Hi, I’m Ryan and I’m a YouTuber.
Now, most of the time when I first meet someone and they ask me what I do for a living that’s
the short version of my response.
95% of the time the follow up question to that is “How do you make money?”
And the short version is, advertisers.
But it’s not a normal payment salary schedule.
You’ve heard it from the royalty of YouTube all the way down to the bottom feeders.
January income on YouTube is the same thing as being constipated on the toilet, a few
pebbles might come out, but it really wasn’t the big load you were hoping for.
And you might be thinking “Wow Ryan, you’re really complaining because your cushy comfy
crusty job gets a tinnie bit more difficult?”
Sorry, I really made you sound like a dickbag there, my bad.
But it’s a good question.
YouTuber’s are always complaining about the beginning of the year and how we are barely
scraping by, but we rarely provide you with any evidence to really back that up.
So I had a thought: what if I showed you exactly how much we made, but not just that, what
if I showed you how much the channel made per video, per view even, where it all comes
from and why we struggle to make it through the first couple months of every year.
The money side of YouTube is a complete mystery too for many people because there just isn’t
that much information out there.
Let’s face it, like the rest of YouTube, the corporate entity that secretly lords power
above us all isn’t exactly open about the finances behind YouTube.
If you’re not in the YouTube sphere how would you have any idea the range of income
a YouTuber can make?
Allow me to be your guide into the back end of YouTube, to show you just how crazy rich
we are.
Or not.
So without further ado, here’s exactly how much Treesicle made over the month of January.
Behold!
The line of money!
This line signifies every penny that was unceremoniously placed into the Treesicle coffers from you
wonderful viewers who are nice enough to watch advertisements on our videos.
And that line equals a total of...Yo, can you unblur that a little bit okay there we
go.
Just over $4,000.
Now I would show you the exact number but I don’t want our Google overlords to bring
the hammer down on us...since we’re in the grey area disclosing this information.
See, YouTube doesn’t actually allow us to tell you the exact amount we make.
In fact we’re not allowed to say a variety of things we want to.
We can’t disclose our estimated monetized playbacks and other stats that I was going
to go into in this video.
So here’s the solution that hopefully won’t get us screwed over.
We show you the first number so you have an idea, but not the whole number so our channel
gets indefinitely demonetized.
Sounds good?
But while we’re on the subject it really sucks that we aren’t actually allowed to
share this information...but, I get it.
From a business standpoint, there’s good reasoning behind it.
Because a big thing to note is Adsense is not limited to ads on YouTube videos, but
ads everywhere on the internet.
And, while Google has a monopoly via Adsense on YouTube ads, they just hold one section
of the market via internet advertisements.
In a day and age where apps collect your personal information and are able to sell it to the
highest bidder, information is power, and I’m sure Google doesn’t want their information
getting to the public if there’s no real reason for it.
Still, it’s no wonder people have such a skewed sense of the income of YouTubers when
we LEGALLY can’t tell you what we make.
But as usual, YouTube wants to keep everyone in the dark about the behind the scenes analytics.
Now I could end the video right here.
I gave you the amount as close as I could, right?
But there’s no context around it, nothing to tell you whether that’s a good number
or a bad number.
It’s like a dick pic without a watch or ring next to it.
You need something to compare it to before deciding if you want to jump on it.
So let’s take a look at the month before it.
In December, we made about double that, hitting in the $8,000 range.
So as you can see, the jump from December to January is pretty harsh.
But I haven’t even put it completely in perspective yet.
Our views in December were actually less than our views in January, so not only are we seeing
a 50% drop, but we’re seeing that despite the channel getting more views overall.
So what does this all mean?
Well many of you might see a figure like $4,000 something dollars and look at me like I’m
an idiot to even mention that it dropped from $8,000.
It’s still a hefty chunk of change right?
Even if that’s all the channel made every month the channel is still making somewhere
in the $50,000 a year range.
A decent salary, better than a starting teacher’s income.
But you have to remember one thing.
It’s not just me on this channel.
That 4,000ish dollars is being split between four incredibly sexy people.
And when you take into account rent, car payments, cell phone bills, utilities, groceries and
everything else that goes into a month’s worth of bills, well, to put it lightly I
can pay my rent and buy a sandwich and January’s income would be gone.
And honestly, that’s not an exaggeration.
Now obviously this isn’t something I’m complaining about.
I love being a YouTuber and wouldn’t trade it for the world, but it brings up some interesting
questions doesn’t it?
If the channel was getting more views on January than December, why is the income so much less?
The answer lies in a stat called Monetized Playbacks.
If you’ve ever done some back end exploring on a monetized channel, you’ve likely checked
out the Revenue Reports.
YouTube is able to break down your revenue by video, date, country, as well separate
revenue streams by the type of ad that’s played.
