How Much Does Youtube Pay [See My Paycheck]
Exhibit A, a video with 3,733 views.
Exhibit B, a video with 722 views.
Exhibit C, shocking results with a video that only got 24 measly views.
Today, we are going deep into a 45 day test. I did to see how much YouTube would pay me for the views on my small channels.
Now this video is going to be broken into three specific parts. Part, number one, understanding how YouTube pays and how to get the most money from your videos. Part number two, we’re going to show you the results from my live 45 day test that’s been running up until today, including screenshots and other statistics you need to know to make the most out of your YouTube channel. In part number three, I’m going to show you how small YouTubers can make even more money from their YouTube channels. Without any further ado, let’s dive right in.
And it’s important to note that this test that I did was for sheer curiosity. I already make lots of money from my YouTube channel without monetization. And we’ll talk about that a little bit later, but I wanted to see what would happen if I actually started monetizing some of the videos on some of my channels and what kind of money I’d actually earn. And I want you to keep in mind that over the years, I’ve made multiple seven figures from my various channels, but the results from this little test actually surprised me quite a bit. And yes, you can make a good income from a small channel.
First, let’s talk about how YouTube works and how you get paid. Last year, over $15 billion was made using the YouTube ad platform. YouTube says that about half of that was paid to creators like you and me who put videos on the platform. And while you might think most of it went to big players like PewDiePie and MrBeast and all those big names, that was actually less than 1%, which means there’s a ton of cash leftover for you and me, the little guys.
Now, in order to understand how monetization works, in order for your channel to be eligible for monetization, you need to get over 4,000 hours of watch time and 1000 subscribers, which sounds difficult, but it’s actually not that hard to do. More about that later. Now, once you are monetized, you’re going to see two numbers. One number is going to be the RPM or the revenue per mil, and the second is CPM or cost per mil. These both describe how much you’re going to make on a thousand visitors. The RPM is the overall what you’re getting on all the views on your video, the CPM is what you’re getting on monetized playbacks, which are people who view the actual ads with the video. This is important to know. And while on average, YouTubers get less than one penny per view, we’re going to see that this is different based on what your videos are about, which brings us to the niche payout.
The earnings on YouTube are driven through the AdSense platform. AdSense is where advertisers can go and bid on keywords or videos or websites to get traffic to their own websites. And obviously for advertisers using words like recipes, that cost a lot less than someone bidding on a word like credit cards. On YouTube, the same thing happens. And for us creators, that means a recipe video is not going to make as much as a credit card video. Here are some of the top paying niches on YouTube: finance and credit cards, mortgages, make money online, web hosting, anything related to insurance, stocks and updates and more. So you could see that most of them are tied to finance, but a lot of other niches, like weight loss and meditation and tons of others, pay pretty well too.
And it’s important to know what niche you’re in so that you can determine what kind of payout to expect. Now there’s a big myth out there that says the more subscribers you get, the more money you’re going to be paid. And I want to dispel this right upfront. Subscribers do not equal the amount paid. YouTube pays on the amount of times your video is viewed. Now, if you have more subscribers, obviously a new video is going to get viewed more at the get-go, but most videos that are paying pretty well are videos that go viral or get lots of traffic from search or suggested views and put more money in your pocket. So if you don’t have that many subscribers, don’t worry, neither do I and I can actually make a pretty good living.
Now let’s dive into part number two, the money part, which is actually the good part, because you get to see what this little test earned. Now throughout this 45 day test, one of my channels got about 113,000 views. That’s where bulk of these screenshots are going to come from. Now the first thing I want you to look at is these statistics from the Social Blade platform, Social Blade is a tool that gives you an estimate of how many views, subscribers and on average, how much money the YouTube creator is making. Now, I actually find this to be on the low side. As you can see here, Social Blade is saying that I should be averaging about $9 a day in revenue on the high end, but I’m actually doing a lot more than that. So we want to keep that in mind, but I wanted to bring this up to show you that my average daily video views is about 2,400, which isn’t that much at all. I’m still a pretty small creator.
And if we take a look at the videos that I brought up at the beginning, we see the first video with 1,519 views. The second video, lifetime views of 4,400. Third video, 2,600 views. And the last video, 480 views. Let’s take a look at what some of these videos ended up earning.
Now, if we take a look at this third video here, this is the one about the Honey app. I taught them how the Honey app makes money and how it produces income and everything like that. And this video ended up making on the lower side of the income. So while some videos were doing a lot better with the CPMs and the RPMs, this one actually didn’t do that great. So during the 28 days that we tested this, we got 3,700 views and earned about $101. And that’s still doing better than the average YouTuber getting less than a penny a click. This video generated approximately 3 cents per viewer.
Now the one at the top here actually was about a keyword tool. And I found this one to be the most interesting of all of them. I actually did a test on one day of this, because this is one of the videos that creates the highest CPM on my channel. And it’s about a keyword tool. Obviously people who own a keyword tool, they charge $200 a month for the tool so they got lots of money to advertise. Now on this one, we got about 1,519 views. And if you measure the last 28 days, we can see from those 722 views, I made about $66, which brings the amount per view to 9 cents, which is a pretty big deal here on YouTube.
