In a world of content creation, one platform stands above all when it comes to money making potential, and it’s, you already know it, YouTube.
But how much of that money making potential is actually there for you to extract? How much can you actually earn from the platform?
How much money do you make per view on YouTube?
Let’s find out!
YOUTUBE PARTNER PROGRAM (YPP)
Let’s start with this.
YouTube launched its monetization program called YouTube Partner Program in 2007 – I’ll refer to it as YPP in this article.
It was very different than what it is today, only a selected group of content creators could actually join it and it didn’t pay much.
Since 2007, it’s grown to over 3 million channels, and it keeps growing.
REQUIREMENTS TO JOIN YPP – SHORTS
Currently, you need to meet at least one of two sets of requirements to join the program.
The first set of requirements which is aimed at Shorts channels:
- Have at least 500 subscribers
- Have at least 3 uploads in the last 90 days
And one of the following:
- Have at least 3,000 watch hours in the last 365 days
- Have at least 3,000,000 Shorts views in the last 90 days
If you manage to achieve everything needed for Shorts monetization, you’ll enter the YPP, but not fully – your long-form content won’t be monetized!
As I’ve mentioned, this is aimed at Shorts content and not long-form.
REQUIREMENTS TO JOIN YPP – LONG-FORM
To fully enter the program, you need to meet the second set of requirements which is aimed at long-form content, and it consists of:
- Have at least 1,000 subscribers
And one of the following:
- Have at least 4,000 watch hours in the last 365 days
- Have at least 10,000,000 Shorts views in the last 90 days
WATCH HOURS, WHAT DOES IT MEAN
Watch hours means how many hours have your viewers watched your videos.
Let’s do a simple calculation:
- Your video is 10 minutes
- Someone watched 5 minutes of your video
- Your watch hours is 5 minutes which equates to 0.2 hours
If your video is 10 minutes long, at the retention time (percentage of video your viewers watch) of 50%, you’ll need 48,000 views on a video to reach the goal of 4,000 watch hours.
Usually, at the beginning of the channel, even if your video explodes and reaches tens of thousands of views, your retention time will be much lower than 50% – it would probably be around 20%.
So at the retention time of 20%, you’ll need 120,000 views for a video that’s 10 minutes long.
As you can see in the picture above, my video got 5.6k views and the retention of 17% (3:58 minutes). When you multiply views and minutes, you get 22,213.3 minutes of watch time, which is around 370 hours.
CPM AND RPM
Congratulations! Your channel is monetized!
Let’s find out some of the most important parameters, CPM and RPM.
When you upload a YouTube video, usually after 1-2 days your revenue analytics will update, and you’ll be able to see the video’s CPM, amount of views and RPM.
CPM is short for cost per mille – or in other words, how much money your video makes per 1,000 views on YouTube.
RPM is short for revenue per mille.
Sounds confusing, doesn’t it?
Let me explain.
CPM is how much your VIDEO makes, no YOU but your VIDEO. Advertisers pay YouTube a certain amount of money to have their ads appear on your videos. The amount of money they pay YouTube for your video is the CPM of your video.
RPM is how much YOU make off of your video.
You’ll earn less money per 1,000 views on YouTube than it actually says on the CPM – about 45% less – because YouTube takes its own around 45% cut.
AUDIENCE
Audience is one of many key factors when it comes to YouTube earnings.
No, I’m not talking about how many views you get. I’m talking about where your viewers are coming from.
If your viewers are from Tier 1 countries (USA, UK, France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavian countries, etc. – you get the idea), your CPM will be many times larger than if your viewers are from Tier 2 (semi-developed countries) or Tier 3 countries (undeveloped countries mostly).
HOW DO YOU ATTRACT THE RIGHT AUDIENCE
Well, it somewhat depends on the niche of your videos. If your niche is based on happenings in the USA, your viewers will mostly be from the United States. But if your channel is in, let’s say, the gaming niche, your audience will probably be scattered all around the world – I am talking about the English-speaking channel and audience.
So, if you want to attract the highest paying audience, the easiest way is to make videos in the niche specific to one of Tier 1 countries in their respective language.
