I’m SHOCKED at how much YouTube paid me for a VIRAL VIDEO...

What's up you guys, it's Graham here! So, two things: number one, we just had our first video break 1 million views in one week on one video. Just to give you guys some context here, usually my channel does anywhere from 850,000 to about 1.1 million views a month. This one, the last few days, I was doing over 800,000 views in just 48 hours on one single video. That’s absolutely mind-blowing!

So first of all, a huge thank you for everyone that watched that video, who is a part of it. It's just absolutely incredible. Another big thank you to the YouTube algorithm for deciding to put that video on the homepage of YouTube when people weren't logged in. You’re the real MVP!

But anyway, for anyone else new here, my name is Graham. I love credit cards and debt, and I hope you guys stick around for my real estate, personal finance, and other money-related tips. I post three times a week, usually Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I also unfortunately don't have a trust fund or any daddy's money—so that would have made things a lot easier. But now, apparently, in addition to flexing credit cards, duplexes, and Lotuses, I'm now going to flex some of that YouTube ad revenue and share with you guys exactly how much I made from a video hitting just over a million views in a week.

Because honestly, it was stupid how much money I was making at the peak when I was getting about 40,000 views an hour! Here’s how much you actually end up making from that; it is shocking! And what's even crazier is that the views are even still coming in right now. This is basically the equivalent of YouTube just looking at my channel and being like: “You know, we’re gonna make it rain on you. There you go, there you go.”

But before I get into how much YouTube pays me for a million views, here's the thing: I made this channel with the expectation of total transparency. I've always been completely upfront with what I make from each of my income sources, from the perspective of offering value and sharing with you guys what you could potentially do as well. And by the way, most of the social media stuff is completely new to me too; we’re both along for the same journey! I’m still figuring it out as I go along, so my experiences and learning lessons are yours to learn from.

And I've always found that videos like this are super inspirational, just to know that stuff like this is even possible to begin with. Like, I don't have any weird superpowers or anything! You could obviously tell from my lack of ability to get a focused shot of a credit box. So these are absolutely things that you would be able to implement as well.

And before I show you guys my income, I got to say there is zero reason for me to lie about any of this. The technical ability it would take to fake something like this—because I'm not just gonna show you a screenshot. Am I going to actually show you my computer, from both this and my actual computer? So you're going to be able to see it. It would make zero sense for me to try to fake any of this, so these are the real numbers you're about to see.

The reason why most people don't want to share these numbers is because they’re uncomfortable with their subscribers knowing how much money they make in ad revenue. But this channel is all about being open about finances, so here you go! Without further ado, here’s how much money I made from a 1 million view video and also how much money I make from the channel in general.

Okay, you guys, so anyway now you could see my dashboard here. Just to prove this is real, I got it recorded on this, and I'm also doing a screen capture. So let’s go up here, let’s click refresh so you guys can see I'm not just like photoshopping this sort of stuff. So anyway, here you go, you see the overview here. Let’s go over to revenue, and you can see over the last 28 days... you know, we'll do the last 30 so you can see the full month here.

But yeah, as you can see over the last 30 days, from October 19th to November 17th, I did about $26,000. This is typical of my channel right about here: so $564, $510, $425. The low is about $281; high is about $501. You can tell this is pretty much when I start uploading here; then obviously over the weekend when I don’t upload, and when I upload again it goes up again.

This right here is about where this video started taking off, so you can see I did $845, $939, $925, and then all the way up to the peak. You can see here $1,401, $2,226. It gets crazier! $2,540. But wait, there’s more! At the peak, this was $3,434.46.

So one thing I want to do is compare metric with views so you can see exactly what the view ratio is. So you can see here, let’s do this day: 33,000 views on my channel made me about $564. Another one here: 22,000 views made $488. Right here, 81,000 views on my channel did $947.

And then here at the very top: 433,000 views in one day on my channel did $3,434.46. So you might be asking to yourself here: why was I doing so much more money per view than it was up here? Because you could see 433,000 views, $3,400 versus this day, 25,000 views is $500.

So given that, I mean, this really should have been more like a $6,000 day. The reason why is because this credit card video here, which is an unboxing credit card video, has a lower watch time and lower CPM. When I make videos about real estate investing, the CPM is often about three times higher than the credit card videos I made. So that’s the discrepancy here between the views and the income I made on this day.