For example, you can see that the vast majority of ads played on our channel are skippable
video ads, those ads that have the 5 second skip button and are currently dominated by
Tik Tok.
But let’s check out Estimated Monetized Playbacks.
This is where you can see exactly how many ads played on the channel per day and compare
it to views.
Comparing December versus January once again gives us a ton of information.
Regardless of the channel getting 400,000 more views in January, there were around 200,000
less ads played compared to December.
Again, we can’t show you the exact amount, so you’ll have to take my word for it.
But further down the column we can take a look at the CPM of each month individually.
In case you don’t know what CPM means, it’s the average income a channel makes per 1,000
views.
So in December, every 1,000 views made 5 something dollars, whereas in January, it was only in
the 3 dollar range.
Oh and you might be wondering why the column for “YouTube Ad Revenue” has higher numbers
than our total income for either month.
That column shows the total income made before YouTube takes their cut.
I feel like a lot of people forget that YouTube takes a significant portion of the revenue
YouTuber’s generate.
We’re contractually not allowed to say the exact amount.
But many other people, not us, have said it’s 45%.
We didn’t say that though, they did.
The other question that comes to mind is how a difference in 200,000 ads played, or about
15% fewer ads, equals a 50% drop in income.
When we’re talking about over a million ads played each month, you’d expect a proportional
drop in ads played in relation to the income drop right?
The reason this doesn’t correspond is actually quite simple: January is a bad season for
advertising.
In fact the first few months of the year are always bad for advertising.
Whereas we see a significant boost once Summer comes around an an even bigger boost once
we get into the last few months of the year.
As the year progresses those ad slots at the beginning of videos become more and more valuable.
People are more likely to spend money during the summer and the most likely to spend money
during the holidays.
Tis the season so to speak.
Whereas January is right after all the major holidays.
People are wiped from gift giving, from traveling, from vacationing.
Meaning they are less likely to spend money on what an advertisement shows them because
they already spent it somewhere else the month before.
Advertisers know this, so they’re aren’t willing to pay as much for their ads to run.
This is why we get discrepancies between CPM’s month to month.
Advertisers are willing to pay more based on the time of year.
However, the drop at the beginning of the year is worse than the increase at the end.
I don’t think we’ve ever doubled a regular month in december.
It’ll get a bit better, but it won’t exactly offset the halfling that happens in January.
I think a lot of this helps dispel the myth that YouTubers are these crazy rich people
who just got lucky enough to land an audience on YouTube.
On the contrary, I could easily make more money doing a variety of different things.
Before becoming a full-time YouTuber, I coded.
I got a degree in Computer Science.
And I was making more than double what I am making now as a YouTuber.
This idea that YouTube pays well only supports the upper echelon of YouTubers.
If you’re getting 10 million views or more a month, you’re making a good salary, but
no one would consider you to be crazy wealthy.
At least, not based off of our CPM.
A channel’s CPM differs for a variety of reasons, a channel like ours won’t get the
same income per 1000 views as say, a makeup channel.
It’s different audiences, different companies that want to advertise.
And also the degree to which a channel is “family friendly” - which YouTube doesn’t
seem to think we are.
It’s why websites like social blade have such a massive range for monthly earnings.
But wait, we’re not even done yet!
Guess who also takes a cut from every month of YouTube ad revenue?
That group of wonderful MCN friends.
Who, we kinda went into in a previous video.
So YouTube takes their cut, then the MCN takes their cut, and then we finally get paid.
And just a fun note, we also don’t know what day we’re going to get paid.
Since it goes through the MCN first it completely depends on them, sometimes we get it early,
or sometimes it’s the day rent is due.
It’s not nerve racking at all!
So there you have it, not only the kinda sorta exact amount made in the month of January
for the Treesicle channel, but all the backend stuff to explain how and why we made what
we did.
The monetization of YouTube has been a mystery to a large group of people for a long time,
but there’s nothing to hide about it, and hopefully this has given you a better perspective
on what we and other creators go through during this time of year.
Especially for channels who have a team operating behind the scenes, like us, it makes revenue
sources outside of YouTube that much more important.
It’s why we get sponsors, why we sell merchandise, why we have a patreon, and do Twitch streams.
Though the Twitch streams are more just for fun (every weekday at 3PM PST).
But all these “extra” things are what keep us afloat.
Speaking of ships, I’m going to go buy a yacht with all my YouTube money now.
Cuz that’s totally a thing I can do now that you’ve seen our ad sense!
But before I go, let me know if you like deeper dives into more informative videos, like this
one.
I really enjoying making content on these real life issues and questions.
So let me know in the comments.
Oh!
We also have a super special surprise this coming Saturday, the 23rd!
So follow Twitter, come to the channel, set your phones, check your watches, do people
still even wear watches?
Whatever.
Thanks fos for watching everybody!
My name’s Ryan, and we’ll see you then!