RETENTION TIME
Retention time is hugely important. Simply explained, retention time is a percentage of video your viewers watch on average.
If your video is 10 minutes long and your viewers watch 5 minutes of it on average, your retention time is 50%.
Why is this important?
Retention time is hugely important, that’s why people like MrBeast and other top YouTubers prioritize it so much.
There are different types of ads and different places where they can be placed. Different types include:
- Non-skippable ads
- Skippable ads
- Display ads
Locations of ads include:
- Pre-roll ads
- Mid-roll ads
- Post-roll ads
We’ll focus on pre-roll and mid-roll ads, types of ads are not important for this explanation.
When your viewers click on a video, they usually get an ad or two before the video begins, those are called pre-roll ads.
The ads in the middle of the video are called mid-roll ads.
It’s those mid-roll ads YouTubers are looking to maximize, but how?
That’s where retention time comes in play. The more you keep your audience engaged, the bigger the retention time will be and the more mid-roll ads they’ll get.
Almost everyone sees pre-roll ads, but not everyone sees mid-roll ads because they don’t watch the video enough for one to appear.
That’s why your content must be high quality and engaging.
Higher retention time means more mid-roll ads which drastically improves your RPM.
BEST NICHES TO MAKE MONEY ON YOUTUBE
Whenever I googled ‘Highest paying niches on YouTube’ in the past, I never really got the real idea how of much do certain niches make.
Once I started working for some channels and running my own channels, I saw something that doesn’t really have a logical explanation.
ENTERTAINMENT AND SPORTS NICHES – MY CHANNELS
My two channels, Troll F1 and Troll NFL, are in the comedy/sports niche – I’m not sure how YouTube classifies and frankly it doesn’t matter.
Retention time of both of those channels is 50-60%, but the audience is where is the big difference.
Troll F1’s audience’s top 5 countries:
The RPM in the last 365 days is $2.44, and I gained 3.3 million views, which equates to almost $8,000.
Troll NFL on the other hand, mainly because of the US audience, earns a lot more for less views.
Troll NFL’s audience’s top 5 countries:
As you can see, due to my niche, my main audience is from the United States.
This channel hasn’t been monetized for a long time so we’ll look at 90 days analytics.
The amount of money I made per 1,000 views on YouTube is $5.16. I gained 250k views, which equates to $1,300.
But here’s the catch. I upload 12 minute long videos on Troll NFL and 8 minute long videos on Troll F1. My viewers watch, on average, 2-3 minutes of Troll NFL more than they watch Troll F1. When you pair that with 90%+ of the United States audience, you get a huge difference in RPM, almost 2x.
There’s a clear example of how different factors effect your money per thousand views on YouTube.
FINANCE AND INVESTING NICHE
One of the biggest channels in this niche is Graham Stephan’s channel. Although he sometimes records real estate videos, most of his videos go under the finance and investing niche.
He made a video called “How Much I Make With 2 Million Subscribers” in which he revealed how much he earned since the start of the channel and in 2020.
Assuming his channel hasn’t been monetized since the start, we’ll look at the statistics only for 2020.
Until that video in 2020 – the video was published in mid-October – he earned $1,583,755 with the RPM of $14.56 which means he gained about 109,000,000 views.
Although he made a short in 2021 revealing his 2021 earnings where he accumulated over 109,000,000 views, same as the year before, but this time he gained over $2,000,000 with the RPM of around $18.50.
YouTuber called Biaheza also revealed his investment video revenue which is around $5,500 from 360,000 views with an RPM of around $15.
This just goes to show that your niche isn’t the sole factor when it comes to YouTube earnings. In those two videos he’s uploaded, he had the same amount of views but earned half a million dollars more in 2021 due to an increase in RPM.
MAKE MONEY ONLINE NICHE
The Make Money Online niche might have the biggest difference when it comes to the lowest and the highest RPM you can get.
For this niche will go with Biaheza’s channel and his video ‘How I Started The Highest Paid YouTube Channel’.
In this video he revealed how much YouTube paid him for Forex, Dropshipping and Day Trading videos each.
