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From watching a few reasonably popular channels over the years, even those folks have a hard time making money given the time investment put into video production. I think the EEVblog guy posted a video when he went full-time youtube and he's looking at making somewhere between $30-40k a year and he has about half a million subscribers with most video getting somewhere between 40k-100k views and he puts out 1-2 videos per week. Considering the intense time commitment to producing content, this really doesn't seem like much. So he's making what...about $500 per video? Let's say all in it takes two or three days to fully produce a video, that's about $20/hr. That's honestly pretty terrible.

Another guy I like to follow, Lord Karnage, has similar number of subscribers, but most of his videos get far fewer views, 6k-10k and he's got over 4,000 videos up. I've heard an interview with him about his business and tbh, it doesn't sound great. He'd make more money panhandling playing video games on a street corner.

On the other hand, Simon and Martina, 1.2 million subs, between 300k-400k views per video and 4 videos a month, seem to be living a decent middle class life in Seoul and then Tokyo. No idea how much money they make, but they've had employees in the past to help them with their video production. Some calculators seem to claim they're probably making something a bit north of $100k.

One of the things that I find really disturbing is that, every so often, google will just "change" the payment computation and suddenly people who were putting 50-60 hour weeks into youtubing to make a fairly minimal living are suddenly seeing their income cut by huge percentages. Eventually everybody will figure out what changed and things will settle down, but there's a few weeks seemingly every year, where my subscription feed will be full of people complaining or shutting down channels.

> about $500 per video [..] that's about $20/hr. That's honestly pretty terrible.

Don't forget to factor in that evergreen content will continuously bring in money, especially if you're funnelling in viewers from outside the YouTube algorithm. A video I made in 2014 is still the bulk of my YouTube income

Making money of old videos might change, if video suggestion algorithm prefer new content. Some suggest that it already have changed: https://youtu.be/03dTJ4nXkXw

If you're relying on your videos getting views for your monthly pay you shouldn't be relying solely on some constantly changing algorithm.

> especially if you're funnelling in viewers from outside the YouTube algorithm

Right. You should also be blogging, engaging with others on forums, having a solid social media presence, etc.

Especially if the content is truly evergreen. Chances are your audience has grown a year or so after posting it - tweet/fb/etc it out again!

Yeah, even with reduced discoverability evergreen content is very possible as long as you've got any exposure at all. I will often watch videos from the backlog of content creators I have newly discovered.

> So he's making what...about $500 per video? Let's say all in it takes two or three days to fully produce a video, that's about $20/hr. That's honestly pretty terrible

One thing that may be worth adding is that for Dave Jones in particular, he has other lines of income such as selling hardware (project kits, branded multimeters, T-shirts, etc) and ads on his popular webforum. The YouTube channel works as advertising for those businesses. So even if you don't make a good living off of the YouTube revenue, it may still make sense as a way of building a loyal customer base.

A lot of YouTubers also make a good chunk of their income on Patreon now as well.

Source on the Patreon claim? I watch a lot of frequent YouTube channels and my anecdote is that < 10% have Patreon.

I guess it depends more on the niche than I assumed. I follow a lot of electronics channels, and YouTubers like techmoan and bigclive make $2,000+/mo on Patreon.

On the more extreme end of the spectrum, CGPGrey is making ~$20000/video on Patreon [0]

[0] https://www.patreon.com/cgpgrey

Beware, it's a power-law thing. I'm in the top 3.5% of all Patreon myself, and I'm barely making $650 a month from it. It's really dangerous to consider that as any more plausible than YouTube ad revenue: everything about it is set up as just another lottery ticket. I've been keeping track of the numbers for a year. The amount that constitutes the '1%' mark has been steadily declining even as the total population grows.

With Patreon, it's more properly considered as just another payment processor: the hope is that you'll build a functioning business and use it to handle people's credit card interactions.

Apparently (according to one YouTube channel I watch) the $/video figure is rather misleading as it doesn't take into account people's monthly spend caps.

So while CGPGrey might be making $20k/video for the first video, anyone with a (say) $5/month cap that paid $5 for the first video now pays nothing towards any videos released later in the month, potentially dropping the income substantially as more and more spending caps are hit as the month rolls on.

Heck even Mr Carlson's lab is making nearly $4,000/mo! https://www.patreon.com/MrCarlsonsLab

Dave Jones is also taking $3500/mo on Patreon. Each of his individual revenue streams is fairly paltry, but they add up to a comfortable middle-class income. That kind of diversification is very healthy.

https://www.patreon.com/eevblog

> One of the things that I find really disturbing is that, every so often, google will just "change" the payment computation and suddenly people who were putting 50-60 hour weeks into youtubing to make a fairly minimal living are suddenly seeing their income cut by huge percentages.

This is why a lot of people encourage youtubers to diversify away from ad-revenue. A youtuber that relies solely on ad-revenue is like a supplier with only one customer. They are at the complete mercy of the whims and competency of their single customer.

This is a large part of the reasoning behind patreon. Then there are people like CGP grey that diversify to podcasts, have patreon, sell merch and get paid-for promotions.

This is similar to how we moved away from depending wholly on newspapers, TV etc (old media monopolies) to Google, Youtube, Facebook (new media monopolies). Even though we can reach more audiences than ever before, 99% of it are being controlled by the Big Five.

