Can you really make money from YouTube videos for kids crafts?

Search Engines And SEO YouTube
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Okey doke, here’s a slightly random one I’ve been mulling over.

I picked up a batch of short kids craft videos - 30 seconds to a minute each ... all with PLR rights. You can rebrand them, repost them, and technically monetise them. There are over 200 in total.

At first, I thought it sounded ridiculous. I’m in my 50s, my kids are past the glue-and-glitter phase, and I’m definitely not about to sit on camera making paper frogs 😅. But then I started digging into the niche and… it’s surprisingly solid.

Family-friendly content has no expiry date. Parents are always searching “easy crafts for kids” or “rainy day ideas.” Teachers use this stuff too. The engagement on these shorts is wild - the completion rates are high, which the algorithms seem to love.

So I’m wondering: could a simple YouTube Shorts channel posting these daily actually build consistent income? Even if it’s small - a few dollars here and there from ad views, affiliate links, or craft kit promos - it all adds up.

I’m thinking of running a test with a few of these videos on YouTube and maybe Reels to see what happens.

Anyone else here tried monetising short-form content like this? I’ve done SEO and parasite stuff for years, but short video feels like a different beast entirely. Curious if anyone’s cracked it - or if I’m about to waste a few evenings finding out 😂.

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This is probably pushing my skill limit but I'm very interested in setting up a YouTube channel. Just not sure I have enough time to devote to it to make it work.

Wasn't sure what PLR is so I looked it up. Does that mean you can basically just throw up a video a day for 200 days as a kind of 'done for you' kids craft channel?

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Yep, that's exactly it Cyrus. 'Done for you' is the perfect description. PLR usually means you can edit or rewrite, add your own name/brand as the author, sell, give away, or repurpose under your own label. Great for lead-magnets, for example ;-)

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If you are simply posting short videos, then to be eligible for ads, you need 1000 subscribers AND 4000 watch hours OR 10 MILLION shorts views! Not easy as you can imagine! And you can't add clickable links to shorts, only to long-form videos.

But you can add a link from a short video to a long-form video. So, realistically, you need a long-form video with your affiliate links in the description, and then send viewers there by hoping they click the link in the short.

A slightly easier option is TikTok. Once you reach 1000 subscribers, you can add a clickable link in your bio. This can be a LinkTree link, to which you can add your affiliate URLs. Or an Amazon shop if you are accepted as an influencer. And then add a comment to your videos to click the link in your bio.

Getting the 1000 subscribers is not too difficult - follow tons of people, and hope they follow you back. Once qualified, it doesn't matter if your followers later drop below 1000; the link in your bio remains live. I have to say, I have never had one click from my TikTok to my Etsy store!

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@diane Oh … kaaaaayyyy I’m glad I asked!

So maybe YouTube is not the answer then. Had a quick chat with Chatty and it seems Pinterest loves ‘shorts’ style videos. Pushes them pretty hard it seems. As long as you have a business account and a verified domain, you can add links I think.

Diane … you’re the Pinterest oracle. Do you think these PLR kids craft vids would work over there?

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@rohanm Hi Rohan, I'm back, lol! I think it could work, and yes, my short craft videos do work very well on Pinterest. But actual click-throughs, surprisingly, still work the most for regular pictures. Seeing my analytics on Blogtopin, videos get the most impressions and saves, so this is great to grow your audience. But in my case, the most outbound clicks still come from either Ai pictures or regular pictures.

( find a way though, to not show the 'AI-made image' button on your pins, as Pinterest now does this, and this could turn of your audience, which I was afraid of! ). I have read that people are getting tired of only-AI pages, and while they stayed on facebook pages/pinterest pages before that they liked, they now start to leave those pages and block them. Which is given signals to those platforms that the page or pin shouldn't be pushed in the algoritmes anymore.

So either, make terrific, almost undistuingishable AI from reality, or make sure the pin has no trace of being made with AI. When I create an AI pin from Blogtopin, this 'AI' mark doesnt show up, so he is doing a good job in that as well!


That being said: things are moving on Pinterest. I got a terrific mail from Tony Hill, Ill just copy past his text here (it is advised to use his newsletter, I never buy anything from his tool, he is giving away so much good info already lol).

There was this thing with 'visit site' buttons dissapearing, and this was his take on it, but he also talks about how Pinterest decides if your pin is related to your actual post you are refering to, somehow, to decide not the quality of your post, but if you're not linking to anything unrelated to your pin.

