I recently started a new YouTube channel, in a niche I had not previously covered. Maybe I’ll shout the channel out later, but for now I’m going to keep it quiet.
Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at my current YouTube earnings, the RPM and CPM rates, and whether or not I plan on continuing to post videos to the channel. So, without further ado, let’s get into the details!
So far, I’ve Made £592 This Month.
My first day of having ads running on my videos was the 22nd of July. In the following 18 days, I made £592, which is an average of about £32.90 per day. Pretty good, right? That’s equivalent to almost exactly £1000 per month or £12k per year. Here’s the thing though. A huge portion of the views came from a single video blowing up, and none of the videos I made which followed have had as much success. They still get views in the thousands, but its more like 5000 than 500,000.
This means my earnings graph looks a little like this…
Yeah, it’s sadly not just a straight upwards line. But that’s the way the YouTube cookie crumbles – daily ad revenue varies so much, and it’s hugely dependent on the topic of the video as well as the time of year. For example, ad rates jump up a lot in December thanks to an increase in advertising spending around the Christmas period.
Now lets take a look at the CPM. This is where you might not be pleasantly surprised…
My RPM Is Just £0.74.
That’s right. £0.74 per 1000 views. And that’s not on shorts or anything, these are long form videos, mostly between 7 and 10 minutes. It’s not great. Here’s the thing – the RPM is really low, because less than half of the views are receiving any advertisements at all on my YouTube videos, for some reason.
The CPM, on the other hand, isn’t too bad. It’s just under £4. This means I’m losing a lot of money from views with no ads on at the moment. I don’t know if this is a case of not enough adverts going around, or if my videos just aren’t super ad-friendly, but it does frustrate me how low the earnings are per 1000 views. Perhaps I should have made a personal finance YouTube channel instead, I’ve heard the ad rates can be pretty great. You know what? I might just do that, and document my journey with building that channel.
I got About 3500 Subscribers This Month
Back to a more positive subject. 3500 subscribers! That’s pretty good! I do think with the greatly improved editing and script writing, there’s potential here for a channel with over 100k subs, given about a year. We’ll have to wait and see.
I didn’t really ask in any of the videos for people to subscribe or anything, which means that those 3.5k people are pretty loyal viewers. I’ve actually found not telling people to subscribe and like the video every couple of minutes has been quite beneficial, because it weirdly makes the videos stand out more.
Editing YouTube Videos Is Long
I definitely underestimated how much time editing a professional YouTube video takes. I thought I could get away with about half an hour of note taking and half an hour of editing, but it takes a fair bit longer.
Even with Premiere Pro, which I’ve found to be much quicker and better than Vegas, it takes me about an hour to edit a 5-10 minute long video, and that’s just very basic editing. Add another hour or two if you want to add a lot of text, animations, or fancy transitions.
This means from an hourly rate perspective, YouTube isn’t as good as writing content or some of my other jobs (yet). Of course, it’s difficult to calculate an hourly rate, because a good video can continue to earn you money over a year after its initial upload, and is hugely dependent on the videos performance. For example, I’ve made around £100 from a quick video which took less than an hour to make (nice!), but I’ve also spent 5 hours researching, recording and editing a video, only for it to get demonetized because of the topic (£0 earned).
It’s all very hit or miss, and all I can say is don’t think that you can live off of 1 million views per month, unless your niche is very lucrative. Given my current CPM, I would need to get around 2 million views per month, to make a decent wage for the UK. Of course, some channels will require much less, like if you’re a crypto YouTuber.
My Plans For September
This YouTube channel is in a topic I love researching and making content on, but the RPM is very low, so it would take a lot of views to make good money from it. Now that I’ve managed to get my first channel monetized fairly quickly and I’ve worked a lot on my editing skills, I think it’s time to explore a more lucrative (but competitive) niche such as personal finance, so I’ve got a point of comparison. I have a feeling that my first 100k views on the money channel will make the same as a million views on this channel. I’ll keep you updated.
Conclusion – Don’t Immediately Quit Your Job If You Get a Million Views
You might feel on top of the world when you get your first million views on YouTube. It’s definitely a big achievement, don’t get me wrong, but I also think you need consistent views of at least 10k per new video, and also have a niche with a high RPM for it to make sense as a full time career.
Sponsorships are also another good option, and once the audience grows more I’ll definitely look into sponsorship opportunities and see what kind of numbers these deals offer to smaller YouTubers.
Thanks for reading my monthly YouTube Earnings report for August 2023, I hope this has provided an interesting insight into the financial side of running a YouTube channel.