How Much YouTube Paid Me After 1 Year

It’s hard to tell if the past 12 months went by really slowly or really quickly, but either way, it’s now been 1 year since launching this channel, so I thought I’d dive into the revenue this channel has earned, as well as my wife’s fitness channel, and our main channel Mango Street. So let’s get into it!

Preface

I’ll get right into all the numbers, but first want to preface this by noting that yes, this channel has just been around for one year, but I’ve been making YouTube videos for over 4 and a half years. So while it’s certainly possible for a newcomer to see similar results if they are lucky, it definitely helps that I have the experience writing scripts, filming, editing, shooting thumbnails – I already own all of the necessary camera and lights, etc. Some of the audience from my main channel Mango Street did follow me over here which helped to kickstart the growth, so I am super thankful to those who have.

I have also been able to reach outside of the photo/filmmaking Youtube world to break into the personal finance world, which is what I really wanted. So at first in the analytics where it shows me other channels my audience watches, it was still mostly channels in the photo world, but now you can see it’s pretty much all channels in the finance world, which is pretty cool.

Mango Street’s Revenue

First up is my and my wife’s main channel, Mango Street. This has a photography focus, so the ad rate is generally lower than some other niches. We have just over 1 million subscribers and haven’t been posting as much here as we normally do. And because the ad rate is lower, in order to pay the bills, this channel relies on other revenue streams, with the main one being brand deals, like those Squarespace ads you certainly aren’t sick of seeing yet.

Now one thing that has thrown off the numbers displayed here is a brand deal we did, which was processed through our Adsense platform here, but it’s not related to the amount of views or anything. And since I’m trying to compare Adsense apples to Adsense apples, we’re going to subtract $15,000 from the total amount shown.

For the past year, our daily revenue tends to fluctuate between $50 and $100 per day. This spike in February is that brand deal I mentioned. Our CPM on this channel is $13.53 and remember, CPM is the amount advertisers paid per 1,000 views. Our cut of that is the RPM, which is $7.48, so our revenue for the past 12 months is $34,948 and 90 cents. But let’s subtract that brand deal and our real Adsense revenue is $19,948.90.

Our top earning video over the past year was this one we shot at the height of the pandemic, where we Facetimed models, and they gave us tips on how to pose. This video received 416,000 views and generated $2,930 and 54 cents in revenue.

COVID made it a little harder to make our usual videos on this channel, but we did make the best of it and did a lot of fun photoshoots at home and more lately it’s been harder to make videos with a lot of other things we have going on in our personal lives. So, that’s the relatively unimpressive stats from Mango Street, so let’s now check out my wife Rachel’s channel.

Rachel Gulotta Fitness’s Revenue

Rachel launched her channel the same time I launched this channel. She has earned over 129,000 subscribers with a whopping 10.6 million views. Dang girl. Her CPM is more similar to that of Mango Street’s, sitting at $10.50. On her best-earning day on February 16th, she earned $264 and 28 cents in Adsense revenue.

Her best-performing video by far is her Burn 500 Calories workout, which has over 3.3 million views and has generated over $16,000 in revenue, which is super amazing.

She was publishing three videos a week for a really long time, so she has over 100 videos on her channel. Unfortunately, she hasn’t been able to make new workout videos since March due to some health issues, but her channel is still growing and earning really nice revenue.

Other than the re-watchability factor with exercise videos, one way she has continued to keep momentum going without publishing new videos is by posting daily workouts, which consist of a playlist of her exercise videos for people to do everyday. She’s launched month-long workout programs for people to follow as well, which is a really smart way to keep the channel growing.

She was first able to monetize her channel in the middle of September. Her lifetime revenue is… $41,983.59. Good job, babe.

This Channel’s Revenue

Alright, so first let’s cover the highlights. Over the past year, this channel has grown from 0 to 155,000 subscribers. So for all of you who have subscribed, thank you so much. And if you have not yet, well, this is your cue.

This channel also received 6.2 million views. I published 56 videos, usually once per week. My most viewed video is my attempt at day trading futures with $1,000 which has over 1.2 million views and has earned over $18,287, so it was well worth the $1,000 loss incurred from trading.

One number that stands out is the CPM. In my last update in February, the CPM for this video was around $20 and now it’s increased 50% to over $30. I don’t really know why – it could be increased ad competition or higher ad spend on campaigns in general, but either way, I’m definitely not mad about it.

And just for some contrast, my least-viewed video is this one I posted at the beginning of June comparing 5 different stock brokerages with just under 10,000 views. It has earned about $168 so far. So obviously, not all videos I publish are earning thousands upon thousands of dollars, and that’s to be expected.

I launched my first video – a channel trailer – on July 24th, I was first able to monetize the channel about a month later on August 20th.

My best day revenue-wise was on January 31st because I had a video about the GameStop short squeeze that really got a lot of traction, and I made over $1600 that day, which just about knocked my socks off.

Generally, though – I’m in the $200-a-day range with Adsense. Sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more.

And for some more context, my lifetime revenue on my last update in February was $28,329 and 99 cents.

So now after one year, the lifetime revenue is….

$80,646.11.

That definitely blew away any expectations I had for this channel and has shown me that it really is worth all of the time and effort I put into this.

Final Thoughts

I think if you’re going to take YouTube seriously, it’s important to think of it as a business. We had all of our eggs in a Mango Street basket, which has been great, but I think many small business owners feel like something could happen and their business could evaporate overnight. And with YouTube specifically, you’re relying on them to host your videos, show your videos to your audience, and introduce new people to your channel. And the YouTube algorithm is a bit of black box where you don’t always know why your videos aren’t performing as well as past videos and why your subscribers aren’t seeing your videos and so on and so forth.

While we still love and are passionate about photography, we also have other things outside of photography that we’re passionate about and being able to expand into new areas has been really helpful for us, not only from a financial standpoint, but personally as well. It’s really easy to get burnt out on YouTube, and being excited about making videos and having fun doing it is really important.

So during a time when a lot of brands were suspending their ad campaigns with Youtubers and we weren’t able to make our usual videos, we were able to add over $120,000 to our business’s bottom line with these new channels, which is really incredible and makes it a little easier to sleep at night.

If you aren’t subscribed to this channel, well I sure as heck would love it if you would so next year’s update won’t show me still sitting at 155,000 subscribers like a chump. And if you appreciate the transparency, do me a favor and hit the thumbs up button on this video, It’ll tell YouTube to show this video to more people, which I would greatly appreciate.

That’s all for this one, see you in the next one.