This blog post on how much YouTubers make was written with help from AI – learn more about AI blogging for your business.

I get asked a lot how much YouTubers make or brands should pay for YouTube sponsorships.

It’s a wide range and depends on multiple factors. There are a lot of revenue streams available, and more popular channels are more successful than others when implementing them.

The main ways YouTubers are paid are:

• Google Adsense Revenue via YouTube Partner Program
• Affiliate Revenue
• Sponsorships/Product Placements
• Merch Sales
• Paid Members

And of course, building a successful YouTube channel can get you a lot of opportunities off platform too. Jake Paul got professional acting and fighting gigs, along with a lot of paid live performances. Let’s break them down further to fully understand how YouTubers make money.

But it’s not stable money – especially at the start. You’ll slave away for free for at least a year before you start reaping the rewards.

YouTube Partner Program

YouTube is only part of my broader content network, but it’s a lot more profitable for ads than my blog content. That’s because Google runs stale display ads on websites but higher paying video ads on YouTube.

Both are paid through the same Google Adsense account though. Here’s my breakdown of my YouTube ad revenue by ad types from YouTube Studio.

That 6.3% in display ads is all I get from my other websites, which means they have to draw a LOT more traffic to earn the same monthly payout as my YouTube channel alone.

Bumper ads play at the beginning (most used in livestreams when you first join), and the rest are self explanatory.

Every YouTuber has a varied RPM (revenue per 1000 views) and CPM (cost per 1000 views). M is the Roman numeral for 1000, in case you’re wondering why it’s not O or T.

The CPM is the amount the advertisers pay YouTube to appear on your content. The RPM is your share of the profits from YouTube.

Here’s my RPM for the past year, which ranged from $1–$4 pretty consistently with an average just under $2. That’s what I got paid.

Here’s the same year showing what Google charged advertisers for those same views. You’ll notice it pretty closely matches, and I’m making less than a third of the money being paid.

This is part of why you hear people complain about YouTube not paying much. You can even see how much people are paying to show ads on my content by country.

Americans and Norwegians are paying the highest prices.

And it’s just the start; when YouTube implemented its Partner Program, it set a hurdle where you couldn’t get paid unless you reached certain minimums of 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours viewed over the past year, if I remember correctly.

My channel didn’t qualify because I was more focused on my written work. I didn’t jump back into YouTube until a few years ago when I realized I was nearing the qualifications on my old videos.

It wasn’t because I don’t love doing videos, vlogging, or YouTube – it was because I have bills to pay, and I didn’t have the free time. Once my time could be monetized, it became worthwhile again.

So, when you look at my lifetime earnings, you can see the difference pre- and post- partner program.

I used to make more money per view for fewer views. And it was a far smaller percentage of what they were actually charging the brands.

My average lifetime CPM was $6.43 compared to an RPM of $1.02, because there were people paying $80-$200 for a long time for me to earn $10-$20.

So, people in the YouTube Partner Program are making out better today than 5 years ago. Brands are too.

But it’s on the back of everybody working for free on YouTube to get into that Partner Program, which isn’t easy, believe me.

And while I only make $150–500 per month from YouTube, it’s not nothing. People who were earning under $100/month got cut off from that revenue, and someone went on a shooting spree in YouTube headquarters over it in 2018.

My channel has 5 million views over 10 years (the views really only came over 5 years, if you look at the charts).

“Rapper” and troll 6ix9ine has about 1000x the views since joining YouTube in less than half the time, which means he’s probably making in the range of $300k-$1m every month just off YouTube ad revenue.

But that’s not the only way YouTubers get paid. They also make deals directly with brands independently to cut out YouTube as the middle man.

Brand Deals

How these deals occur is a mix of you contacting brands and them contacting you. You never know when or where the next offer will come from, but you do have to pursue them.

A long-time YouTuber like Phil DeFranco will place ads in the middle of his shows.

He’s able to pull these sponsorships because he’s reaching 800k to 1.2M views per video. But most companies are much stingier with straight sponsorship deals.

