Best Affiliate Influencer YouTube Channels and How Much They Earn

YouTube is an awesome platform to start affiliate marketing and affiliate influencers on the platform are some of the highest earners.

Affiliate marketing is an online marketing business where affiliates generate revenue by adding affiliate links for products or services they recommend to videos they create and upload.

YouTube is an online community of about 2 billion users and is a great avenue to build steady traffic. YouTube users watch over 1 billion videos in a single day and leverage it to have a successful affiliate career. The YouTube community is full of all kinds of content creators.

YouTube influencer/marketer channels are a way of keeping up with the latest trends in just about any and every niche. It also serves as a networking corridor for newbie marketers to connect with seasoned influencers and learn from their experiences.

Becoming a Pro YouTube Influencer or Marketer

Becoming an affiliate influencer and amassing huge followership on YouTube isn’t as an easy task as it sounds. Many of the most successful YouTube affiliate marketers today took years in gathering the large followers or subscriber base they have.

Whichever way, all affiliate influencers have one thing in common. They all require a business channel on YouTube to share their videos and communicate with their audience. We will go over some basics that are needed to be an efficient and effective affiliate influencer on YouTube.

Content is king

This is most likely the most important aspect of your affiliate influencer journey on YouTube. All successful affiliate influencers will tell you to always create value for your viewers.

You stand a better chance of succeeding in your influencing business if you can inspire your subscribers to perform an action. Such as learning a new language, using a certain tool, or even something as basic as losing weight, just about whatever you advise them to do.

Encourage your audience to take action. This encouragement should be in your content. You as an affiliate influencer can give tutorials, life-hacks, and snippets of advice with useful information to your viewers in your videos.

Become the Expert

You can’t be an influencer in any field if you are not an expert in that field. Unlike written content that can be outsourced, video contents are a bit more technical. While it’s not entirely impossible to outsource your videos, it is advisable to always be the face of your channel.

If you plan on promoting gadgets, then you should be familiar with what the features of a good gadget should be; if the sport is the product you want to promote, then you should be familiar with sports routines and languages.

This doesn’t mean you have to learn everything there is to learn about a topic. All you need is the basics. Avoid lying or providing false information, this will hurt you and you will lose your subscribers. The key here is to keep studying and developing your knowledge on your chosen topic. How to do this? Read books, conduct research, watch other videos and adopt practices of other experts in your area.

Believe in your content

One way an affiliate influencer stirs up the interest of the audience is via his/her passion displayed in their video content. If you create content with a lack lustra attitude, chances are it will appear very boring to your audience.

To avoid this, be the biggest fan of the product you are promoting. Give insights about the product, relish your audience with some secrets, discuss the product as a user and not as a seller, and always seek their opinion.

Be emotional positively in your videos and interact with the audience. Some notable affiliate influencers even go the distance by offering their audience the ability to choose the next topic for the next video.

Assume the position of a friendly face which your audience can trust for help and advice when they need it most.

Prioritize quality over quantity

One of the most important things to remember is to never chase after the number of subscribers/viewers. If anything, research has shown that huge numbers of subscribers don’t necessarily translate to a successful channel.

And even YouTube itself ranks Engagement and not the number of subscribers. If you have a large number of viewers/subscribers and only a few of them react to your video, then that is a red flag that you aren’t doing something right.

Getting more and more subscribers may look good but you need them to interact and engage with your content. More subscribers with fewer interactions will only confuse your statistics and put a dent in your affiliate marketing earnings.

Build a community around your brand

Work on developing a relationship with your subscribers. Pay attention to your audience and try as much as possible to respond to all queries from them.

Since they will watch your videos, it’s important for you to interact with them. By building this relationship, they are more likely to listen to your opinion. And by extension, you will be creating a strong community around your channel that will support and even promote your content. When the audience likes a channel, they are quick to recommend it to friends, family, and colleagues.

Collaborate with other influencers

Audiences are like sponges and they like to soak up as much information as possible as they can, so long they like it. It’s only natural to see them subscribe to other channels. That doesn’t mean they will leave you. For instance, if an audience wants to attain fitness by eating healthy, it makes more sense for that audience to subscribe to several channels to garner more information. Affiliate influencers need not worry about this development. Rather they can leverage this by collaborating with other affiliate influencers to further attract viewers to your channel.

Some of the Best Affiliate Influencers on YouTube

Influencers have a huge power of words and the ability to wield that influence over a large audience. They are able to sway consumers’ decisions in favor of any product or service they deem fit for use or they promote.

While a seasoned influencer has no problem in using these powers to attain financial stability, a newbie needs time to learn the roads. In our series of affiliate marketing, you’ve learned about what affiliate marketing entails, the various platforms to engage in affiliate marketing, and the affiliate programs themselves.

Learning all these can be interesting at the onset but with time newbies can easily tire out and lose steam. In this article, we’ve compiled the success stories of a few well-known YouTube affiliate influences. These stories are meant to spur you into reaching new heights with your affiliate career.

So read on and learn from some experts.