(by the way, video pins have their 'visit site' button NOT on the pin, but elsewhere (on laptop, this is for example besides my titles), while pictures DO have them ON the pin. Hence why I get more outbound clicks there I assume!

anyway, this was his mail:

"

Last week I was on vacation, so that means one thing:

Pinterest thought it would be a good time to shake things up!

So now I'm back and mostly caught up.

It seems like the missing "Visit site" button fiasco is back, but with a twist.

Once again, Pinterest has decided to do another round of hiding the "Visit Site" button on pins.

(We also experienced this back in April.)

But this time, it seems to mostly affect logged in users.

The visit site button is still appearing to logged out users when it's gone for logged in users.

This makes it nearly impossible for tools like FlaggedPins and PinClicks to detect which pins have lost the visit site button.

I've been digging into their code to try and find a way, but no luck.

However, I did find something interesting in the code that I'll reveal shortly...

I've been looking at tons of cases of the "Visit site" button being removed from pins.

If you recall, Pinterest removes this button or hides it in the three vertical dots menu when they think the link quality is low.

Actually, I need to correct that last sentence...

I re-read Pinterest's announcement about the Visit Site button, and I caught something this time around that I missed last time...

"In cases where Pinterest can't determine the quality of the landing page linked to from a Pin, or the landing page does not align with the Pin content, the “Visit site” link is in the “…” dropdown menu."

Pinterest is not saying they've determined your landing page to be low-quality... they're saying they can't determine the quality at all, high or low.

Which is interesting, as I'd assume they would hide the button when they determine the page quality is low.

Here is what Pinterest is looking for in terms of page quality:

  • A close connection between the images, text and keywords in your Pin with the details on your landing page
    ​
  • Page loads in under 4 seconds (here's my favorite tool to check this)
    ​
  • Free from spam (including bad ads that can get injected)
    ​
  • Suspicious reviews
    ​
  • Unsafe images

And so far, all of the pins I've looked at had their button removed - they didn't seem to violate any of these issues.

Which tells me this is more of a glitch with Pinterest and their ability to try to determine the quality of a page or pin cohesion (which I'll explain in a minute).

This week I've seen Pinterest creators post screenshots of their responses from Pinterest support.

They've ranged from saying that they acknowledge there's an issue going on with this to... all the way to saying "the visit site button removal is accurate for this pin."

Which tells me they have no idea what's going on either.

Okay, so let's focus on how Pinterest is trying to determine page quality when it comes to our text and images.

When Pinterest crawls the page that a pin links to, it's doing a couple of things to determine a "pin cohesion" score:

  • Analyzing all the words on the page as well as the pin text to determine a relatedness score (which includes text on the pin or the name of the board).
    ​
  • Analyzing the pin image and the images on the page to determine a visual similarity score.
    ​
  • If they can't find the exact image on the page, then they analyze the images for a "semantic similarity" score, where images are visually different but semantically cohesive.

Pinterest is constantly crawling pages that pins link to.

But, it doesn't constantly evaluate the quality - that appears to happen every week or so, depending on many factors.

So to me, it's pretty logical to say that for most bloggers, all their pages or posts are very similar in terms of the design, load time, ads, etc.

But what differs between pages is the pin cohesion score.

And it doesn't seem to be a blanket ban on a URL on your site.

There are cases where two unique pins link to the same URL, but only one has the visit site button removed.

So to me, this means one of two things:

1) The pin that lost the button has issues has a low cohesion score.

2) A glitch.

I'm guessing for 90% of those affected by this are in the glitch category.

Okay, so let's get really practical here...

What you can do

If you are 100% certain the quality of your page is high: no excessive ads, pop-ups, loads under 4 seconds, and pin text and images match what's on the page...

  • Contact Pinterest support and give them links to example pins that have had their visit button removed and ask to re-evaluate. I'd start by checking all your top pins in Pinterest Analytics.
  • Post your issue in the Pinterest community, so we can all make some noise to official channels. Create a new topic. Their mods will likely merge it to an existing post, but that's okay. The goal is to get their attention and get them a little overwhelmed with all the people publicly reporting this issue.
    ​
  • For Pinterest bot to recrawl your URL by either posting a new pin to it or adding a comment to one of your top pins that lost the visit site button. This could potentially add the URL into a queue for reevaluation of quality. It's not going to be immediate and this is just a theory of mine.

Then just give this some time for them to sort out... at least a few weeks.

Guess what's back?

The "save" metric for any pin!

A month or so ago Pinterest removed the save count in the code for all pins.

But this update that they rolled out on October 13th-ish brought it back.

However, the save numbers aren't always 100% accurate...

If you use a Chrome extension like Sort Pin, look at the save count it shows vs what Pinterest shows you on the stats page for that pin (select lifetime stats).