>>Let's say all in it takes two or three days to fully produce a video, that's about $20/hr. That's honestly pretty terrible.

On the other hand, YT is populated by people from different countries. $20/hour is not great in US or UK, but where I'm from that's about 10x the minimum wage and 3-4x the median wage. There's plenty of foreign creators on YT and for them that amount of money places them firmly in the top income bracket.

It's not just youtube. The ENTIRE INTERNET works like that, for ALL websites. It's been called the "Google Dance".

One day you are on page one and monetizing (I've been there), next day, page 5 and nothing (been there too).

Just from youtube ads it's about $1 per 1000 views, but can vary by a factor of 4 in either direction. Sponsoring, Patreon subscriptions, etc adds between a lot and nothing on top of that, depending on the kind of videos, the fanbase and a host of other factors.

For example, PewDiePie makes a video a day with ~4 million views each, which should net him around $1.5 million a year from ad revenue. I have no problem imagining him making another $6.5M through other means, being the most well-known youtuber. He also does heavy promotion of amazon affiliate links, which probably brings in a decent amount of money as well.

But of course normal people don't make a video a day and don't get millions of views on each video. I think most youtubers who manage to make it their day job get the majority of their money through Patreon subscriptions.

CGP Grey also made a few videos on YT monetization:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW0eUrUiyxo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_wFE9kHSos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvaxkpeSg_4

It's just one data point, but Dave Jones from EEVblog made a video about half a year ago regarding his ad income: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8qdOAEQnps

Of course, these days it's often supplemented by stuff like Patreon and separate sponsorship deals.

Another person of interest here might be Jim Sterling of The Jimquisition, since AFAIK his main income is through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jimquisition

Sterling doesn't take ad revenue of any kind, as a point of principle. It's a key part of his appeal - his independence as a journalist is unimpeachable, because he's funded solely by fans.

It really depends on a lot. I do 1 million views most months. Highest my earnings have ever been is $400. Last month I made $170. Most of my views are from an African country though, so we're talking low CPCs and fill rates.

I don't think there is very much money in the integrated pre-roll ads on Youtube. The real money is in sponsorship deals and live reads or pushing viewers to sites that that have a clearer revenue model for content creators like Patreon. However those generally require a decent sized following before they open up as potential options.

One more data point:

Primitive Tech makes $5k-$6k per month purely from Patreon, no ads, affiliate links, or endorsements. He produces one video per month.

Has almost 5m subscribers and each video gets at least 10M views.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA/fea...

He's probably pretty abnormal, in that every single video is at the top of Reddit for a day

Yes it's much like saying nowadays many young musicians like Lorde can become successful very quickly.

Most YouTubers, like most musicians, don't make any real profit.

I remember a criticism of the adage "It's a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll" (or any pop music). It's actually a very short way to the top, or you wouldn't have so many 20-year-olds topping the charts. There's just a hell of a lot of competition.

> We are doing all of these jobs for a relatively small fee.

If you were paid simply on the number of hats you have to wear, then every small-business proprietor would be a billionaire.

> Nowadays many young YouTubers can become flush with cash much more quickly ...

The problem is that people conflate "more individuals are making it big" with "individuals have a better chance of making it big." The number of contributors trying to make it into a career is far, far larger than it was, and has increased far more quickly than the number of contributors actually making a lot of money.

> I always wondered how much on average a Youtuber makes, per 100K or 1 Million video views. Any original Youtuber care to throw some light on this?

I believe the reason this is so hard to find out is that it's in their contracts that they can't disclose their earnings publicly. Plus, their revenue comes from ads shown on their videos and advertisers pay varying amounts depending on how in-demand that kind of content is.

Best bet is going to be estimates from places like SocialBlade.

And that won't even take into account things like endorsements and merch, which is how people like PewDiePie make a lot of their money, nor will it take into account costs of production or other things like management or an MCN.

>I believe the reason this is so hard to find out is that it's in their contracts that they can't disclose their earnings publicly.

YouTube isn't exactly enthusiastic about people sharing their revenue data, but they're not stopping anyone. Most creators choose not to, purely for reasons of commercial sensitivity. Some do, most notably CGP Grey and Dave Jones of EEVBlog. Dave Jones had an average eCPM of $1.36 pre-adpocalypse; CGP Grey's post-adpocalypse video had an estimated eCPM of $1.11.

There's a YouTube money calculator which offers an estimate of earnings:

https://socialblade.com/youtube/youtube-money-calculator

I've used this one, and a few others that were around back in 2011. All were waaaay off, i.e. would report 500% to 1000% more than what I know I am actually making after entering the view counts, subs and other details.

Hence my original question :)

Not ad revenue, but this year a person who is famous primarily for their YouTube makeup tutorials made >$1m when their collaborative kit with a cosmetic brand sold several hundred thousand units (and sold out) in less than an hour.

Source: know someone who worked on the project and was involved in the launch.

I have heard around a $2 CPA. If you're doing tech unboxing videos (possible higher purchasing intent) more, if you're doing abstract poems you wrong, possibly less.

Mentally, I apply a $0.50 - $4 CPM for 1-2 STDEV.

Jordan Peterson is making nearly half a million dollars from Patreon alone. And that too making videos on supposedly "boring" topics like mythology and psychology.

Well sure, no one is making money unless they get millions of views.