Another guy I like to follow, Lord Karnage, has similar number of subscribers, but most of his videos get far fewer views, 6k-10k and he's got over 4,000 videos up. I've heard an interview with him about his business and tbh, it doesn't sound great. He'd make more money panhandling playing video games on a street corner.
On the other hand, Simon and Martina, 1.2 million subs, between 300k-400k views per video and 4 videos a month, seem to be living a decent middle class life in Seoul and then Tokyo. No idea how much money they make, but they've had employees in the past to help them with their video production. Some calculators seem to claim they're probably making something a bit north of $100k.
One of the things that I find really disturbing is that, every so often, google will just "change" the payment computation and suddenly people who were putting 50-60 hour weeks into youtubing to make a fairly minimal living are suddenly seeing their income cut by huge percentages. Eventually everybody will figure out what changed and things will settle down, but there's a few weeks seemingly every year, where my subscription feed will be full of people complaining or shutting down channels.
Don't forget to factor in that evergreen content will continuously bring in money, especially if you're funnelling in viewers from outside the YouTube algorithm. A video I made in 2014 is still the bulk of my YouTube income
> especially if you're funnelling in viewers from outside the YouTube algorithm
This is why a lot of people encourage youtubers to diversify away from ad-revenue. A youtuber that relies solely on ad-revenue is like a supplier with only one customer. They are at the complete mercy of the whims and competency of their single customer.
This is a large part of the reasoning behind patreon. Then there are people like CGP grey that diversify to podcasts, have patreon, sell merch and get paid-for promotions.
One thing that may be worth adding is that for Dave Jones in particular, he has other lines of income such as selling hardware (project kits, branded multimeters, T-shirts, etc) and ads on his popular webforum. The YouTube channel works as advertising for those businesses. So even if you don't make a good living off of the YouTube revenue, it may still make sense as a way of building a loyal customer base.
A lot of YouTubers also make a good chunk of their income on Patreon now as well.
With Patreon, it's more properly considered as just another payment processor: the hope is that you'll build a functioning business and use it to handle people's credit card interactions.
So while CGPGrey might be making $20k/video for the first video, anyone with a (say) $5/month cap that paid $5 for the first video now pays nothing towards any videos released later in the month, potentially dropping the income substantially as more and more spending caps are hit as the month rolls on.
On the other hand, YT is populated by people from different countries. $20/hour is not great in US or UK, but where I'm from that's about 10x the minimum wage and 3-4x the median wage. There's plenty of foreign creators on YT and for them that amount of money places them firmly in the top income bracket.
One day you are on page one and monetizing (I've been there), next day, page 5 and nothing (been there too).
For example, PewDiePie makes a video a day with ~4 million views each, which should net him around $1.5 million a year from ad revenue. I have no problem imagining him making another $6.5M through other means, being the most well-known youtuber. He also does heavy promotion of amazon affiliate links, which probably brings in a decent amount of money as well.
But of course normal people don't make a video a day and don't get millions of views on each video. I think most youtubers who manage to make it their day job get the majority of their money through Patreon subscriptions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW0eUrUiyxo
Of course, these days it's often supplemented by stuff like Patreon and separate sponsorship deals.
Another person of interest here might be Jim Sterling of The Jimquisition, since AFAIK his main income is through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jimquisition
Primitive Tech makes $5k-$6k per month purely from Patreon, no ads, affiliate links, or endorsements. He produces one video per month.
Has almost 5m subscribers and each video gets at least 10M views.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA/fea...
Most YouTubers, like most musicians, don't make any real profit.
If you were paid simply on the number of hats you have to wear, then every small-business proprietor would be a billionaire.
The problem is that people conflate "more individuals are making it big" with "individuals have a better chance of making it big." The number of contributors trying to make it into a career is far, far larger than it was, and has increased far more quickly than the number of contributors actually making a lot of money.
I believe the reason this is so hard to find out is that it's in their contracts that they can't disclose their earnings publicly. Plus, their revenue comes from ads shown on their videos and advertisers pay varying amounts depending on how in-demand that kind of content is.
Best bet is going to be estimates from places like SocialBlade.
And that won't even take into account things like endorsements and merch, which is how people like PewDiePie make a lot of their money, nor will it take into account costs of production or other things like management or an MCN.
YouTube isn't exactly enthusiastic about people sharing their revenue data, but they're not stopping anyone. Most creators choose not to, purely for reasons of commercial sensitivity. Some do, most notably CGP Grey and Dave Jones of EEVBlog. Dave Jones had an average eCPM of $1.36 pre-adpocalypse; CGP Grey's post-adpocalypse video had an estimated eCPM of $1.11.
Hence my original question :)
Source: know someone who worked on the project and was involved in the launch.
Mentally, I apply a $0.50 - $4 CPM for 1-2 STDEV.
Articles like this paint a very rosy picture....
> Nowadays many young YouTubers can become flush with cash much more quickly and set up their own companies just to deal with the income from ad sales, marketing tie-ins, and personal appearances at live events.
But I'm having a hard time getting convinced. I launched a tech videos channel like what TechCrunch is doing now with CrunchReport, back in 2011. For video views of 10,000 or so, I was barely getting 10 / 15$ in ad revenue. A year later I shut it down as the cost of production was far outpacing the video ad revenues. I had a hard time getting sponsors also.
The article mention 1 of the MOST POPULAR Artist - “PewDiePie” -'s earnings of 8 Million, but this NYTimes story [ 2014 ] also features the same Olga Kay mentioned in OP, and also paints a much sober picture of how much money "Youtube Stars" really make from it, and all the efforts that go into it.
"Chasing Their Star, on YouTube" => https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/business/chasing-their-st...
> “We are underpaid,” Ms. Kay says. “We are not only coming up with the commercial concept and tapping into a loyal audience, we are also doing marketing. We are doing all of these jobs for a relatively small fee.”