Ryan’s World

Nine-year-old Ryan Kaji is the highest-paid YouTube affiliate influencer. He has been able to garner an incredible amount of subscribers in excess of more than 41.7 million subscribers to his YouTube channel. In 2020, he signed a deal with Amazon to star in its first original long-form original for Kids+, Super Spy Ryan. To add to that, Ryan also has his own show on Nickelodeon as well as a line of toys and clothes with a juicy deal from Hulu.

Ryan’s began his YouTube channel in 2015 when his parents, Shion and Loann, started uploading videos of him unboxing toys. People soon got caught in the frenzy and would often get toys Ryan unboxes in his videos gathering over 43.4 billion views. Ever since then, the channel has seen a sharp growth and Ryan doesn’t just cover toys anymore but also educational materials.

Recently, Ryan started conducting science experiments on his YouTube channel and is currently working off YouTube to build his clothing and toy lines. During the 94th annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a superhero version of Ryan, Red Titan, floated in the parade.

The bulk of his business comes from licensing deals for more than 5,000 Ryan’s World products ranging from bedroom decor and action figures to masks and walkie-talkies. Ryan’s channel usually publishes a video every day or so, ranging from just a few minutes to over an hour and including vlogs, product reviews and unboxing, science experiments, and much more.

Estimated Earnings: $30 million

Like Nastya

Anastasia Radzinskaya is one of YouTube’s youngest affiliate influencers and among YouTube’s highest-paid. She clocked six years of age in January 2021. She is a Russian-American content creator who regularly gets help from her father to create entertaining and educational content. And at more than 190 million subscribers, with a total view of around 40 billion.

Her channels create content in seven languages for her global audience. Several of her YouTube channels such as Like Nastya, Like Nastya Vlog, Stacy Toys, Funny Stacy, and Like Nastya Show are been maintained by her parents.

Anastasia’s major channel, Like Nastya, started off as a toy unboxing channel before branching into a travel channel and showcasing videos of the family’s visits to amusement parks around the world. These days, she posts a few times each week and focuses more on the entertainment content she creates with her dad.

Estimated Earnings: $18 million

Dan TDM

Dan Middleton also referred to as Dan TDM, is a YouTube affiliate influencer and specializes in the gaming niche. He is well known for his Minecraft and Fortnite videos.

Dan TDM has built a subscribers base of over 24.2 million with a total view of around 17.5 billion in one year. He spends quality time creating his content especially staying on top of everything and anything Minecraft, including recording and editing videos.

In 2016, Dan diversified his channel, adding more games like Roblox and Tomodachi Life to his Minecraft offering. He also released a graphic novel, Trayaurus and the Enchanted Crystal the same year. His books sat on the number one spot on The New York Times best-seller list for hardcover graphic books for almost 11 weeks.

Dan starred in a YouTube Red web series called DanTDM Creates a Big Scene, starring alongside other social media influencers in 2017. The series ran for six episodes.

He now creates contents geared towards community Discord challenges, reaction videos, and playing random video games.

Estimated Earnings: $18.5 million

PewDiePie

PewDiePie is a popular brand name among YouTube affiliate influencers. Therefore it’s no surprise that he also ranks as one of YouTube’s highest-paid.

Felix Kjellberg’s YouTube channel was once the most-subscribed channel on the platform in August 2013 held that position until early 2019. He was subsequently surpassed by the Indian record label T-Series. With more than 26 billion views, PewDiePie ranks as the 19th most-viewed channel on YouTube and a subscriber base of around 108 million.

In the beginning, his YouTube content was niched down on Let’s Play videos where he ran commentaries on games in the horror genre. His commentaries were some of his most popular content. Eventually, he started creating walkthrough contents of other games. He became popular due to the friendly and personable way he communicated with his audience during walkthroughs.

According to Variety, he “acts like he’s spending time with a friend.” As his popularity has grown, PewDiePie’s content has expanded to include vlogs, comedy skits, and shows.

PewDiePie’s YouTube influencer career has been flooded with controversies. His regular use of racial and homophobic slurs, sharing anti-Semitic language and imagery creates fallout.

Estimated Earnings: $15.5 million

Mr. Beast

Jimmy Donaldson aka Mr. Beast has been on YouTube since around 2011. And he is one of the platform’s most influential affiliate marketers. His earlier content was mostly Let’s Plays. His popularity boomed in 2017 with his “counting to 100,000” video in which he, counted to 100,000.

Mr. Beast’s YouTube channel has an impressive subscriber base of 47 million and a total view of around 8 billion. He’s best known for expensive stunts focusing on philanthropy; Mr. Beast often posts videos where he is seen donating large sums of money.

While many of the videos are sponsored mostly by coupon company Honey, he has made donations without a sponsor in the past, putting up his own money.

Estimated Earnings: $12 million

Conclusion

No doubt, YouTube affiliate influencers earn big. But earning big doesn’t happen overnight. It takes years of constant effort on the part of the influencer in choosing a great product to promote. He/she then has to create equally awesome content around the product, constantly engage with audiences and keep them entertained.

The remarkable success stories of a few YouTube affiliate influencers shared here should help you take your affiliate career seriously. We hope to see you earning high or even more than some of the heavy hitters on this list.