And again, I’m not saying that’s what you’re going to get. The numbers are kind of all over the place, but it does depend on the specific niche you’re in. And one of the things I noticed about this video in particular is on Monday, October 19th, this video only got 24 views. Now out of those 24 views, somehow it generated $8.93, which is a staggering per view of almost 40 cents. And that’s pretty much unheard of. I’m not sure why that happened, but it seems to be the norm now that the views of died off and the traffic is coming primarily from people searching for that keyword tool. So it’s really targeted traffic and advertisers pay a lot of money for this stuff.
And if we take a look at the last two videos, which are the only two videos monetized on my alcohol addiction channel, we could see the first one got 520 views and made about $10. And the second one got about 752 views and made $2.47. So those are pretty much on par with the average YouTube earnings across the board, maybe just a smidge higher. And overall for the entire 45 day test, again, remember we got about 113,000 views. Some of the videos we have monetized, some of them we do not. Off of that little test for 45 days, we generated over $2,714 and dollars in revenue, which is profit for me. And that was pretty cool considering I’m a pretty small channel and not all the videos are monetized.
And the cool thing about this is it really adds up. I’m seeing on average that the new videos I put out do anywhere from $80 to $300 within the first couple of days, and then they start to taper off after that and make a steady income. For example, the Honey app one is now generating between 80 cents and $5 a day, which is pretty cool because that’s passive income that’s going to add up over time. And if I could make 20 or 100 or even 500 videos that do that same amount, I can have a channel that’s growing and making me a great income. And one of the secrets here is that if you make that many videos, some of them are going to do well if you learn how to do them right. I’ll go ahead and put a link to an in-depth video talking about how to get more views and grow your channel in the description below. Make sure you leave a comment and check that out after you watch this video.
All right, congratulations. Give yourself a pat on the back for staying this long in the video and make sure you stay to the end because right now I’m going to reveal some killer ways that you can make a lot more money with your YouTube channel without getting that many views just by utilizing what you have right now.
First of all, what we’re going to do is we’re going to talk to you about that little link that’s been at the bottom of the screen the entire time this video has been going that says VideoHacks.com. Now, if you were to go over to videohacks.com you could see that I actually give you PDFs, videos, tools and tutorials to help you make more money with your YouTube channel. Why do I do this? Well, quite simply, because I need a reason to get you from the video onto my mailing list so that I can make more money. This is one of the ways that I utilize to make lots of money, but let’s talk about some others before we get into that one.
First of all, one of the ways to make more money is quite obvious. You can make more videos about more topics that pay more money, right? So instead of making videos about travel, make a video about how you saved a bunch of money with a certain travel credit card. Instead of making videos about how you’re renovating your house, talk about how you took out a loan to get that renovation done. Or if you’re talking about funny cat videos, maybe you can get them into pet insurance or something like that that pays a lot more money.
So number one, make some videos about expensive topics. You should be doing this anyway for the steps I’m going to talk to you about in just a minute.
Number two, you need to get into affiliate marketing. For example, my video here on living with depression, there’s actually a therapy affiliate program that pays me $100 when someone signs up to talk to a trained therapist, I don’t even think they need to buy anything. They just sign up and I get a hundred dollars, which is pretty cool. And that starts to add up. If a thousand people view my video and YouTube only pays me $10, this I could probably get two or three people out of those thousand to sign up and I can get paid. And if you go to sites like OfferVault, you could literally find affiliate offers for anything under the sun. If you could make a video on it, there’s a way to make money. Go to videohacks.com to learn more.
The third way to make more money is with blogging. You could start your own blog where you host your videos and notes from your videos and tools. And in each of the videos, you simply tell them, go to my site to get the PDF, the MP3, the list, the tool, or whatever it is, even the notes from this video. And people will go to your website. You can have ads on your website. You could have affiliate offers on your website, or you could even sell your own products and courses or ClickBank or something like that. Again, remember there’s tons of ways to monetize if you can be creative enough.
Number four, we’re going to talk about a little doozy here called related video flipping. Let’s say you have a video that’s got a lot of views, but you’re not making much. What you want to do is you want to take that video and understand what the viewers want. So if I do a video about my latest travel trip and I talk to them about whatever it is and it gets a lot of views, but it’s not making money, what I want to do is I want to have a little link in the description that says, watch this video next. The video they watch next should be a video about something expensive. Instead of here’s my trip to Hawaii, we would say, here’s how I save tons of money on my travel. This is very important.
If you’re doing something about real estate or funny cats or whatever, you could say here’s my video about how to train your dog to not bark or whatever it is, right. And what you’re doing is you’re taking people from the video that gets lots of views and putting them to a specific video that you know is going to drive ad revenue through the roof. And all you have to do is be a little creative, use your keyword tools like Ubersuggest, Ahrefs or even the Google AdWords tool, and find out what advertisers are paying a lot of money for and try to flip your market from the video that’s not paying well to the stuff that’s paying well.
I do this all the time with my video on the Honey app. I teach how the Honey app makes money and then I say, watch my video here on how to make money online. That takes them from a couple pennies a view to something that pays me a lot more. And the way I can do all, this is very simple. Utilizing the cards, the little button that pops up on the video, I could send them to websites. Utilizing end screen clips, where I say watch this video next, I can send them to a video that drives expensive ads. I can also put different videos in the comments, links to my website, affiliate links to Amazon ClickBank or other affiliate networks and more. I can also do this in the description.
And if you utilize all these methods, you’ll start making a lot more money with your YouTube channel. And if you go over to videohacks.com, you can get the full list and full two hour video explaining this entire thing. So if you like this, subscribe, click the bell, give us a big thumbs up and check out my detailed YouTube money video next.