- How much money did YouTube pay me
for my most popular video with over one million views?
Well, today we're gonna find out.
Hey everybody, this is Roberto Blake,
helping you create something awesome today.
Welcome back to the channel.
For the new people here, first of all, welcome.
Thanks for watching.
My name is Roberto Blake.
I'm an entrepreneur, public speaker.
And today we're gonna talk about YouTube,
we're gonna talk about my YouTube AdSense earnings.
In a previous video I showed you
how much money I make on YouTube.
Today we're gonna see what YouTube paid me
for a video with over one million views.
We're also gonna look at a 90-day cycle
where I did a million views on a channel
and how much YouTube paid me for that.
I'm gonna tell you the truth
about making money on YouTube ads.
The reason I wanted to do this video is
there is so much misinformation out there
about YouTube and how much YouTubers earn.
It's a topic of speculation,
and often the media gets it wrong.
But you also have a lot of videos
that I just feel like cover this topic
and they don't do it well.
Now, there's some great channels
that have done an amazing job with it.
But there's just a lot of information you don't know
if you're trying to become a YouTuber.
And I wanna try and debunk some things
that might be out there.
A lot of you might have heard that you make 25 to $2 CPMs,
and that's not entirely true
and that's not what you could call normal.
There is no normal in YouTube.
So that information is a baseline that people like to use
to speculate on how much money YouTubers make.
If you go to Social Blade,
you'll see a lot of information
about how much money YouTubers make,
but it doesn't account for anything.
It doesn't account for what country their views are in,
it doesn't talk about any of the really deep dive stuff
that helps you get higher CPM rates,
and the numbers are just inaccurate.
If you've seen my videos,
and you'll see the data here for yourself,
those numbers are not accurate at all
with regard to how much money I make,
so they're probably not accurate
with how much money most people make
or even what you can expect to make.
Now, my most popular video on YouTube is
"Passive Income: 10 Ways to Make Passive Income Online."
I published this video back in May of 2016.
Now, according to YouTube Analytics,
that video, for 1.4 million views,
earned me $9,836 and 32 cents
as of the making of this video.
So, that's actually really good.
And for 1.4 million views, that's a lot of money.
It had an average CPM of about $12 and 32 cents.
So, nice, right?
Now, that video is one that took off over a period of time,
as you can see.
And for years after I published it,
it was still making me money,
it was still making me real passive income,
making me hundreds of dollars a month.
Long after I published this video,
there were months back to back
where I was making five or $600 off of this one video,
every single month, which is insane.
That is crazy to think about.
Now, there are other videos that I've done
that are close to that in terms of what they earned,
and they did it with a lot less views.
So, I'll give you an example.
And example of that would be a video that I did
on affiliate marketing step by step.
It's another one of these videos
in terms of how to make money online,
$100 a day in passive income.
That video did 133,103 views,
so about 130k views.
And it did $3,024 and 70 cents in revenue.
Not bad at all.
If it had had 10 times as many views,
just like the previous video,
then it might have made me as much as,
you know, if we're doing the math here,
$30,000 on the video.
Now, it probably would've been less,
but it still probably would've been close to 20,000
if I had gotten that video to a million
because that video has extraordinarily high CPM rates.
So, when you really think about it,
when you look at these videos, they're widely different.
And the data here is crazy
in terms of how much a video can be worth.
Now, there is a video where I did 360,000 views.
"How to Get 10,000 Subscribers in YouTube."
That video did $2,546.
So, that is a big gap between 130,000
doing more money than that.
And why is that different?
Why are two videos on the same channel
getting widely different ad rates?
Why do they have widely different CPM rates?
Because the videos reach different audiences.
Even though my core audience is a little bit older,
when people wanna know how to grow on YouTube,
you get a little bit of a younger audience on those videos,
and you get people from all over the world
watching those things.
And based on age and demographics, geography,
there are a lot of factors that go into
what ads play on a video.
A video that talks about money or passive income
will get completely different ads
from a video talking about social media
or anything entertainment-based or popular.
Or a vlog will not make nearly as much money
as a video that is on personal finance or real estate
or, again, marketing.
They'll pull completely different advertisers
and a completely different audience
that is valued differently.