So let's go to this video here; we can check the revenue here. So anyway, as you can see here, a 1.2 million view video made me $7,293.02. Again, you can see the views here every day: 32,000 views, $285. And then again at the peak, 312,000 views made me $1,782.

We can go here to overview so I can show you guys the watch time. So you can see the average view duration here: 4 minutes and 35 seconds, which again is pretty low for the most part. The one thing that I do find interesting here is that most of the money that I ended up making in terms of revenue was really on the backend.

So even though I’d make about $1,700 a day on that video, I ended up making significantly more from people watching other videos of mine. Like for instance, this one that says, “How I Built Six Income Sources.” The thing is: YouTube was recommending this video as a next up, so people would watch my credit card video and then go over and watch this video as well. So you can see on this video, I made $689 that day; this is $612.

We can compare by views to give you an idea of what different views pay. So this one: 6,700 views made me $153, and then this day, 44,000 views made me $689. Again, just a little bit lower watch time when it was recommended versus when my subscribers watch.

But yeah, so as you can see here: here’s another day. At 13,000 views, I made $163. So yeah, a lot of this revenue here was really because the other video took off and everyone else was watching this video. Here’s another video that was absolutely getting recommended. So as you can see, I'm an idiot for getting a credit card!

78,000 views made me $755. So there you go; that's pretty much how much I make. 24,000 views is $26,000. We can even go back, and I can show you guys a custom range. Let’s go back; let me show you guys what I did. We can just go back to August first—to the end of August 31st—just to give you guys another example here.

So here’s another one: this was 1.25 million views, did almost $16,000 that month. I can go back; let’s even go back another month. Let's go back to July—to July 31st. This one I did 1.1 million views; that did a little bit more: $16,000 again! Just purely based off the CPM and the topics.

So a lot of this doesn’t necessarily come down to how many views you get. It’s never a hard number in terms of “this view means this amount of money.” It really comes down to whatever the CPM is and whatever the video length is. Like you could see my average watch time here: 8 minutes and 8 seconds. So it just so coincides that the longer the video is and the longer the watch time, generally the more you get paid.

So first of all, let’s talk about the big discrepancy here between what YouTubers say they make, what SocialBlade says I make, and what I actually make. So here’s how this works: YouTube ad revenue is based off what's called the CPM, which stands for cost per mile, which is basically the cost per 1,000 views that you get. This means that advertisers can pay different rates for different topics on different channels.

So my CPM is going to be a lot different than, let’s say, a prank channel, which is gonna be different from a gaming channel, or a vlog channel, or anything else. The CPM will vary greatly from topic to topic, and it’s for that reason that my income that I make on this channel is often 10 or 20 times higher than other channels with similar amounts of views.

So when a YouTuber is out there saying that they got 10 million views, but they only made $5,000, you know they’re not lying. It’s just that’s what their channel’s CPM is paying them. If I got 10 million views, I would make more like $150,000.

So the second thing: let's talk about what SocialBlade says they make. Thanks to a lovely comment provided to you by Pixel Bug, I guess there is something wrong here. According to SocialBlade, I got around 800,000 views in the last month. Now let’s say you get paid $4 for every 1,000 views, which is the maximum amount, by the way. Your income will be around $3,200—please explain!

It's always someone with 9 subscribers telling me how much money I can make off YouTube. I love that! But you know, the thing is: he’s not alone. Here’s the thing: when it comes to SocialBlade and the amount of subscribers and the amount of views you get, SocialBlade is 100% correct. It pulls that data directly from YouTube.

So if you want to know how many views a channel is getting or how many subscribers a channel is getting, SocialBlade for the most part is extremely accurate. But the thing is: when it comes to estimating ad revenue, there is simply no way for it to be even remotely accurate. There are just way too many factors to take into consideration with something like this. Like, what is the type of channel, what’s the topic of the video, how long is the video, how many ads are in the video, and what type of advertisers are paying to be on that video.

This is why a million views on Ice Poseidon’s channel only gets about $500-600, while a million views on mine usually does about $14,000 to $16,000. The moral of the story? Just ignore SocialBlade when it comes to estimating income; it is entirely wrong.

Okay, so finally, let’s discuss what I make from this channel. So obviously, you can go back and you could see what I've made over the last year. And by the way, if I go back a whole year, you can see what I was doing a year ago today. So keep in mind that this all right now is the accumulation of nearly two years' worth of work and a bit of a recent lucky break.

