This is how much YouTube paid me for my 1,000,000 viewed video...

Ah, YouTube! The place where dreams are made and crushed. The place where your monthly income is essentially left up to the gods and whatever the YouTube gods deem you are worthy of for that month. Well, you just have to live with that. But seriously, YouTube is a very strange place. Because you could make, say, five videos and each one of them gets like 500,000 views, and the amount of money that you would get for each video would be basically completely different.

So in this video, we're going to talk about how much I'm getting from YouTube and how much I got paid for my video that recently hit 1 million views. So let's get stuck into it.

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So yeah, how cool is this? After four years on the platform, I finally had one of my videos reach a million views. The really funny thing about this video is that it's, you know, I talk about the stock market and talk about personal finance and money. This video is, of all things, it's about arbitrage sports betting. Now, I uploaded this video early 2019, and since that time up until now, it has gathered 1 million and 36,000 views and over that time has generated revenue of eight thousand three hundred and fourteen dollars and sixty-nine cents.

So there you go: about eight thousand dollars for one million views, which gives that video a personal CPM for me, which is technical talk for how much money the video makes per thousand views. It gives me a CPM of eight dollars, eight dollars and three cents. But you want to know the crazy thing? Despite that video being by far my most viewed video, it's actually not my highest earning video. My highest earning video is a video I put out back in July of last year, of 2019, talking about how I just hit the milestone of generating 3,000 of passive income each month.

Now that video ended up doing 495,000 views, which is only 47% of the views that the arbitrage sports betting video got. So less than half the views, but that video has made me 37% more money. So that video has earned me a total of 11,384 dollars, which is a full 3,070 dollars more for 541,000 views less. So while that arbitrage sports betting video had a personal CPM of about eight dollars, this one has a CPM of about twenty-three dollars.

In fact, if you have a look at this video that I made about Warren Buffett, that video there has earned me roughly the same as my arbitrage sports betting video. There's only three hundred dollars difference between the two videos; however, the Warren Buffett video has 572,000 views, so 464,000 less views than that arbitrage sports betting video.

So as you can see, there is a big discrepancy in the pay rates from, you know, video to video. Can be drastically different. So to get the best possible guess on how much money I would make per million views, then what we really should do is have a look at my average channel CPM— that is revenue per thousand views for the past four years, ever since I started this YouTube channel.

And if we have a look at that, the average CPM for my channel has been 31.58. However, to understand that number, you have to understand a little bit more about how YouTube works. So YouTube takes 45% of that CPM revenue, and then they give the creator or they let the creator keep 55%. So that's 31.50 of revenue generated in total per thousand views. Then of that, I will get 55%.

So if I were to have one of my regular videos go viral and hit a million views, then I would probably expect to see somewhere around 15,000 for that video. But I wanted to talk about it, it's really quite up in the air because as we've seen already, just through the examples that I've shown, it can really fluctuate a lot.

I wanted to talk about exactly why that is. Because it wouldn't be consistent. If I had five different videos that hit a million views, I wouldn't get fifteen thousand for each one. Some of them might do eight thousand, some of them might do twenty thousand, some of them might do five thousand for all I know.

And the reason, to understand the reason behind that, you have to understand a little bit more how YouTube works. So the first thing to understand is that YouTube pays differently depending on what niche your content falls into. So nobody really knows exactly what niches are the best and will earn you the most money. However, a lot of us have been around on YouTube and been using the platform long enough that we've kind of figured it out, even though we can't put definite dollar amounts next to it.

So for example, I'll throw this website up on the screen. This is a pretty good estimate; they say that the best kind of niches for YouTube include e-commerce, real estate, insurance, stock market, loans, mortgages, trading, marketing, etc. So as you can see, a lot of my content falls within those popular niches.

However, from niche to niche, it will differ, and that will ultimately impact exactly what my CPM is for each video. But the other real reason why the dollar amount that I would earn per million views would differ so much, or would even be lower than what my channel CPM is, is because, say, the first hundred thousand views or so, YouTube is really only pushing that video to people that are directly interested in that particular niche.

So if I make a stock market video that starts going viral, the first hundred thousand views are really just going to be people that, you know, follow my channel or have pretty close interest surrounding the stock market. But once a video goes more viral, it starts getting pushed to a broader audience—a more diverse audience.

