How much money 4 YouTube creators earned last year directly from the platform
- YouTube's Partner Program allows influencers to earn money off their YouTube channels by placing ads within videos.
- Google places these ads and pays a creator based on factors like a video's watch time, length, and viewer demographic.
- Business Insider spoke with four YouTube creators - Shelby Church, Kevin David, Sienna Santer, and Andrei Jikh - who broke down how much money YouTube paid them for the entire year of 2019.
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How much money a YouTube creator will earn in a single year directly from YouTube varies depending on a number of factors like the type of content they make, the number of views they get, and the strategies they use.
Creators with 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours are eligible to have their videos monetized with ads by joining YouTube's Partner Program. These ads are filtered by Google, and how much money a creator earns (known as AdSense revenue) depends on the video's watch time, length, video type, and viewer demographics - among other factors.
Some top creators have ad-placement strategies to maximize their earnings, as well. For instance, YouTube creator Shelby Church, who has 1.4 million subscribers, said she more than doubled her earnings in 2019 versus 2018 by lengthening her videos to over 10 minutes so she could include more ads.
In general, business-related YouTube channels have a relatively high CPM rate (or cost per thousand views) compared to other types. Marina Mogilko, an entrepreneur and YouTube creator, spoke with Business Insider about her three YouTube channels, and she said that her business channel made more per view than the others - by far.
To get a sense of how much top creators are making directly from YouTube, Business Insider spoke with four influencers with vastly different channels - Shelby Church (1.4 million subscribers) , Kevin David (856,000 subscribers), Sienna Santer (321,000 subscribers), and Andrei Jikh (365,000 subscribers) - who broke down how much money YouTube paid them in 2019.
Here's what they said: