So how much money can you make on YouTube? Well, if your name is Jimmy Donaldson, aka Mr. Beast, then in 2022 you made over $1 Million – per week!
That’s obviously a staggering amount of money and an unrealistic target to aim for. So how much could you realistically expect to earn?
We’re going to help you find out. We break down how YouTube pays creators and how much you could expect to make if your channel receives 1000 views per month, 10,000 views, and 100,000 views per month.
For fun – we also show you how much you could potentially earn if you grow your channel up to 1 Million monthly views.
At the end of the day, the question (how much money can you make on YouTube) comes down to how badly do you want it. How hard are you willing to work? And crucially, how long can you sustain that effort?
So let’s get into it. But before we talk dollars and cents, you gotta get your YouTube channel monetized if you want to earn money. Here’s how.
YouTube Partner Program
You can get monetized when you join the YouTube Partner Program.
What you need to join
- Follow the YouTube Channel Monetisation Policies.
- Live in a country/region where the YouTube Partner Programme is available
- Have no active Community Guidelines strikes on your channel
- Make sure that 2-Step Verification is turned on for your Google Account
- Have access to advanced features on YouTube
- Have one active Google AdSense account that you’ll link to your channel. Or be ready to set one up in YouTube Studio if you don’t already have one
How You Can Become Eligible
Your channel can become eligible for YouTube Partner Program with either Shorts or long-form video. You need to accomplish one of the following:
1. Get 1,000 subscribers with 4,000 valid public watch hours in the past 12 months or
2. Get 1,000 subscribers with 10 million valid public Shorts views in the past 90 days
Once you’ve met all criteria, log into YouTube Studio, click earn, and follow the instructions to apply for membership.
Now it’s time for the fun stuff.
How You Make Money On YouTube
We focus on the two most common ways to get paid on YouTube.
- Adsense revenue – run YouTube ads on your video content
- And affiliate Commissions – sell someone else’s product for a commission
Before we get into the numbers, we first need to understand how both income streams work.
It’s All About That Ad Revenue
Ad revenue is where most creators make the bulk of their income. Many factors go into how much advertisers pay YouTube to have their ads featured – but at its core, it comes down to supply and demand.
You see, it depends entirely on how many advertisers want to bid on specific search terms or topics and how much they are willing to spend per impression or view. This is why some content topics make much more money from ad revenue. Those topics are considered more valuable to advertisers, who can expect to generate more sales.
For example, it costs more to advertise on keywords like technology, finance, and health than on keywords like scary or prank videos. And that’s not to say that other subjects like scary videos or pranks can’t be huge on YouTube.
Often, even though they make less per view on their channel, a lot of these channels can strike it big because they get a boatload of views.
CPM – How To Calculate Yours
So, advertisers pay YouTube a fee per thousand views. This rate is known as CPM or cost per mille. CPM rates are not published, but if you dig around, you can find creators who share their earnings for an inside peek into how it works.
And at the end of the day, YouTube keeps 32% of the ad fee and passes on the remaining 68% to you.
So how much money can you expect to make per thousand views on your channel? Well, it really does depend. The only way to figure out your CPM is to dig into your YouTube analytics. Divide a video’s earnings by the number of views, then divide again by 1000 to get your CPM.
As we mentioned earlier, not all niches and topics are equal.
So in low CPM niches, like prank channels or scary videos or stuff like that, you can make around $1 to $3 per thousand views in those niches. Whereas in higher CPM niches, you can potentially make $30 to $50 per thousand views on your video.
That’s a pretty huge range, isn’t it? Opinions vary on CPM rates. Influencer Marketing Hub claims the average YouTube channel earns a CPM of $18.
We’ll get into some calculations for you, but first – let’s go over our other income stream.
Affiliates Get Paid
You can also earn serious money from affiliate sales on your channel. So how does it work?
Advertise a product in your YouTube video, and leave an affiliate link in the video’s description. You get a commission if an interested viewer clicks on it and buys the product through your link.
You actually don’t have to advertise at all. You can have a group of links that are always in your description. Leave links to all the gear you use in your setups, favorite software, or even energy drinks. It’s entirely up to you what you want to promote.
How many people can you expect to buy from you? Again, it really depends. And on so many factors – including how much trust you’ve built with your audience.
