How Much Do YouTubers Make (& Top 10 YouTube Earners!)

Ads

The way you make money directly from YouTube is with ad revenue. And that comes from Google AdSense which is one of the top ways of making money with Google. According to the parent company, Alphabet Inc. (who owns Google, YouTube and AdSense) pays out 68% of their AdSense revenue to publishers. That means, you as a YouTuber, get $68 out of every $100 that advertisers pays to Google AdSense to display their ads on YouTube.

Now, in order to put ads on your videos, you have to be partnered with YouTube, which has its own set of requirements.

Basically, you have to have at least 1,000 subscribers and have your viewers watch at least 4,000 hours of your content to become a partner. It’s not something you can just pick up in a day!

Once you do, though, you can start raking it in, provided you keep getting those views! On average, according to Influencer Marketing, you can get between $0.01 to $0.03 per view. This means if all 1,000 of your followers watched a video of yours, you’ll get up to $30 (more if people watch it more than once).

More subscribers means more views and more money!

Sponsorships

If you’ve ever watched a big-name YouTuber, you’ve probably seen an example of a sponsorship. It’s those little shout-outs made during the video, usually spoken by the YouTuber like old-timey radio ads.

You can find brands that are willing to sponsor you through websites like Channel Pages, Famebit, or Grapevinelogic.

Brands are usually on the lookout for established personalities with a loyal viewer base. The kind of people you would listen to if they were talking up a product.

Merch

Most of the top ten YouTubers, as well as the people lower on the list, have a line of merchandise that they sell. Ryan Kaji has a line of toys on sale at Walmart, VanossGaming has a line of clothing and accessories, and Good Mythical Morning has a merch store featuring pins, accessories, and books they’ve written, just to name a few.

Livestreaming

A growing trend among YouTubers, especially the ones that play video games, is to live stream their content. Viewers watching along can throw in donations, usually along with a message that will flash on the screen or be read aloud by the streamer.

Employees

You might think this is a strange thing. YouTubers have employees? What?

This is actually extremely common though. When you first start off, the first thing you’re going to notice is that you’ll need someone to edit your videos. For a while you can do this by yourself, sure, but the editing won’t be as good as if a professional had done it. Furthermore, you’re going to need to be making tons of videos during this time too.

Eventually, you won’t be able to edit all the content you make. It will just be too much for one person to do. You’re going to need an editor.

Then when you become big enough, you’re probably going to need to hire someone to handle your social media too. Then artists to help you make merch and nice thumbnails for your videos. You see where this is going?

Just be sure to keep all of this in mind when you start this. Save up some spare cash to invest in future editors and so on.

Final Thoughts

While YouTube can be big business, with the top 5,000 YouTubers having more than 2 million subscribers apiece (according to Social Blade, a social media metrics site), it’s important to know that being successful on the site takes time and work.

A creator doesn’t get to 1,000 subscribers overnight unless they already have a big following somewhere else.

But if you have a winning personality, an idea for content that people would be interested in, and a camera, you can be a YouTube star someday too!