How Much Money YouTube Pays Me (1 Million vs. 24k Subscribers)

I was amazed when I saw the revenue generated from my first day with monetization on this channel. After years of making YouTube videos full-time, the CPM from this channel far surpasses that of my main channel.

In this video, I break down how much in ad revenue both of my YouTube channels earn. At the time of recording, my main channel, Mango Street, has over 1 million subscribers and this channel had around 24,000.

In this video, I’m going to compare how much my two channels make in ad revenue from Youtube. At the time of this recording, My main channel – Mango Street has a little over 1 million subscribers and this channel has around 24,000. You may be surprised at how they stack up.

So I’ll get into the revenue numbers in a minute – I swear, but first, I want to give you some context.

We started the Mango Street channel in January of 2017.

And back then, there weren't any viewership requirements to enable monetization, so right away, we started making… well, pennies.

Also, the entire concept of our channel was to create short, to-the-point videos that don’t waste your time. This means that the vast majority of our videos aren’t eligible for mid-roll ads. I also think this makes the Youtube algorithm not want to recommend our videos as often because there aren’t as many ads rolling on them.

Regardless, the channel does well, but we don’t get an insane amount of views. All-time, we have close to 50 million views.

2017

Okay, so let’s take a look at Mango Street’s revenue. We have three main metrics that Youtube displays – our estimated revenue, the RPM, and the CPM. The estimated revenue is pretty self-explanatory. The RPM – or Revenue Per Mile – tells creators how much they earn per 1,000 views. They take your estimated revenue divided by the total amount of views to get this number. The CPM is the cost per thousand and it shows how much advertisers are will to spend on the channel on ads per 1,000 impressions. So the RPM will take into account our cut after Youtube takes its share, and it includes views that aren’t monetized, so this number is lower than the CPM. It’s what we’re actually earning per 1,000 views.

So our first year in 2017, we earned $17,572.93. The average CPM was $5.56 and the RPM was $1.17. So this means we made only $1.17 per 1,000 views. So for a first year as a channel, $17,000 is not too bad at all… but we did have incredible growth our first year and went from 0 subscribers to 500,000 within a year and by October of 2017, it was both mine and my wife’s full-time job – so thankfully there are other income streams outside of Adsense that help us pay the bills.

The most we made in one day in 2017 was in June – we earned $249.11.

2018

Moving on to 2018 – it was actually surprisingly similar and yet less than our first year, at $17,516.22. We earned $56.71 less our second year – during which our subscriber growth did slow down quite a bit, but I also would’ve thought that having twice the videos available on our channel would increase our revenue. Also, the CPM was 8 cents lower and the RPM was 3 cents lower.

2019

In 2019, we earned $18,566.78 with a higher CPM rate of $7.39 and an RPM of $1.48. It looks like our biggest day in terms of revenue was on July 29th we hit $166.45.

Lifetime

So over the last 3 and a half years on Mango Street, we earned about $67,000 in ad revenue – roughly less than $1500 per month. It’s interesting that by making more short-form videos in the photography and filmmaking niche, not only are we making less ad revenue without mid-rolls, but Youtube’s entire algorithm is designed to keep you on Youtube as long as possible, so it seems our videos are also less likely to be suggested because they are shorter in length and don’t contain many mid-rolls for Youtube to profit off of.

But don’t worry, we are fortunate enough to have long-term sponsorships with Squarespace and other one-off brand deals, as well as selling digital products, so the Adsense revenue generated is really just a nice little bump in the bank account every month and not something we 100% rely on to make rent every month.

And – if you’re curious – our most viewed video has 3.7 million views and earned us a little over $3,600, with just pre-roll ads playing before it.

TODAY

Now looking at the last 28 days, the Mango Street channel got 542,000 views. Now it has roughly 1 million more subscribers than this channel, but I still received 268,000 views here the last 28 days. I think a lot of you found this channel due to one of my videos being recommended to you, so now it seems the algorithm is giving me a little boost.

It’s pretty well-known that videos in the personal finance niche demand a higher CPM rate from advertisers… so let’s see how our channel on photography and filmmaking compares with this channel on making money online.

I applied for monetization on Wednesday, August 19th, was accepted shortly after, andI first enabled monetization the next day, Thursday, August 20th. I don’t like Overlay Ads or Sponsor Cards, so I leave those disabled. So it’s been just over a month with being monetized, let’s see what I’ve earned.

