When someone asks me every time, How Much Money Do YouTubers Make ? It always confuses me as in how to respond to the question. Actually there is not an exact answer or an exact figure that a certain YouTuber makes. No one, including the YouTuber with “x” number of followers will be able to answer the question themselves when someone asks them how much do YouTubers make every month?
Read: How To Make Money From YouTube??
This post is dedicated to all those people wondering on how much do YouTubers make and also for those who have no clue, how do the YouTube content creators make money off of YouTube in the first place.
First lets look at some of the facts about YouTube in general.
And I will be diving this YouTube Income generation into two parts.
- Part 1 : The general Revenue stream for YouTubers
- Part 2: More advanced and behind the scenes way of making money from YouTube video.
How Much Do YouTubers Make: Breakdown?
YouTube is owned by Google. It looks after overall operation of the service itself. And Google does make heaps of money off of YouTube, how you ask?? Do you remember last time you tried watching your favorite music video on YouTube and you had to wait for 5 seconds before you could skip the add the you might or might not care about. Yes, that’s how Google makes money from YouTube.
Google charges advertisers to put advertising before the video, on the right side of the video and bunch of other different places that the advertisers can advertise their service, product or even their own video.
So since it gets paid for showing the advertiser’s add on a video that has been uploaded by the user, the user definitely gets their share from Google. That’s how most people make money off of YouTube, even though there are bunch of other ways too, that one can make money from YouTube, direct advertising from Google is one of the most basic ways the content uploaders make money from YouTube. But how much money?? Keep reading.
YouTube allows everyone to upload videos and monetize the video with their add network(If you are from a country that has been recognized by google for advertising).
Back To The Discussion
YouTubers get paid a certain amount which usually is anywhere between $1-5$ per thousand views that he/she receives on the video. This is called the CPM (Cost Per Mile). The cost of every thousand views.
- The CPM depends upon lots of different factors, like location, age group etc. If a user is from united states, Australia, Canada, United kingdom the CPM is generally higher as to compared with other much smaller or undeveloped countries.
So lets do a little bit of maths and you should be able to have a rough idea of how much money do youtubers make next time you watch one of your favorite YouTuber.
Assuming a video gets 1 million views and majority of the users are from united states, Australia, UK. So chances are the video can have a CPM of around $2.5 at its best or even higher.
So,
(1000000/1000)*2.5 This will be the equation.
= $2,500
Note: There are lots of factors that can affect these figures.
- Lots of the users use Adblock software/plugin these days. So if most of the users are using it, then the ads will not be shown and the views would not be counted. This also results in less ad clicks eventually leading to a lower overall CPM.
- The users might be from the countries where adwords might not be a big thing, so there won’t be too many advertisers.
This is the most basic and main source of income for more than 90% of YouTubers out there. This advertising program is called Google Adsense. If you’ve heard about this before, than you are lucky.
I will now stop beating around the bush. Like i have already mentioned before and you will see all over the internet, no one knows the actual figures on how much money do youtubers make. But lets see how much they make roughly.
Forbes published an article on The world’s highest paid YouTube stars 2015, this gives us an insight on these YouTube made millionaires.
Tubebuddy For YouTube
Tubebuddy is one of the widely used browser plugin. It is available free for download from their official website or from your respective browser’s app store. This plugin is solely developed for YouTube’s content creators and provide lots and lots of features for its users. If you are looking to find out how much do youtubers make from each video, this will give you the closest assumption.
I would go into much detail about tubebuddy, but will go through only what you require here.
- First go to Tubebuddy’s website and install the extension on your browser.
- There is no need to get premium subscription.
- After the installation has been completed, restart your browser.
- Find any youtube video that you want to spy earnings on.
- As you must have noticed by now, that new options have been added on your YouTube’s watch page.
- If you click along Tubebuddy’s tabs, you will see that it will give you earnings.
This gives you the rough estimation of how much the YouTuber has possibly made from that video.
Another way to get a rough idea is to use a service called socialblade.com
- Go to socialblade.com.
- On the top right search section, enter the youtuber’s name or username and hit enter.
- You will be provided with a rough data about the YouTuber’s daily views, monthly income and early income.
Social Blade, YouTube Statistics
You can also use another online service that does a rough calculations that is based on CPM and google Adsense income. Like we have already discussed earlier in this article, there are hundreds of streams that once can make money from YouTube.
- Goto youtubemoney.co
- On the homepage itself, you will see an option to enter the video views. The calculator automatically calculates the average amount the video must have generated.
Part 2 : Affiliate, Sponsors, Branding etc
YouTube is filled with content creators that make video in almost every niche. When the YouTubers start getting traction from the website and start building an audience, the audience is generally from the same niche. What does this mean for other companies and brands is that, it creates a platform for the business to reach highly targeted and “loyal” users. On the other hand, the content creators can get a cut out of the promotion scheme and make living from YouTube.
I would like to quickly explain how does affiliates work or branding is done and so on.
- Affiliate: Have you ever came across a video where you are asked to visit the link from the YouTube’s video description and then buy the product or service. Chances are that the user who uploaded the video has put their affiliate link in the description and when you buy the product/service, the uploader will get a cut out of it.
- Branding/Sponsors: Branding and sponsorship deserves whole another article, so I will try to be as quick as possible. You might have seen your favorite YouTuber talk about a product, company a lot in their video. They might have even showcased one of their product or service everywhere. This might be an indication that the YouTuber is in a deal with the company or not. Like Casey Neistat for Samsung.
So, i hope this post gave you a rough idea about how much money do YouTubers make.
Share your thoughts in the comments below.