But, for the calculations that follow, we’re going to use a 0.1% conversion rate on your affiliate links. This means that for every thousand people that watch your videos, 1 person end ups buying a product.
How Much Money You Can Make With YouTube Videos
Alright – let’s work out how to earn money! We break down how you can make money on your Youtube videos using three common Youtube channel size milestones:
- 1,000 views per month
- 10,000 views per month
- 100,000 views per month
And for fun, we’ll tease you with how much you could make if you build up to 1 Million monthly views in a high CPM niche.
For this example, let’s be fairly conservative, and let’s say that you make around $6 per thousand views from ad revenue on your channel.
You get paid for both ads and affiliate product sales.
Level One – 1,000 Views Per Month
So, you’ve ground your way to 1000 views a month. Strong work! Here’s how much you could potentially earn…
So if youtube pay you $6 CPM on your channel, 1000 views per month would equate to around $6 a month from ad revenue. You keep 68% for just over $4.
Now let’s also say that you promote an affiliate product that costs $100, and you get a 50% commission for every single sale. So you make a cool $50 for every sale through your affiliate link.
So if you get 1000 views a month on your video content at a conversion rate of 0.1% – you can expect to make about one affiliate sale per month.
You can expect to make around $50 per month for every thousand views. So that would be a grand total of $54 per month.
Ok, so let’s be real for a minute. You probably aren’t super excited about making $56, and you aren’t about to buy your Mom a new house. But have patience. You got to earn it one step at a time.
Next step – 10,000 views.
Level Two – 10,000 Views Per Month
What about 10,000 views a month? How much money can you make now?
You can expect to earn around $60 per month from ad revenue, again at a $6 CPM. Again, you keep 68% or $40; the rest goes to YouTube. And if we take the same example of a $100 affiliate product with a $50 commission and 0.1% of your viewers buy, that would be ten sales at $50 each.
So $500 per month just from affiliate income. So this brings us to a total of $540 per month if you’re getting 10,000 views monthly on your channel.
Again, not life-changing money, but you’re getting somewhere. And hopefully, it inspires you to stay on your grind. At the next level, you can make a full-time income.
Level Three – 100,000 Monthly Views
So now, what about 100,000 views a month? At this point, you can generate some very significant income from your channel. And if you previously had to work another job while you built your channel up on the side – you might be able to quit and go all-in as a creator!
And this is where things can start to get fun. So at a $6 CPM, you can make around $600 monthly (you keep $408) from your YouTube channel with 100,000 views. But where this really starts to get crazy is when we factor in affiliate sales.
So let’s say again that you promote that $100 affiliate product with a 50% commish. If just 1 in a thousand buys through your link, that’s $5,000.
And that brings you to a total of $5,400 per month with 100,000 views a month on your channel.
So how hard is it to get 100,000 views?
Short answer, it isn’t as hard as you probably think.
Honestly, if you already get 10,000 views a month on your channel, it’s not hard to scale up to 100,000 views a month. It really comes down to being consistent, producing more content, and using your data and analytics to optimize.
And being patient. It isn’t “hard” to do from a technical standpoint. But – it takes diligence and discipline to stick with it long enough for your efforts to compound.
Now – let’s have some fun.
How Much Does YouTube Pay You For One Million Views?
This is where we can start to see a crazy amount of income.
So at a $6 CPM getting a million views a month, you earn $4080 from just ad revenue alone. And remember, this is an average to low CPM. What niche you’re in and where your target market lives make a huge difference.
So now, what about affiliate income? One million views equal 1000 sales at a 0.1% conversion rate. Well, now we’re talking about $50,000 just from affiliate income.
So if you can get your channel to one million monthly views with similar CPM and affiliate numbers, you could potentially make $54,000 each and every month. Run that for a year, and you can buy your Mom her dream house in CASH.
But – what if you were in a higher CPM niche?
So in high CPM niches, you can sometimes make between $30 and $50 per thousand views on your channel. Now, if you get a million views per month on your channel, that can be as much as $20,400 to $34,000 per month just from ad revenue alone after YouTube takes its cut.
And that’s not even factoring in the potential affiliate income that you could make. Pretty wild, huh?