That first day, I made $40. Now after years of looking at Mango Street’s depressing ad revenue numbers, this was pretty interesting. My first video published with monetization enabled was my Print-On-Demand video and the day it went live, I earned $92.82. Things really started to take off when I posted my video on ways to earn Passive Income. The day it went live, I earned almost $182. My biggest day so far was the following Monday, when my video on Saving Money went live, I earned $236.73.

Last 28

Okay, so let’s compare the last 28 days between Mango Street and this channel.

Mango Street had 542,800 views, compared with my 268,675 views. Mango Street’s RPM was $3.69 and mine was $12.19. Mango Street’s CPM was $11.96 and mine was $26.77. The ad revenue for Mango Street was $1,885.59 and mine was $3,054.76.

Wow. So I was completely blown away at how much more this small channel made compared to our much larger and more established channel. I received 49% fewer views, yet earned about 62% more in ad revenue. It’s clear that advertisers in this niche are willing to pay more for ads and even a small channel like this can generate some pretty serious revenue.

Brand Deals

So obviously adsense revenue is not enabling us to make Mango Street our full-time jobs, and I had briefly mentioned other sources earlier. One of the main ways we make money on Mango Street is through brand deals. Generally, a company or agency will reach out to us with a product or a campaign and we decide if the product or service is a good fit for us and our audience and if their budget aligns with what we charge, we can usually strike a deal.

The contracts generally don’t allow us to tell you exactly how much the fee we get paid is, but you can get a rough idea by knowing some basic numbers.

When a Youtuber does something like a 45-60 second shoutout in their video, the ballpark CPM for that is in the $20 to $40 range. Let’s say the advertiser agrees to pay a $30 CPM and the Youtuber gets an average of 100,000 views per video. This means they would get paid $3000 for that shoutout.

Some deals may also involve an affiliate commission paid out to the Youtuber, so they could make a little extra on the backend if people signup or buy whatever it is they are advertising.

Our deals rarely have the affiliate backend – like if you use our link to signup for a new Squarespace site, we don’t see anything from that. It’s really just a way for Squarespace to track how well we are converting our audience into Squarespace customers. This will then tell them if they should keep advertising on our channel or look elsewhere for their ad spend. Since Squarespace has offered us year-long contracts for the past 3 years, it’s safe to assume that our channel hits the numbers they look for to keep re-investing in us.

Now that’s just for a shoutout. When we do an integrated or dedicated video – where the video either features the product or is focused entirely around it – those demand much higher rates. You have to consider the actual product, how you can genuinely incorporate it into a video that your audience will want to watch, and how your audience will react to being sold to in that way.

We’ve always tried to approach these videos in a way where we can incorporate our sense of humour and make it clear that while it is a sponsored video, we still want to keep them entertained. Like for this video for Intel, we made fun of the typical travel bro video on Youtube.

These videos end up being some of the most fun to make and some of the largest scope videos we produce – like in this other video for Intel, we rented a camper van and did a road trip up the west coast with our dogs… and the laptop they wanted promoted.

It took 7 days and a ton of hours on the road, but it gave us a really memorable trip from which we released a really fun video, and got a paycheck after all was said and done. We usually just do 3-5 of these a year since they take a lot of time and effort to pull off in our style and end up being pretty exhausting. We also don’t want to be selling to our audience all the time because we know how annoying that can be.

So as I mentioned, these types of videos demand a higher rate. Depending on the product and the scope, the rates can be anywhere from 3 to 20 times the amount of a normal shoutout. If the budget available is larger, we always put more money and time into the production of the video to make it as fun to watch as possible.

Now of course there are other revenue streams related to youtube channels I could cover, but that’s outside the scope of this video. I really wanted to focus on Adsense and include a little inside peak at brand deals so you know how they work.

OUTRO

Ad revenue certainly isn’t what it used to be before Adpocalypse and it can be hard for creators outside of personal finance and the other highest paying niches to make enough to sustain themselves without looking for other sources, like brand deals.

So next time you’re annoyed when you watch a Youtube video sponsored by Squarespace or whatever, you’ll hopefully have a better understanding of why it’s necessary for them to be able to keep the lights on.

I hope you also enjoyed seeing the actual revenue generated from both channels. My goal is to always keep things as honest and as transparent as possible, so let me know if you have any questions in the comments below. I’ll see you in the next one.