How much YouTube pays per view

Every number you have seen quoted for this is wrong for most channels, including yours, because the figure varies by more than ten times depending on subject, country, season and format. What follows is how to work out your own.

Why one number cannot exist

YouTube does not pay for views. Advertisers bid to reach specific people, YouTube takes a share, and the creator receives the rest. So the amount is really a measure of what your particular audience is worth to advertisers, which changes with:

• Subject. A viewer researching business software is worth many times a viewer watching entertainment, because the advertiser stands to make far more from them.
• Country. The same video earns very different amounts depending where the viewer is, and most channels have a mixed audience.
• Season. Advertiser budgets follow a calendar. The final quarter of the year is consistently the strongest and January the weakest, and the gap is large.
• Format and length. How many ads can be shown, and whether the viewer stays long enough to see them.
• Whether the viewer is signed in, using an ad blocker, or watching a video advertisers avoid. Some views generate no revenue at all.

The two terms, and why mixing them up causes most of the confusion

• CPM is what the advertiser pays per thousand ad impressions. It does not reach you and it is the number quoted in most articles, which is why those figures look implausibly high.
• RPM is what you actually receive per thousand views, after the platform's share and after counting views that carried no ad. This is your number.

RPM is meaningfully lower than CPM, always, and someone quoting CPM as their earnings is not lying so much as quoting the wrong metric. When comparing what anybody reports, check which one they mean before drawing conclusions.

How to work out your own realistic figure

1. Find your own RPM in YouTube Studio once you are monetised. It is reported directly and it is the only figure that is actually about your channel.
2. Before that, use the closest comparable channel you can find in the same subject and same main audience country, from creators who publish their figures openly. Same subject matters more than same size.
3. Multiply by your monthly views divided by a thousand. That is your ad revenue, and it is usually a smaller number than people expect.
4. Now add the other routes, which is where the actual income is. A single affiliate commission or one sponsorship can exceed a month of ad revenue on a mid-sized channel.

The conclusion this leads to

If ad revenue were the plan, you would need enormous view counts to earn a living, and that is exactly why most channels chasing views alone never get there.

Channels that earn well use views as the input to something else - a recommendation, a product, a service, a sponsor. The views matter, but as traffic rather than as revenue. Treating them as revenue directly sets a target roughly ten times higher than it needs to be.

Where the income actually comes from · How many views you would need · All seven routes