How Much I Made From 3 YouTube Channels in 2021

Thanks for watching my channel this past year! Here are the revenue numbers from our three channels.

Intro

In this video, I’ll cover the revenue generated from our 3 YouTube channels in 2021.

So I know about this time of year, a lot of YouTubers are making these videos recapping their revenue and I wasn’t sure if I should make one of these videos or not since it may get a little old, so I asked on Twitter and, well, the results were about split. I then asked on Instagram, and well, it was overwhelming in favor of a video recap, so here it is.

And a lot of channels had absolutely incredible earnings for 2021 and some, not as much as people may think. Ours will probably lie somewhere in the middle.

So, if you’re new here, the channels are the following:

Mango Street, which is my and my wife’s channel on photography, started in 2017 and has a little over a million subscribers.

Then, there’s my wife’s fitness channel, Rachel Gulotta Fitness, started in July of 2020 and has 142,000 subscribers.

Then, there’s this channel, which I started the same time, July of 2020 and has 205,000 subscribers.

Later, I’ll also cover revenue generated from brand deals.

Mango Street

This year was a bit slower over on Mango Street – we published 30 full videos and 4 shorts which received 3.2 million views down 56 percent from the previous year. Just getting YouTube to show our videos to subscribers has been a challenge – a lot of people will come across our videos and mention how they didn’t realize we were still making videos because they don’t show up on their homepage. So that’s been a bit of a challenge walking the line between making videos we want to make and making videos we think will perform well on our channel… and even 5 years into this, it can be hard to gauge what will do well and what won’t.

Let’s take a look at revenue. The CPM on this channel was $14 which is actually pretty good and up 42% from the previous year. Now for revenue, we’ve made $28,715… but $15,000 of that was from a brand deal and was paid out to us through our Google account, so it got lumped in with the Adsense. So our actual Adsense revenue was $13,715.

That’s a bit lackluster and luckily is not the only form of revenue from this channel. A large majority of it comes from brand deals, which I’ll cover later.

Rachel Gulotta Fitness

So Rachel’s channel was still going strong from 2020. She was publishing about 3 videos a week. But unfortunately, in March due to some health issues, she had to stop making videos and hasn’t been able to make more workout videos since. Most channels would stall out completely, but as I mentioned in past videos, the nature of workout videos is the repeatable view factor. If you like a workout and it’s part of your routine, you’re obviously going to watch it many more times than a photography video or a video on this channel.

And she’s put together monthly workout challenges based off videos she’s made, so this keeps her audience more engaged and motivated, and keeps views coming in for her channel.

So despite the setbacks, her channel still grew nicely this past year. Her CPM was $11.66, which is a bit lower than I expected, but still, not bad.

This makes her revenue for 2021: $43,709. Good job, Rach, that helped pay for my failed trading challenges!

This Channel

Alright, now for this channel.

A lot of people in the finance niche here on YouTube post way more often than I do. Meet Kevin posts… I don’t know between 3 and 20 times a day maybe? Uh yeah, that’s just nuts. Graham Stephan and Andrei Jikh post several times a week, along with this guy with the ridiculous thumbnails.

In 2021, I however published only 45 videos. Usually every Wednesday, sometimes I skip a week here and there. And the reason is I really only try to make videos that I want to make. Videos about topics that I’m interested in. Money-making experiments that satisfy my curiosity. I don’t really want to be making videos saying the stock market is crashing every time it closes down .5%, nor do I want to make videos about recent financial news or things like that.

This way I can really enjoy the topics I cover, have fun doing it, and be less likely to get burned out. Plus, I’ve got another channel for which I make videos, and I day trade most days, so that’s about as much as I can handle.

I wrapped up 2020 with about 42,000 subscribers. January ended up being a huge month for my channel for two reasons: I published my most viewed video, my day trading attempt with $1,000… and I posted a very timely video about the GameStop short squeeze. I published that video on January 23rd, and the following week the stock went absolutely nuts, and everyone and their mom was talking about it. Needless to say, these two videos brought in a lot of views and new subscribers and by February 13th, I hit 100,000 subscribers. And then just before Christmas, I hit 200,000 subscribers. Thank you so much, by the way.

So it’s been a pretty remarkable year for this channel. Overall it generated 8.6 million views. Because it’s in the finance niche, the ad rates are higher. My CPM was $30.65, which is really incredible, especially compared to our other two channels. My RPM, which is essentially my cut after YouTube gets it’s paws on the ad money, was $13.71. So, altogether, those views generated $116,722. That is pretty crazy.

Looking at a monthly breakdown, January and February were my biggest months, with January hitting $15,000 which just about blew my mind. February dropped to $13k then 11 in March, had a spike in May… and November and December it started to ramp back up again.

As far as what topics get the most views on my videos, trading by far is the most popular, covering 8 of the top 12 most viewed videos, then videos on passive income, NFTs, and some money-making experiments.

So altogether across the three channels, we earned $174,146 in Adsense.

Brand Deals

So as I mentioned earlier, brand deals are a big part of Mango Street’s business model, as long it’s a brand / service / or product that we believe in. Something we think our audience would like and benefit knowing more about… and we do it in our own style and try to make it as entertaining as possible. If a brand wants us to do something too far out of our style or over-sell something, we have no problem turning down those offers.

So in 2021, we worked with Squarespace, Skillshare, DJI, Canon, Vivo, and several others. I try to limit brand deals on this channel, so I’ve only done two sponsored segments for Masterworks.

Between all of the brand deals, we earned $201,861.

That brings our total revenue from brand deals and Adsense to $376,007.

That is top line revenue… of course we have operating expenses, gear, insurance, taxes, paying for a video editor to make me look less like a dummy…

FInal Thoughts

Okay, cool, what’s the point of all this? Well, I think there has been a push for people to become more transparent online with where their money comes from and to share that with their audience, and I think that’s great. If you’re interested in YouTube as a career option, I just showed you three different channels in different niches with different sized audiences and different CPMs so you can have a better insight into what’s possible.

And of course running a successful YouTube channel isn’t easy, and it’s not something everyone can do. I don’t have a course to sell you that says otherwise, but it is possible. A lot of people think YouTube is overly saturated and it’s hard to stand out, and yeah, it definitely can be. But our last two channels were launched in 2020 and, sure, they got an initial boost from our following on Mango Street, but growth can only be sustained if you’re able to build your own audience by bringing something unique to the table.

I hope you enjoyed this type of breakdown for the year. If you did, please let me know in the comments, and let me know what type of videos you want to see more of this year. Thanks so much for watching – if you aren’t already one of my 205,000 super cool subscribers, you should go ahead and hit that subscribe button and as always, hitting the thumbs up button on this video will help my channel out and is greatly appreciated. I’ll see you in the next one.