And so it's going to be worth more money
to do some categories in YouTube
than other categories in YouTube.
I would say the lowest CPMs are probably in comedy
and in gaming and maybe even vlogging.
So, you just have to think about what ads
could possibly run against your videos,
what brands would market against those videos,
and how much do they sell a product for.
How much is advertising worth to them?
What are their budgets like?
So, these are things you really have to think about.
There's also the simple fact
that not all videos are monetized equally.
Just because you got views
doesn't mean those views had ads attached to them.
Now, a lot of people think that I run
multiple mid-roll ads on my videos.
And I don't.
I very rarely put a mid-roll ad in a video.
I do it on occasion, but most of my videos,
if you're a long-time viewer,
you know that I have an ad at the beginning of a video
and an ad at the end of a video,
and that's usually it.
Now, what a lot of popular YouTubers will do
because their ads CPMs are so low,
they have to do multiple ads in the middle of a video
to really make any significant money on AdSense.
That's why so many YouTubers do sponsorships
and merchandise and other things to be able to make money.
And I don't fault them for that at all.
I have always talked about the fact
that you need to diversify your income
and that AdSense is not a stable way to make money,
and that's why I'm making this video
and why it's so important.
Now, all that being said,
I wanna show you something really interesting.
And to do that I'm gonna have a mid-roll ad right here.
(gentle electronic music)
Now, if you got through that mid-roll ad,
assuming you saw one,
then I want you to understand something.
Whatever advertisement you just watched
is considered a monetized view.
And for most YouTubers, the far majority of their videos,
the ads on the video show up on only 30% or less
of all the views that they get.
Now, in other niches,
specific niches like entertainment or gaming,
a lot of those people might have Adblock,
and so less of their views are monetized.
More than 60 to 80% of my views
are monetized in a given period.
Which means that, for me,
I actually do a lot better than most YouTubers
in terms of my views getting ads playing on them,
and so I would make more money on those views,
even if I get less of them.
So, that's just kind of a given
with what happens in my channel.
And that's different than other people.
I don't say that to brag,
I say that to just give you the real example
of why would somebody who has less views
stand to make more money on YouTube.
Because it's possible.
And also, if you're a smaller channel,
maybe that makes you a little bit optimistic.
Maybe you're a little bit more optimistic
about what your earning potential on YouTube could be.
Now, let's look at the last 90 days.
So, in the last 90 days,
and I'm pulling the data here on my laptop,
it looks like the battery is gonna die,
just a little over a million views
that's worth over $7,000 on my channel.
So, as you can see,
there's a lot of opportunity for you here in YouTube.
Depending on what category of YouTube you're doing,
it might be more worthwhile in ads,
but otherwise you might need to look
at other revenue streams.
CPM rates are not guaranteed.
As you can see, you might be getting
25 cents per CPM rates, or $25,
and it really depends on what the videos are
and also whether they are monetized.
You might not be worth as much
in terms of monetized views if you're cursing,
anything extreme or covering sensitive subjects.
So, that matters.
Channel authority and watch time matters more than views.
Cash over clout, my friends, cash over clout.
I keep saying it in Twitter.
Follow me on Twitter at @RobertoBlake
if you're not already, by the way.
So, let's talk about some ways
that you can make more money on YouTube.
I think that's really important.
We saw what a million views is worth,
but I don't need a million views
to be successful in YouTube
and to make a substantial amount of money.
We also know that that's not the money that I make
every single month.
I make money off of affiliate marketing
through the links that I use in the description
for camera gear or for products.
We also know that we do sponsorships.
In my case, I am very good at business
and I'm in a different category of YouTube
than an entertainer.
I speak to an older audience with a disposable income
and I have proven sales numbers.
I can prove that I can convert sales.
So, when I go and I negotiate a brand deal,
I'm able to get a lot more money
because I'm not using my views as my leverage,
I'm using my authority as my leverage.
I'm using the fact I'm a public speaker.
I'm using the fact that I have an email list
to include in the deal.
I'm using the fact that I'm positioned
very uniquely in the market.
And those are things you need to understand
about negotiating,
which I'll cover in a completely different video.
I've done videos on negotiating and how to sell,
but a lot of you skipped over those
because they didn't have the words YouTube in the title.
