How Much I Made With 1 Million Views on YouTube
Five months ago, I started a finance and career focused YouTube channel called rareliquid, which recently reached 1 million views in accumulated views with 58 videos. In this piece, I share:
- How much I made through YouTube ad revenue from 1MM views
- How the genre of the channel affects YouTube ad revenue
- How much I made from two other income streams tied to my channel
YouTube Ad Revenue From 1MM Views
I’ll get right to it: I made a total of $6,126.36 starting from when I first got monetized (March 2021) to when I reached 1 million views (July 2021). For reference, I started my channel in January 2021 and it takes 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours to get monetized on YouTube. When I took the snapshot below (July 9th), I had 28,300 subscribers.
Surprisingly, more than half of my YouTube ad revenue came from a single video that went semi-viral, “How I spent My ENTIRE J.P. Morgan Investment Banking Salary.” Alone, It earned me $3,110.79 and pulled in almost 500,000 views. When this video was going viral in mid-May, it earned me a peak of $415.03 in one day, which was super exciting at the time. As you can see below, my daily ad revenue has fallen since then to a much more normal amount.
How Your YouTube Niche Affects YouTube Revenue
Two metrics I want to share are RPM and CPM. RPM, Revenue Per Mile, is an estimate of how much you earn per 1,000 views. CPM, cost per 1,000 impressions, is what advertisers pay for 1,000 views, which Google takes a 45% cut from. My RPM and CPM are $6.11 and $14.48, respectively as pictured below.
From my understanding, my RPM and CPM figures are higher than those you might see from other YouTube accounts. The way YouTube pays its creators is based on an auction process where advertisers bid on ads depending on various factors but including the video’s relevance to the advertiser’s target audience.
Because I focus on the finance and career niche, I think advertisers are willing to pay among the highest across all niches on YouTube. They understand that their audience are more serious viewers who might be more inclined on average to buy finance and career products that could improve their lives.
The takeaway: one thing you might want to consider before starting your own channel is what your niche will be. Channels that attract viewership that does not particularly translate well to the sales of advertised products might not bring in much ad revenue. However, as long as your channel attracts a lot of viewers, there are other potential income sources, which I will cover in the following section.
My Other Revenue Streams
With a large audience, there are many ways to increase your revenue streams. For me, my two other main sources of income are Patreon and sponsorships.
Patreon
Patreon is a common way many finance YouTubers earn an income. For those who aren’t familiar, Patreon is a membership platform in which creators create a subscription service. In my Patreon, I have 3 tiers and in each, I share information such as buy/sell alerts, a weekly updated financial database that I use to analyze stocks, the models I build, and more. Currently, I am earning about $1,500 each month on Patreon.
Affiliates and Sponsorships
Affiliate links are the links that I leave in my YouTube video descriptions, and whenever people use them to buy the products referred by the link, I receive a small percentage of those sales. I see them as win-win’s for both the users and me because I only refer product offers in which the user can also get free money or a discount when they use my link.
For sponsorships, I get paid for inserting 60-second mentions of the sponsor in my videos. So far, I’ve received around 50 offers from different sponsors and I’ve worked with 3 so far because I try to only work with those that fit with my audience and have a really good product or service. I believe this approach is the best for all three parties — the sponsors, viewers, and me.
I can’t provide the exact numbers for how much these sponsors are paying me because that goes against our agreements, but to provide a rough range, as a channel with roughly 30,000 subscribers, each sponsor pays around $500 to $1,000 for a 60-second mention in a video.
You can see above how much affiliates/sponsorship income has developed over the past 6 months. There was a huge increase in June because that was when I really started working with sponsors.
In total and excluding July, I’ve earned $5,922 from YouTube ad revenue, $3,869 from Patreon, and $4,800 from affiliates and sponsors, which brings the total amount to $14,591.
Conclusion
Overall, after 1MM views, which came after about 5months of hard work, I earned nearly $15,000 in total, which is about $3,000 per month. I am hoping these figures continue to scale up, but we’ll see what happens over time. Hope you found this article helpful and check out this article if you’d like my top 5 best tips on how to grow your YouTube channel.