And because the stock market niche is like one of the highest paid niches out there on YouTube, as the video gets shown to a more diverse audience, then overall that's going to start to drag the CPM down. Because there are going to be some people that click on the popular video that don't really have much of an interest in stock market investing. Maybe they're more interested in video games.

But the video game niche might pay much, much less. Because at the end of the day, the way it works, right, is for the stock market nation or the banking nation or whatever it is, the finance niche, you think about the type of advertisers. If you've clicked on one of my videos, you're probably getting, like, brokerage sites or banks that are advertising in that space.

Now, those advertisers are willing to pay much more for that ad space because if they can generate a customer from that advertising, that customer is going to be worth much more to them over time. Right? Because you think about if a banking customer signs up for a home loan, that customer could be worth literally tens of thousands of dollars of revenue for the bank, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars over, say, 30 years.

Whereas, if on the other hand, you could take an advertiser that's trying to promote a video game, likelihood is that even if they generate a lead out of that advertising, they're only going to generate, say, eighty dollars of revenue from that person. Um, say there's an ad for, I don't know, Cyberpunk 2077. By the way, I'm really excited for that game. I cannot wait for that game; I'm going to play the hell out of it.

But say they generated a lead, then the game only costs like 80 bucks. So really, the amount of money they're willing to spend to get that ad shown in front of someone is going to be much less than, say, a bank. So that's why different niches end up paying vastly different amounts. So you can see why, as my videos, which usually track a higher CPM, as they get shown to a more diverse audience, we start to get ads that aren't specifically in that niche that I'm in all the time.

So that's why, over time, generally the CPM, the more viral the video from my channel, the lower the CPM will become. But overall, that's kind of a little bit of an insight into how YouTube works.

But yeah, overall, like, it is very individual. It depends on what the subject matter of the video is like a video that I make about the stock market versus about insurance or savings accounts or e-commerce. They're all going to end up with slightly different CPMs. But overall, I think that if I had just a random video of mine plucked out of the air and it did a million views, it would probably earn me somewhere around 15,000. That's based on the average CPM of my channel, where I get about 55% of that overall.

So anyway, guys, that is the video for today. I hope you enjoyed it; maybe you learned something if you’re maybe not caught up to speed on how the whole YouTube revenue system works. But as you can see, like a lot of people say, “Brandon, why do you always suggest people start a YouTube channel? I mean, it's so unrealistic.”

The reason I keep suggesting it is because you can see that if you do get a couple of videos that get caught up in that algorithm, like you can do quite well. Like just one video—obviously, it doesn't happen with every single video that you make—but it's still pretty awesome that, you know, you can put a week or two into a video, and then that video can over time earn you, say, like eight to ten thousand dollars. I mean, that's pretty awesome.

So that's why I'm always, like, very optimistic why people should definitely at least try out a YouTube channel at some point. But yeah, anyway, that is it for this video, guys. I hope you enjoyed it. Leave a like on the video if you did enjoy it or if you found it useful. I super appreciate it.

It turns out that a lot of these videos where YouTubers start talking about how much money they make, they actually end up going viral themselves, which is kind of hilarious. It definitely shows you that the way to make money is by talking about making money.

But yeah, I would super appreciate it if we could try and get this video as viral as possible, so definitely leave a like on the video and leave a comment down in the comment section below. There are the two easiest ways to support the channel.

Leave a comment about literally anything. You could even hate on the video, and that would still help me out. You could throw me the worst insult you've ever said to anyone—go ahead! I'm going to get some interesting stuff down in the comments section now.

But no, it all helps the channel, it all helps the video. So I super appreciate it. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more about my personal stock market investing strategies—passive investing, active investing—then check out Profitful links down in the description below. I super appreciate it; it further helps out the channel, helps me do this full time for a living.

So I super appreciate it. But that's it for today, guys. Thank you very much for watching, and I'll see you guys in the next video.

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Snake eyes with dice for y'all. Shoulders on ice for y'all. A6, all the hate I woke in a ball. Today I'm flipping the balls—I'm flipping the flip, and I'm flipping them all. Record off record, I still count wins when they get it on.

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