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I get asked a lot how much YouTubers make or brands should pay for YouTube sponsorships.
It’s a wide range and depends on multiple factors. There are a lot of revenue streams available, and more popular channels are more successful than others when implementing them.
The main ways YouTubers are paid are:
- Google Adsense Revenue via YouTube Partner Program
- Affiliate Revenue
- Sponsorships/Product Placements
- Merch Sales
- Paid Members
And of course, building a successful YouTube channel can get you a lot of opportunities off platform too. Jake Paul got professional acting and fighting gigs, along with a lot of paid live performances. Let’s break them down further to fully understand how YouTubers make money.
But it's not stable money - especially at the start. You'll slave away for free for at least a year before you start reaping the rewards.
YouTube Partner Program
YouTube is only part of my broader content network, but it’s a lot more profitable for ads than my blog content. That’s because Google runs stale display ads on websites but higher paying video ads on YouTube.
Both are paid through the same Google Adsense account though. Here’s my breakdown of my YouTube ad revenue by ad types from YouTube Studio.
That 6.3% in display ads is all I get from my other websites, which means they have to draw a LOT more traffic to earn the same monthly payout as my YouTube channel alone.
Bumper ads play at the beginning (most used in livestreams when you first join), and the rest are self explanatory.
Every YouTuber has a varied RPM (revenue per 1000 views) and CPM (cost per 1000 views). M is the Roman numeral for 1000, in case you’re wondering why it’s not O or T.
The CPM is the amount the advertisers pay YouTube to appear on your content. The RPM is your share of the profits from YouTube.
Here’s my RPM for the past year, which ranged from $1–$4 pretty consistently with an average just under $2. That’s what I got paid.
Here’s the same year showing what Google charged advertisers for those same views. You’ll notice it pretty closely matches, and I’m making less than a third of the money being paid.
This is part of why you hear people complain about YouTube not paying much. You can even see how much people are paying to show ads on my content by country.
Americans and Norwegians are paying the highest prices.
And it’s just the start; when YouTube implemented its Partner Program, it set a hurdle where you couldn’t get paid unless you reached certain minimums of 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours viewed over the past year, if I remember correctly.
My channel didn’t qualify because I was more focused on my written work. I didn’t jump back into YouTube until a few years ago when I realized I was nearing the qualifications on my old videos.
It wasn’t because I don’t love doing videos, vlogging, or YouTube - it was because I have bills to pay, and I didn’t have the free time. Once my time could be monetized, it became worthwhile again.
So, when you look at my lifetime earnings, you can see the difference pre- and post- partner program.
I used to make more money per view for fewer views. And it was a far smaller percentage of what they were actually charging the brands.
My average lifetime CPM was $6.43 compared to an RPM of $1.02, because there were people paying $80-$200 for a long time for me to earn $10-$20.
So, people in the YouTube Partner Program are making out better today than 5 years ago. Brands are too.
But it’s on the back of everybody working for free on YouTube to get into that Partner Program, which isn’t easy, believe me.
And while I only make $150–500 per month from YouTube, it’s not nothing. People who were earning under $100/month got cut off from that revenue, and someone went on a shooting spree in YouTube headquarters over it in 2018.
My channel has 5 million views over 10 years (the views really only came over 5 years, if you look at the charts).
[You want to see even further into how much I made off those 5 million views?](https://typo.today/how-much-do-youtubers-actually-make/)