Remember, Mr. Beasts earns over $1 Million a month!
High CPM Niches
So now, here are some of the highest CPM niches on YouTube.
- Finance
- Technology
- Health
- Cars & Automotive
- Investing
Now, what makes these niches high CPM? Well, there are more advertisers and, therefore, more competition to show ads on these particular niches and keywords. So they bid the price up and wind up paying a lot more to YouTube to display their ads.
Let’s look at a real-world example to give you some more data.
Young Entrepreneurs Forum – When You’re In A High CPM Niche
Have you heard of Young Entrepreneurs Forum?
They are in a very high CPM niche – make money online. So this would be part of the financial niche. And they produce videos like The top 20 best small business ideas for beginners in 2023, and how to write a business plan, how to get rich, and stuff like that.
And if we look at the stats on their channel, they get half a million views a month. So let’s see how much this channel could make from ad revenue alone.
Since this channel gets 500,000 views a month, let’s divide that by 1000 to see their thousands of views per month.
So we get 500. Now, let’s run the numbers at a $30 CPM, which is possible in the make-money-online niche.
That’s $10,200 per month if their channel is properly monetized. Not bad at all.
But that’s not it. Make money online is a perfect niche to feature affiliate products. Where can you find affiliate products to feature?
You can browse online marketplaces like Clickbank.com or Digistore 24.com. Vendors list their products along with the sale price and commission percentage so you can see how much you’d make for each sale ahead of time.
For Young Entrepreneur Forum (YEF), they could hop on Clickbank and search “E-business and Marketing.” And they’d find a ton of products to serve up to their viewers. Many earn a lot less than $50 per sale, and many earn a lot more.
So with this channel, YEF, they average 500,000 views a month.
Let’s be super conservative with the conversion rates between views and buyers. Let’s say 0.1% bought the featured product. That’s still 500 people buying through their affiliate link…
So at $50 in commissions for each sale, this channel could make an extra $25,000 a month. But imagine if this channel was promoting a $500 product or a $2000 course? They could potentially make a lot more.
Yes – YEF Makes Bank
So in total, for 500,000 views, Young Entrepreneurs Forum could make anywhere from $35,200 to $42,000 every single month.
And when they scale to 1 Million views per month? Double that to $70 to $84K.
And another quick side note with this channel. Their videos are whiteboard slideshows with a voiceover in the background.
Now, if you want to produce videos just like this channel right here, you could use software called Video Scribe. It’s cheap to use. And you can create videos just like this. And super fast.
And you don’t even have to show your face or film content. The point is that it’s easier than ever to start a YouTube channel and put up monetized content quickly.
There’s really no excuse. So what are you waiting for?
But you can also add other revenue streams to your mix. You could also earn $$$ from:
- Channel memberships: Your members make recurring monthly payments in exchange for special perks like badges, emoji, exclusive content, live chats, and more
- Shopping: Buy my merch! You can set up a merch store on YouTube and sell products
- Super Chat & Super Stickers: Your fans pay to get their messages or animated images highlighted in chat streams
- Super Thanks: Your fans can pay to have their message highlighted in your video’s comments section
- YouTube Premium Revenue: Get part of YouTube Premium Subscribers fees when they watch your content
- Sponsorships: a brand can sponsor your video in exchange for your personalized recommendation. You negotiate a set flat fee for the video
- Patreon: sign up for Patreon and ask your loyal fans to support you with a monthly membership. Patreon takes a 5-12% cut off your subscription fee
So you’ve got a lot of options to monetize your channel and laugh all the way to the bank.
Find Out More About Making Money On YouTube
We hope you found our guide helpful and are inspired to get on your grind and join the newest rank of YouTube stars.
If you want to learn more about average CPM rates for various niches, read “The 11 Most Profitable YouTube Niches in 2024.”
If you already have a YouTube channel and you want to take things to the next level, then check out “How To Grow Your YouTube Channel Fast With Fractional Video Editing.”
Do you want to learn about 2023 trends? Look at “The 5 biggest YouTube video trends 2023” for insider tips to help you take off this year.
If you’re already making money on Youtube, let us know if you need any help and advice on editing. We’re busy on that game, helping YouTubers create better content for the world. If you think you might need some help or advice in the next few months, drop us a message here.