His forex video got an RPM of $27.75 and with the view count of over 2,500,000 views, he earned over $71,000.
Biaheza’s day trading video gained almost 1,000,000 views, had an RPM of $18.39 and earned him around $17,500.
His dropshipping video had the highest RPM out of these 4. In total, it earned him almost $30,000, had an RPM of $36.55 and had around 820,000 views.
Depending on the content you want to make, in this niche you can expect an RPM anywhere from $10 to $50.
AUTOMOTIVE / CAR NICHE
Compared to others on this list, a pretty unknown channel called The02CumminsRAM published at the very end of 2020 how much he’s made throughout his YouTube career.
At that time, his channel gained 4,100,000 views earning him just over $21,000 which equals to an RPM of around $5.3.
This is pretty spot on when it comes to the automotive niche. Although as we’ve seen from my channels, this can very drastically. From this niche you can probably expect to have $4-$10 RPM depending on the audience origin and retention time.
TECHNOLOGY NICHE
In 2020, a channel called Mined Tactics actually managed to leak Marques Brownlee’s YouTube earnings. We all know Marques’ channel is the biggest tech channel in the world, so we’ll go with his channel for this niche.
From the mentioned leak, we can see that he gained around 16,500,000 views that earned him just shy of $31,000. That’s an RPM of around $1.85.
Considering some other channels like Daniel Owen’s – we can see that the RPM can go higher and reach $3-$4.
We don’t have a clear RPM here so we’ll go with $2-$5.
LIFESTYLE / VLOGGING NICHE
Vlogging niche hasn’t been popular for the past few years and the channels have become pretty hard to grow – although it’s not impossible and if you think vlogging suits you try growing a channel!
In this niche we’ll take a look at Marintia Eiko’s channel. In her video ‘How Much Money Does My 100,000 Subscriber YouTube Channel Make Me?’ we can see that her channel has the RPM of $2-$5.
HEALTH AND FITNESS NICHE
For this niche, I couldn’t find a good source, but a YouTuber called Daniel Inskeep uploaded a video where he talked about his wife’s channel called Rachel Gulotta Fitness.
In a video titled ‘How Much Money My Wife’s Fitness YouTube Channel Earns’ he reveals that she made almost $3,200 from almost 1,200,000 views which amounts to an RPM of $2.65.
Most blogs and YouTube channels claim that health and fitness niche earns much more, but from this example that’s not true. I’m not dismissing the possibility of videos in this niche earning up to $10 per 1,000 views, because at the end of the day, your audience and analytics matter too.
VIDEO EDITING / CONTENT CREATION NICHE
At the start of 2023 channel called Josh Winiarski uploaded a video where he talked about his earnings. His channel’s main niche is video editing and content creation.
In this video he didn’t show a specific timeframe of his earnings so take this with a grain of salt.
We won’t look at his channel’s total revenue because his channel hasn’t been monetized from the start and his content isn’t 100% in this niche.
Some of his content creation videos have the RPM of $4, some even reach over $9, so my estimate would be that the content creation niche earns has the RPM of $7.
GAMING NICHE
Gaming niche is just weird. Most channels have around $2-$6 RPM, other channels go higher or lower than that, but I reckon the average is $2-$6 RPM.
When it comes to gaming videos, the highest earning channels make the longer videos than you normally see on YouTube – 20-40 minute videos.
Those videos tend to get more watch hours and thus higher CPM and RPM.
In late October 2022, channel called SatchOnStuff published a video called ‘How much you can earn as a small gaming youtuber (not clickbait)’ in which he revealed his revenue.
He gained somewhere around 1,600,000 views and with the RPM of $4.12 he earned $6,750.
SUMMARY
As you can see, there is not a single factor that determines how much money you can make on YouTube per view.
We’ve learned that views aren’t the sole reason what makes you money on YouTube.
Retention time, audience and niche are the main factors that contribute to your YouTube revenue.
YouTube can be a highly profitable business if you try your hardest and end up being successful at it. It takes time, so don’t rush anything. Improve the quality of your videos as much as you can and enjoy the process!
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