So, we'll figure that out later
and we'll make some clickbait title just for you.
Now, when it comes to how to make money outside of YouTube,
I think this is important
because a lot of you are hoping to go viral,
and we've seen it before.
(mumbles) put out some information
where he showed that on a video with over a million views,
he only made $500.
As we know that for me,
a million views would be worth so much more,
and it's because I get different CPM rates.
And, again, your CPM rates might be lower
if you have viewers that are in another country.
Ad rates are best in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia,
places like that.
They're not as good in other places.
If you're getting a lot of views
from maybe South America or India
or parts of the Netherlands,
they may not be worth as much money
and there may not be as many ads
to play against those videos.
Or, if your audience is blocking,
they have VPN, they might be routing through a country
that has no ads or lower ad rates,
they might be using Adblocker,
so those are all things that could affect your revenue.
I honestly believe that it's easier to make $1,000
freelancing or doing a number of other things online
that I've talked about
than making money on YouTube ads.
It's not as glamorous as it looks
and that's why I wanted to show you guys the real numbers.
Now, it's also not as bleak
as the media paints it out to be.
The media would have you believe
that every YouTuber that's not at 10 million subscribers
is living in poverty, and that's just not true.
But at the same time, when that's not the narrative,
the narrative is that anybody with 100,000 subscribers
must be rich, and that's also equally not true.
The truth is that YouTube is an individual experience.
Your mileage may vary.
What somebody else makes is not really any of your business
beyond the fact that maybe it's useful information.
But if you're not doing the type of content
that that person is doing
or you don't have the type of audience that that person has
or any number of variables that you can't know or control,
then your results are not gonna be that person's results.
Just because I make a certain amount of money on YouTube
does not mean that that's the normal.
And I think that so many of you get tripped up
and the reason there's so much misinformation
and so many myths and rumors out there
is not because YouTubers aren't being transparent
and not because a bunch of us
aren't making these videos, we are.
But people are taking it out of context and saying,
"Oh, so that's what I'm gonna make."
Or, "That's gonna be me," and it's not.
You have to run your own race,
have your own journey, have your own experience.
Because I have data on multiple YouTube channels,
multiple YouTube channels,
and nobody's CPM rates are the same.
There's no normal.
Nobody's ad rates are the same
in terms of how many of their views are monetized.
It's not the same.
So, just kind of think about that
and think about what you can do
to make the most out of your YouTube channel,
how can you position yourself
to make as much money as possible,
and are you making content that you enjoy.
I would say if you wanna be a full-time content creator,
do not rely on AdSense.
It is not something that is sustainable in the long term.
And I don't care if there are
a couple of mythical unicorns out there
making 50 or $60,000 a month.
There's a real good chance
that that's not how it's gonna play out for you,
even if you get big.
Hopefully this was helpful.
I shed some truth on this topic that's very important to me.
I think it's important to a lot of us here
in the YouTube community.
I've got a question of the day for you.
So, question of the day.
If you have a million views,
how much has that been worth?
So that we have some more data to compare it to.
And if you don't have a million views,
what I wanna know is,
what is for you the most challenging thing about YouTube?
And hint, you can't tell me it's views,
you can't tell me it's subscribers.
I wanna know about your creator journey.
So, what is a struggle for you in YouTube
that has nothing to do with views or subscribers
and what you're trying to understand,
that way I can make a video about it here on this channel
and help you out.
If you wanna learn more about YouTube,
I've got a great playlist of videos.
I also have some stuff linked down in the description
that can help you out.
And also, if you just wanna do one-on-one coaching with me
or you wanna join my membership group
and get some more exclusive training
and learn how to build an online business
or how to market yourself on YouTube or Instagram,
then make sure you're hitting up AwesomeCreatorAcademy.com.
There are gonna be links for you
in the description down below.
That is my coaching business.
And I'm just looking to try and help more creators.
We've built a great network.
And I'd like to have more of you in there
so that we can share information, share data,
and so that we can grow together
and build real businesses that help the community.
Anyway, like this video if you liked it.
Don't forget to subscribe,
check out the awesome content here on the channel.
As always, you guys, thanks so very much for watching
and don't forget,
go out there and create something awesome today.
Take care.
(gentle music)