This is why you’ll see DeFranco often do affiliate deals and include referral codes to effectively show his value.

A lot of creators and influencers want to get paid based on their followers, subscribers, likes, and views. Brands learned over the 2010s though that influencers don’t always have a direct influence on sales.

YouTubers (or anyone really – I did this for my blog and also recommend it for podcasts, social influencers, etc) just starting out can easily sign up for affiliate programs through platforms like Amazon Affiliates or Rakuten Linkshare.

I wrote a Cracked article about the influencer marketing and media review circuits. It explains how creators get free products from businesses and brands looking to get them featured in their content.

If you’re being paid by the brands and not having to pay for things, you’ve built a pretty powerful revenue stream.

And the push to microinfluencers means brands are seeking people with 10k-100k subscribers/followers on any given platform to work with. That pocket is where you’re making a living wage just off your content.

When you creep over 100k, you’re official. That means you’re a brand of your own and can start selling your own merch successfully.

Merchandise sales

Now, there are plenty of businesses that figured out how to make money selling merch and don’t even care about the ad revenue.

LuLaRoe and other MLM cults did an amazing job building their business out on Facebook. If only it wasn’t set up with Deandra Stidham as salesperson number 1 getting the entire sales staff’s upstream.

But every YouTuber looking to monetize their time on the platform eventually starts selling merch. Even Nerd City, which has an entire video putting Jake Paul on blast for his infamous Santa Claus Merch song, has merch.

I have some merch I bought to support Phil DeFranco and Harry Mack, among others.

There are seemingly infinite options for drop shipping merch, and many of them specifically target YouTubers and Twitch streamers. Basically, most cartoons you grew up with were made by toy companies to sell toys, and now the YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch videos you watch have their own toys…

Or clothing lines and other goods. Some YouTubers like Ethan and Hila Klein from H3h3 designed their own clothing line Teddy Fresh.

Most people simply throw a logo or slogan on shirts, mugs, and the like. It’s pretty easy to 10x your ad revenue through merch sales. And for all the cult like behavior, LuLaRoe proved you can successfully build a video sales force.

That direct relationship between a YouTuber as a brand and a customer is the most effective way to sell them anything, even a monthly subscription.

Paid Members

Community building is an important part of any business. You need employees and customers acting as part of a team with executive management and owners.

YouTube does a lot of team building to keep everybody happy, but ultimately each individual YouTuber is building their own microcommunity.

Once you’re in the YouTube Partner Program, you can do more than just earn ad revenue. You can also enable features like paid memberships and super chats.

Paid members pay a monthly fee, and you can provide exclusive content just for them or give them exclusive access to chat on your livestreams. Super chats are users paying to have their comment featured.

Harry Mack is my favorite usage of super chat when he’s doing his epic Livestream freestyles.

The man gets into his zone and starts rapping to his cadence then people pay to see him rap what they want. As his audience grows, the chat moves so fast, super chat is the only way to guarantee your comment is seen.

He did this particular stream for 10 hours to celebrate 1 million subs and had no issues clearing $100/hr for the entirety just off super chat revenue. That doesn’t even include the ad revenue on the 350k views.

Learn how other rappers are successful on different social media platforms.

Member subscriptions and super chats are a great source of revenue, and it doesn’t stop at YouTube. YouTubers like DeFranco have a Patreon, while some go with OnlyFans.

You can also find PhillyD actively participating on social networks like Public. He gets an affiliate commission and helps boost his portfolio by promoting this social investment platform that’s light years ahead of SoFi.

Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) is another hugely popular YouTuber I often see at major events and in emerging social platforms like Clubhouse and Discord Stages.

Discord is a great place for YouTubers and Twitch streamers to build fan communities, because they easily connect and integrate to track paid members and subscribers.

Building even a small community on Discord can really pay off as you foster connections. It helps make more opportunities available while providing more value for your fans.

And fans can pay to boost your server. It’s ultimately the sum of all these revenue streams that make a YouTuber successful. How much of this business each one builds is up to them.