How Much Money Does YouTube Pay You for Advertising?

To see why I could care less about the change in YouTube’s advertising policy and how to make money on your videos, you have to start with how much YouTube pays for ads.

Most bloggers start making money with Google Adsense on their blogs. The pay sucks, averaging between $0.006 and $0.015 per page view, but it’s quick and easy.

YouTube ad rates are even worse.

YouTube shares 55% of its ad revenue with video creators and books an average of $7.60 per 1,000 ad views. That means you get about $4.18 for every 1,000 views of ads shown on your videos.

That’s just $0.0042 per view and doesn’t even count if someone clicks off the ad before a certain time has passed.

I know it’s a lot of numbers but stick with me for a second to see just how crappy a deal this is.

If you publish two videos a week and get an average of 500 views on each, an extremely ambitious goal, you’d still make less than $20 a month.

How Much Do Famous YouTube Celebrities Make?

Everyone gets pulled into the myth of making money on YouTube by the millions made by a very few YouTube stars. Exact income isn’t shared but estimates are pretty easy to come by with the top ten all making more than $10 million a year from ads on their channels.

Six-year old Ryan of ‘Ryan’s Toy Review’ is estimated to make $11 million by opening and playing with toys in videos for his 10 million subscribers. I think my 5-year old son is responsible for about half of the views on the channel.

Daniel Middleton is estimated to have made $16.5 million by playing Minecraft in videos for his 18 million subscribers.

But think about those numbers. NBC gets about 18 million viewers for its Sunday Night Football broadcasts, the #1 rated show on TV. If the show was on YouTube, it would make just $1.2 million for the 17-game season…

YouTube celebrities are getting millions of views on each video and making a fraction of what is being paid on traditional media. You have to reach nearly 12 MILLION PEOPLE a year with your videos just to make YouTube a full-time job based on what you make with ads.

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