Unlike most channels I won’t make you skip through a 10 minute video if you’re just
looking for the answer.
For 2.6 million views at the time of recording this video we made 6 thousand five hundred
81 dollars and 7 cents.
There’s a lot that goes into that number and we could have actually made over 30,000
dollars, so if you’re interested keep watching.
YouTube breaks down how much you make into CPM, which stands for cost per thousand.
Okay it actually stands for cost per mille and mille is latin for thousand, but everyone
just calls it cost per thousand.
CPM is what determines how much you make on YouTube and it’s all over the board.
CPM varies greatly depending on the type of videos you make, but the average CPM in the
United States is somewhere between 6 and 8 dollars.
Some of the highest categories for CPM are videos about how to make money (things like
finance, investing, and cryptocurrencies), social media marketing, and educational videos
(thank god amiright).
And some of the worst are music and video games.
This means that for one million views a wallstreetbets yolo options trading channel would make almost
9 times more than a fortnite gaming channel for the same number of views.
Pretty much the more advertisers are willing to pay for views from your audience the higher
the CPM.
The people looking up investing videos are probably 20 to 35 year olds with plenty of
disposable income while the average pewdiepie viewer is a 12 year old who has to steal her
mom's credit card to buy the latest fortnite skins.
Educational videos also have comparatively high CPMs because advertisers know those are
some of the smartest, best looking viewers on YouTube and are fine paying top dollar
for them.
The next biggest factor in determining how much you make is what country your views are
from.
YouTube analytics are a little weird behind the scenes.
I can’t see how much I make per country on a computer, but I can on my phone, so forgive
the phone screenshots.
For almost all creators, the two highest CPM countries are usually the United states and
then Australia.
Typically the Nordic countries come next and from then on the general trend is that European
and more developed countries tend to make more money.
While every thousand views from the United States earns me about 8 and a half dollars,
a thousand views in places like the Philippines, Kenya, and India only pull in around one dollar.
It’s all about where your viewers are, not where you are.
So even if you’re based in the United States, if you make Indian news videos, you're gonna
make a lot less.
Your viewer's age also has a big effect on how much you make.This is a chart showing
income and expenditures for people at different age groups in the US.
As you can see, people below age 25 and above age 75 have incomes and expenditures at pretty
much the same level, meaning they don’t have a lot of disposable income.
Advertisers love 25 to 44 year olds.
They’ve got the most disposable income and are most susceptible to internet marketing.
This is the actual reason that gaming channels don’t make that much money from YouTube
advertising.
The average age of their audience is really young.
Of course that’s assuming YouTube doesn’t limit your advertisements like they do with
any mildly controversial topic we make.
Even within a channel CPM can be all over the place.
Our channel has just about 100 public videos.
We have 5 with CPMs of only about a dollar over the last month, meanwhile our video on
how bitcoin mining is killing the planet makes $16 per thousand views and our video on the
hidden engineering tricks behind modern commercial planes has a CPM of over $25 dollars.
If you are interested in watching any of our vidoes after this one, I definitely recommend
these two.
For our 2.6 million view video about the Tonga eruption, half the viewers came from the United
States, and some of the other most frequent countries were the United Kingdom, Canada
, and Australia with high CPMs.
This led to a comparatively high CPM of $9 and 7 cents.
But if we made 9 dollars and 7 cents per thousand views, and we got 2.6 million views, shouldn’t
we have made almost $24,000.
I’d cry if I wasn’t too busy laughing.
Wait flip that, I’d laugh but I’m too busy crying.
First off, YouTubers don’t keep all the money they make.
YouTube takes a flat 45%.
So that $24,000 becomes $15,600.
Then, and I know this might come as a surprise to some of you, not everyone sees an ad on
every video.
YouTube claims they won’t show an ad to someone if they’ve already seen one in the
last three minutes, plus a few other ways people get around seeing ads that I’m not
going to mention, and we make a lot less money than you think.
This is where RPM comes in or revenue per mile.
This is how much Youtubers actually make per thousand views, taking into account YouTubes
45% cut and the people who don’t see any ads.
On top of that, as you can see here, our RPM for the first 3 and a half days was $0.
We didn’t make any money on the first 250,000 views.
This was my personal choice to keep metrics like average watch duration high so YouTube
would continue showing off the video to more people.
I’d say that strategy worked…..
So at the end of the day, we made about $2.57 for every thousand views, or $2.82 if you
only count after we turned ads on.
It’s a little unfortunate this video blew up in January, because it has the lowest advertisement
payouts of the year after the holiday season.
On average, CPMs are 84% higher in December than they are in January.
This means that most creators see their paychecks cut in half as the new year starts.
My RPM in December was $4.13, meaning if this video blew up just a month earlier, instead
of $6,500 I would have made $10,500.
While this might sound like a lot already, the real money on YouTube comes from embedded
ads, the ones where video creators personally talk about the product.
While average CPMs on YouTube are typically 6 to 8 dollars, for embedded ads it's north
of $20 (and you don’t have to split this money with youtube).
So make a video that gets one million views and youtube will pay you 2 to 3 thousand dollars
and a sponsor would pay another $20,000 on top of that.
That’s why you see all your favorite big creators making ads for NordVPN and Raid Shadow
Legends.
Add in the fact that most major channels make more money from merch and pateron than they
do from youtube advertising, and big channels are making serious bank.
Hopefully one day this channel will get there.
Help us get there by checking out two of my favorite videos.
What life would look like on alien worlds, and how the US lost 6 nuclear weapons, and
remember, there is always more to learn.