How Much Money Can You Make From YouTube?
You’ve probably heard of an eight-year-old boy who makes $ 26 million a year from what started out as a toy on the YouTube unboxing channel and thought, “I can do this.” And, of course, the earning potential for the second most visited site in the world is very high, although most creators receive a more meager annual income. Here’s a look at how much you can make on YouTube.
Followers are important, but that’s not all
Only a small percentage of YouTube users have a large following: According to Tubics , a marketing software company, out of 37 million accounts, only 22,000 have more than one million subscribers. The vast majority of successful authors belong to the “middle class” of accounts with 50-500 thousand subscribers, many of whom cannot live off their YouTube income alone.
Subscribers are valuable because they are more likely to constantly interact with your content and share it with others, but they are not the best metric for determining how much money they are making. To get a more accurate idea of what creators are getting paid, you should look at their “cost per thousand impressions”, also known as cost per thousand ad impressions or CPM.
Your CPM determines your payroll
When you monetize your videos through the Google Affiliate Program , you enable ad revenue sharing based on your CPM. Cost of 1,000 impressions is a metric that shows how much money advertisers are willing to spend on advertising on your YouTube videos. But as Business Insider points out , no YouTube creator has a consistent CPM as advertisers pay different bids based on a variety of factors such as geography, seasonality, and subject matter (typically, your CPM rate is higher for an informative, targeted business content) personal video blogs, for example).
CPM rates are a little cryptic to YouTubers, and they can vary a lot, but usually fall somewhere between $ 2-5 per thousand views. This means a $ 5 CPM would net you $ 5,000 for a video with a million views. Considering that on average a YouTube video only gets a few thousand views, you can see why earning a steady income from a site can be a challenge, even if you’re popular.
To truly make money, you need to go beyond views.
If you want to make millions of dollars on YouTube, you actually need more than a lot of subscribers. The best YouTube accounts use their content as a springboard for other ways to generate income, including:
Sale of goods
YouTubers can make more money from ads than from ads. If a creator has an interested, loyal audience, their profits from selling mugs, T-shirts, coffee beans, bags, stationery, or online training videos can be significant. According to Tubefilter :
The median month for [Jake] Paul is 200 million views, which equates to his estimated monthly Adsense earnings of $ 50,000 to $ 800,000. On the other hand, his estimated [annual] income from the sale of goods is between $ 820,810 and $ 4,292,940.
Advertising content
Content creators can receive direct money from sponsors for mentioning a particular company or product in their videos, typically ranging from a few hundred to thousands of dollars. Hard numbers are hard to come by, but the more popular you are, the more leverage you have. According to Forbes, influencers with at least 100,000 YouTube subscribers can usually make $ 12,500 for a sponsored video.
Free items
Many YouTubers get lots of free giveaways in the hopes that they will review the products on their channels. It’s hard to pin down the exact figure since it’s not exactly income, but you can imagine how much a creator could save on costs if, say, they run a makeup product review channel and all products that are reviewed are paid for by someone else.
Patreon
Patreon allows creators to make money from their most loyal followers in exchange for exclusive content and perks. You can easily earn as much from Patreon as you can from ad revenue, but you need to build a large following before you see a lot of growth potential. This blog has a good breakdown of how a Patreon account can be used to generate revenue beyond what you can do from YouTube ads.