers in a year