By the way, I never use Chrome extensions like Sort Pin to see pin stats because I analyzed the way they get those stats and found it's making YOU break Pinterest's Terms of Service. Too risky for me!

All of my tools get all the pin stats for you using our servers and IPs and not your computer and is never associated with your personal IP address.

That's why I use PinClick's Pin Stats tool to get everything I need.

We'll be adding the pin saves metric back into PinClicks soon if we see Pinterest is going to keep it around!

Thanks for reading and hit reply with any questions :) "

 

@Andy: this information from Tony Hill could be very interesting for you as well and your new tool!

All the best,

Recharged Lizzy from the African sun hahaha

PS; this lacking of a visit site button on pins, hasn't happened to me (yet?), and my traffic has grown even, so I think I'm still good using Blogtopin!
Cant wait for his Facebook option, cause I'm just too lazy to restart my hacked miniature fb account lol. Although I need to diversify to get my traffic even higher now that I'm on Mediavine. And honestly, as Blogtopin is taking pictures from my website, only sometimes I use AI for some particular pins, would be sooo much better for my niche, they hate AI. I think the whole crafting niche does.

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By the way, I recently found out, when you place a link to an article in the comment section, so not the description of your short YouTube video, it DOES GET SEEN on mobile! So there could still be an opportunity to do so! I don't know how much percentage of people now watch Youtube on mobile, but I can imagin this being high and growing immensily, because people now prefer to watch short videos!

I've already got some traffic from Youtube from shorts to my mini site, so I'm still creating shorts for both of my sites.

Also, the community tab, when your channel has grown, has great potential for linking to your site and can get quite popular with likes, in my case.

So my procedure these days whenever I post a new blog post is: index request on bing, fix the alt texts on all my pictures, post a short on youtube, link to it in the comment section, and on my community tab, put it on facebook, for pinterest I'm using blogtopin and it will come round to it anyway, and if I dont forget: post it on Reddit and Instagram (ugh, don't like it, hence why I 'forget' it , lol. And then share it in my newsletters.

So even if you cant monetize Youtube, because you need the watchhours and such, it can still be useful in my opinion! I just need to do more of what I say myself hahahaha

 

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@ohnoo_not_her Lots of fascinating information here, thank you! I wonder if the Pinterest account for this forum isn't doing particularly well, because it doesn't have any images; therefore, Pinterest has nothing to compare to. Although, of course, it's not a super popular niche on Pinterest.

As regards Rohan, which I am sure he will tell you, he doesn't actually have a website for these kids' videos, so that's why he was hoping to make money from ads or affiliate links.

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@ohnoo_not_her Welcome back Lizzy. Sounds like you enjoyed Africa and are full of beans, ready to go! :-) …

Wow! That’s a goldmine of info. Thanks so much. I had to read it twice just to keep up 😂

Didn’t even know Pinterest was tagging stuff as “AI-made.” That’s slightly terrifying. I’ve clearly been living under a rock while everyone else became Pinterest scientists. Blogtopin sounds interesting though.

The YouTube comment trick is pure genius too. I never would’ve thought of that. It’s those little platform quirks and loopholes I'm looking for. And you’re right - I imagine most people are watching on mobile now (like me), so that might actually be a sneaky way to get clicks through.

I love the idea of using shorts just to feed traffic elsewhere. I was fixated on monetisation through ads, but it might make more sense as a feeder channel to something else - like a quick lead-gen page.

Pinterest or YouTube ... which way to go? Decisions decisions, lol.

Anyway, this thread’s turned into a mini-masterclass already. I might have to print it out and stick it to my fridge so I don’t forget half of it 😅

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@rohanm well, its also because I am on Youtube for quite some years now, as with Pinterest. I had the watchhours and subscriptions in about a year back then, but monetization was very low, I guess it's my niche also.

Also I was thinking: how can it be that comments links don't work anymore, they used to always have worked, that's impossible to gain a lot of ad money, when the focus is on shorts, unless you have millions of views!

Then one day I was uploading them from my phone, and there you go, the comment link was visible. This is how I am using Youtube nowadays, I'm not focused on the ad money any longer, tried for too damn long, and it was a lot of energy and time waisted. and even money, because I had projects done with the help of someone on fiver as well.


But when I have a miniature project, I create a blog post with step by step pictures, and then just create a very short video with the result, and bam: link to the blog post.

And the silly thing is, that the ad income doesn't go down, it remains stable at a low amount of about 30 bucks per month, without too many long form videos anymore, lol!