At this point, I have over 240 videos posted on YouTube. Each of those videos has taken me, on average, about 8 hours to make, not including all the time I spent answering comments, creating thumbnails, descriptions, tags, and everything else that goes into doing YouTube. There’s a lot of work that goes into doing this. It's essentially almost like a full-time gig for me.

So definitely don't get the impression that this is anything that's happened to be overnight. This is two years' worth of work, and it's finally starting to catch up at this point with a big push from YouTube. Now in terms of specifics, my videos contain a few things that really do help with high ad revenue. The first thing, obviously, is that I don't swear in my videos.

Clearly, I have this here; the YouTube algorithm does not pick up on this. But it will pick up if I do say certain words. It knows. Now, in the beginning of my YouTube career, I swore up a storm—I mean, I had zero filter! I would basically say whatever came to mind, but at that point, I didn't expect anyone to watch me.

The reality is that the bigger you get, the closer you are to being watched. So as I started getting more and more views, I really made the decision to clean up my act and be more of a family-friendly, just generally good content that people can watch. I don’t want any issues, no problems, so it’s safer for me not to swear than it is to take the risk, and swear, especially when there’s really no benefit to swearing. You know, besides this, I just want to be pretty PG.

The second thing is that my videos are all on the topics of finance, investment, and real estate. These topics just have a really high CPM, so I think that goes without any sort of explanation. If I made YouTube videos about fidget spinners and gold diggers, I would not be making this much—unless I made videos about how to sell fidget spinners for a profit.

Now, the third thing when it comes to this is that I had very high watch time on my videos. Now my average watch time is somewhere around 7 minutes and 30 seconds, which, when it comes to a YouTube video, is very good. Generally speaking, the higher the watch time for the video, the more you end up getting paid because your video is better, and advertisers are willing to pay a little bit more for a longer video that people are really engaged in.

You can use this calculation for just about any YouTuber out there. Now, for most investment-related channels, we’ll get paid anywhere from $8 to about $25 per 1,000 views, depending on the topic. Car YouTubers will make anywhere from about $3 to $10 per 1,000 views, again depending on the topic and length of the video. Personal vlogs pay anywhere from about $2 on the low end to about $8 on the high end per 1,000 views.

And for prank channels, they will often make under one or two dollars per 1,000 views—and that is if they're not demonetized to begin with. And again, this is just a very rough approximation because there are so many factors that can play into this. If someone loads up their videos with ads, that’s going to pay a lot more than someone who just puts one ad in the very beginning of a three-minute video.

So this is really meant just to be about on average. But also remember this: many YouTubers don't just rely strictly on ad revenue. Many of them do sponsored videos as well, and a lot of these sponsors pay anywhere between $500 to sometimes five or ten thousand dollars per video, just depending on who the YouTuber is—if not even more—and depending on the type of channel, how often they post, and how often they do sponsored videos.

It’s very achievable for some of these YouTubers to do fifty, a hundred thousand, or sometimes two hundred thousand dollars a month strictly on just sponsored videos, again depending on the YouTuber, the amount of views they get, and the type of sponsor.

Now, in addition to doing sponsored videos, selling merch can also be extremely lucrative. I'm not going to say any names, but I know a few other channels that are doing over $250,000 a month in profit selling merch, and they’re not even like huge. I mean, they’re big channels, but they’re nowhere near, like, the Logans or the Jake Pauls or anything like that. But selling merch is extremely lucrative!

Not to mention also selling programs or courses. I mean this could be anywhere from, you know, a few thousand a month like mine to maybe over $500,000 a month for other people. I mean, it really just depends on the type of channel, the type of program—so many variables with this.

But you can see how some channels can easily pull in a million dollars a month, and you would have absolutely no idea because they just don’t discuss how much money they make on the backend.

So anyway, that’s how much I make from a 1 million view video on YouTube. It’s also how much I make per month on average on YouTube. And just to give you some ideas of how much other YouTubers are making, because chances are, it’s a lot more than what you think it is.

So as always, you guys, thank you so much for watching! I really appreciate it. If you haven't already subscribed, make sure to smash that subscribe button, smash that notification bell, so YouTube notifies you anytime I post a video. Also make sure to smash that like button if you haven’t already! Also feel free to add me on Snapchat and Instagram; I post there pretty much daily. So if you want to be part of it there, feel free to add me there.

Thank you again for watching, and until next time!