How Much Money Do The Top Grossing YouTube Partners Make? | Hacker News Reader

How Much Money Do The Top Grossing YouTube Partners Make?

socialtimes.com

92 pointsfezzl28 comments

The linked story is from a year ago. I actually run a YouTube statistics site called SocialBlade which one of the things it provides is estimated earnings of everyone, be them partners or not meaning if they do become a partner they can see how much they could make. It's based on some data from this story and also feedback from many many partners so its more or less accurate.

I am currently as of this post using an estimated cpm of 0.75 to 8.0 (ads have gone up dramatically in september). The cpm that partners will see vary greatly depending on what types of ads they use (prerolls pay way more for example) and where their viewers are (us pays way more then canada for example) but this range seems to be on par for most people.

Regarding what people are saying about partners dismissing the linked story, that was true, but they dismissed it because they said they made 3x more then it back in aug 2010.

Check out my site if you want to see updated estimations :)

http://SocialBlade.com/youtube

Thanks, that's a useful site. An order of magnitude range for the earnings estimates is quite large. Can you not narrow that down using ad type data?

That's not a bad idea. Possibly in the future I'll see if I can incorporate this into the estimates but remember its also again based largely on the location of ones viewers. If you're from the US and your viewing audience is 99% from Canada you'll have a lower payout then the opposite. Same is even more dramatic with other countries. That type of data I'm not able to get.

[Edit] As a general rule of thumb though, the higher up partners are generally making closer to the higher range, and the lower end ones are making closer to the lower end of the range.

Adding some kind of confidence bound or estimated probability distribution might make more sense of the huge ranges. You're already computing the 'height' of partners, so you could potentially incorporate that into the model.

Something like "$100 - $1000, best-guess $500 ± 200"

Philip DeFranco did an AMA on reddit a few months ago[1]. In answer to how much he makes:

My companies make some nice revenue. I pay myself 60-100k though. Most of the money is reinvested. Thats the first time I've even kind of answered that question[2]

[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/gb05p/iama_professiona...

[2]http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/gb05p/iama_professiona...

/sigh/

This is completely inaccurate based off incorrect assumptions and statistics. Though not a youtube partner myself, I work with quite a few. This article has been dismissed by nearly all of the people it mentions

Dismissed as high or low? With all due respect to your YT friends, most people will lie to you about how much they make in an attempt to make you either think they make more or less than they actually do.

I can give you a real number. A friend of mine runs http://youtube.com/moviebuzz. He's making $8-10K a month. He only has 144K subscribers. Not too bad for a 22 year old working 1 day a week.

He says the big guys, like DeFanco, are bringing in well over $100K a month.

I knew he probably did well, but wow.

Way too low. The starcraft commentary community alone splits more then a million between the popular casters.

Much more than a million.

Both, some partners have external syndication or promotion deals. A lot of partners are now using services like Blip.tv and Revision3 alongside Youtube. Other's sell products, do advertising and other things on the side, all because they are popular on Youtube, but not related to their viewcount (Rhett & Link is a good example, they now have a successful TV show). Some have lower CPC/CPV values due to their audience and content. Some don't even use adds. This report was put together under the logic of "The average CPV is $0.001 so every 1k views = $1", rather than doing any actual research

Any links to back up what your saying?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/business/media/06blip.html...

Not of the top of my head, if you look back far enough through @PhillyD's twitter feed you'll probably see him ranting about how he doesn't make anywhere near that much.

I think he meant he doesn't pay himself that much. Last I heard, he was paying himself a salary and ~6 or so other people that are working on a company he is launching.

I remember watching that video. It was a while back when they first launched the "moderator" features on youtube. Wish I could hunt for it now, I think it was under his "vloggity" account.

At the time he was also talking a lot about launching a scripted media company for youtube and stuff. Mentioned that he makes a LOT for his affiliate stuff.

Think for example that he ran a "netflix club" where once a week he would review a different movie on netflix and discuss it with his viewers. Any of his viewers could us a "phillyD" signup code and get a free month of netflix.

I don't know what the netflix payout is - but - on 1 million views per video. Say the NF payout is $5 a 1% conversion pays $50k per week which would be $200k in the month that he ran the series.

And how much do they get from Sony the week they talk about giving away a new camera? The week they promote a Qbids auction? The week the makeup girls give away a bag of "rimmell"?

Yup, they are missing a zero at the end of most of these.

Can you share some accurate numbers?

See my post above for the full explanation but http://SocialBlade.com/youtube has more or less accurate ranges.

I'm surprised freddiew is not on that list, since he has a massive subscriber base, has tv and film celebrities lining up to participate in his videos and does youtube on a full-time basis. Surely he makes more than $100k.

http://www.youtube.com/user/bugmafia This channel makes $200 / day aka $6000 per month.

I'll be honest, I'm pretty disappointed that Day[9] isn't on there.

If he had been, he wouldn't have needed a donation drive to pay for college.

1.8 subscribers isn't much to crow about

Extremely low CPM.

> I’d say that for someone right out of college, or even pre-college (like Fred), making $100,000 or more a year is not too shabby.

Not too shabby? What world are we living in? That's insane money for someone like Fred who is making a video every so often with close to zero production value. That's money for nothing and your chicks for free.

He was being sarcastic.

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