Gosh, I am exploring so many more things these days. Instead of doing the craft videos and blog posts myself, I could just ask chat GPT about other ideas on how to build something miniature, and after the conversation, I can ask it to summarize the tutorial with pictures. Just found that out today actually!

Maybe you could do something similar with the kids crafts idea.

I have been creating a miniature bar diorama, the scale is on 1:22 or maximum 1:24. So I couldn't find a good dollhouse beer tap for the life of me in that scale, especially not from Europe, having something like that shipped from the US or UK, would cost too muchin transport costs.

So I asked Chat GPT today how I could make one myself and started brainstorming and asking it for real-scale examples, and how I could use everyday materials to replicate it in a mini size.
this was the temporary result:



[attach]2353[/attach]

I was pretty surprised with this result! (this double beer tap does actually exist in real size), kind of lol : https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-cznxq08r7/images/stencil/1280x1280/products/902/3055/619b_double_tap_brass_draft_beer_kegerator_tower_-_3-inches_diameter_0009__73391.1590768384.jpg?c=1

 

Have it brainstorm ideas on projects, create a good prompt around it, have it create tutorials in bulk and even pictures with step by step instructions, create a short around it, and just upload it on both pinterest and Youtube, and get your traffic from there, because why not?

I am on it again hahahaha, you're welcome!

 

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example of many pins with the label 'AI modified' on it: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/545428204892982752/
if I would put that picture with the beertap straight on my pinterest account, that label would also show on my pin.

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Brilliant! Thanks Lizzy :-)

So, forget about YouTube revenue. I must admit, I always thought that would be a bit of a tall order anyway. I'm thinking maybe funnel viewers to an 'exclusive members area' (via an email list) where I provide more value for free and slowly soft-promote affiliate products like that.

I need to take some time off-work and get this set-up!

Of course, I could always just sell all the PLR content in one hit and let someone else think of ways to monetise! In fact, that might be a good shout!

Here's an example of one of the vids. What do you think?

[attach]2354[/attach]

 

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@rohanm looks pretty good! in the past, you could definitely see if it’s AI from the fingers and hands, but these nails even look a bit ‘dirty’, like mine can be when I’m crafting lol. Sounds like a good idea! Good luck!

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@ohnoo_not_her thanks Lizzy!

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@ohnoo_not_her Yeah, we're working on some of those features. Thanks for the share - I must have missed that email.

Just a note, the visit site button is actually back for a lot of accounts now, though you really have to check your outbound clicks to determine whether or not they've been fully restored on your account.

 

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So, I don't know how these shorts were created, but I do know that Youtube also came out recently and said that anything that was AI generated or 'low quality', they weren't going to monetize at all (That was around the same time when my AI generated "Heavy Metal Gregorian Chant" YT channel idea went out the window too, lol).

You also want to see if there is a way to see how many other people are using what you bought - if enough people have used the same videos on TikTok or Pinterest, then it may lower your reach.

Having said that, we just recently bought a bunch of coloring page PLR, and have had good success with putting that on Pinterest. At least our metrics are starting to go in the right direction, so it may be worth trying it on Pinterest.

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@andy damn it, I used to procrastinate but now I just don’t know … lol. Now here’s Diggity telling me “YouTube gets cited 200x more than any other video platform in ChatGPT and Perplexity” …

Pinterest

YouTube

Pinterest

YouTube

Maybe I’ll flip a coin … heads!

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@andy that’s what I thought, you can’t even monetize AI any longer on Youtube, it was nice while it lasted for the people who jumped on early on. But you can still do the ad-arbitrage to a website. Then again, you need to be able to join an ad company that allows AI only - lol. And that won’t be mediavine or Raptive, I think. Although I very much disliked Ezoïc, I’ve read some pretty good reviews about them lately, so it might be worth a shot. Apparently, they changed quite a lot with higher rates and much better customer service.

@rohan, why not try both at the same time? I don’t think you would need to change the video format for the different platform, not sure if that’s worth it at all, they both are vertical. You could use exactly the same titles and descriptions, and just copy paste the whole thing. Not sure if the algoritms care if its not the ‘right format for their platform’. I’d say, give it a few months on both, and see where it goes!

here’s a guide to warm up a Pinterest account: https://www.blogtopin.com/growth-guide

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@andy yeah thanks for the mention, apparently it was a glitch, what a relief! :slight_smile:

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@ohnoo_not_her good idea Lizzy :-)

 

It will come down to time for me. This is only really a little side project as the kids craft content was a bonus download with a whole load more PLR content in another niche entirely (which I really should focus on first) ... lol

 

But there's some really great info in this thread which applies equally to both niches so I'm very thankful for everyone's input!