This Is How Much YouTube Paid Me For My 2,000,000 Viewed Video (Not Clickbait)

Hi guys, it's Mark. So there's one question that I get asked all the time. How much money do you make from YouTube? After one year of doing YouTube, I've never asked that question and I don't want to come across as showing off. Believe it or not, in England, we're a bit shy talking about money. It's just not the British way. Tea and crumpets, anyone? However, I started this channel to help people with personal finance, business, and investing tips by sharing my 35 years of experience. It only seems fair to be completely transparent about everything. After all, if you didn't find my videos helpful and laugh at my bad jokes, then none of this would be possible. So my aim today is to satisfy your curiosity once and for all, and who knows, maybe inspire some future YouTubers. So I asked you guys two questions on Instagram, at Mark Tilbury, if you want to follow. First, I asked if you'd find it interesting if I revealed how much YouTube paid me for a 2 million viewed video, or would you think it's a bit showy offy? The response was pretty clear on that one, as many of you even stated you enjoyed similar videos from other YouTubers. The second question was just a little bit of fun. I just wanted to see if you could guess how much YouTube paid me for this video of over 2 million views. Now, your responses range from one penny to $1 million. But to be fair, it's an almost impossible question to actually answer, as there are five main factors that determine how much YouTube pays you. That's why I find videos like this so interesting, as everyone is earning different amounts. I thought about starting a YouTube channel years before taking the plunge. I've even been asking you guys to smash the like button on my son's channel, even before Graham Stephan, and that was six years ago. If you liked the video, don't forget to smash that like button. Hopefully by showing you what's been possible after one year on YouTube, it'll help inspire you to do whatever you've been putting off. Maybe that's grabbing your free stock from the investing social network, public.com, worth up to $50. I'll leave the link in the description below. And free trader giving away a free stock to anyone in the UK worth up to 200 pounds. First of all, let's break down how money is actually made from videos. It's actually views that make the money, not subscribers. This is something boomers my age never seem to understand. There are lots of different platforms you can upload videos to. The biggest and best in my opinion are YouTube and TikTok. I'm going to let you into a bit of a secret. The platform is the first big factor that affects how much money creators can earn and their relationship with advertisers, because that's where the money comes from. Let's take a look at one of my TikTok videos, which has over 2 million views. TikTok has something called the creator fund, which they split up between all the creators every day depending on how many views they get. So this video has around 2 million views and it's made a grand total of $48. Now that's not actually bad when you consider that's only a 30 second video and I would have been doing it for free anyway, but it's certainly not what a lot of people would expect. But this helps me to pay for my son and all the filming and editing work that he does for me. However, the YouTube numbers look entirely different. Even I was shocked when I saw them. So let's look at what actually makes a YouTube video more valuable and why there is such a huge difference even between other YouTubers. So stick with me guys, as this will really help you understand who gets paid what and why. YouTube pays its creators per thousand views. This is known as a CPM. This stands for cost per mil, which is French for 1000. I actually didn't put adverts on my channel at first as I didn't want to distract from the content. But when I started thinking about it a little bit more, I did wonder if YouTube would really want to promote my videos if they weren't making any money from them. So I tested it out by including a few ad breaks and almost instantly my channel exploded. This may have just been a coincidence, but it does sort of kind of make sense because YouTube is a business and of course it needs to make money. Factor two is the type of niche. There are lots of different YouTubers and topics that they talk about and they all have a big impact on how much money they get paid. On the lower end, you have the gamers and vloggers who generally make an average of one to $4 per thousand views. Now I love a bit of Casey Neistat and PewDiePie as a lot of people do, and that's exactly the issue. Everyone likes them. It's nearly impossible for brands to know who they're actually advertising to, which means these creators get more generic ads running on the videos to pay less. Imagine you had a bunch of chocolate for Easter and you wanted to sell it. Would you choose to go to a room with a bunch of random people that could be vegan, lactose intolerant, or just simply didn't like chocolate? Or would you go to a room full of chocoholics? I think the answer is really clear. You'd sell out in seconds and this is exactly how advertisers think and why they're prepared to spend more on targeted audiences. In the middle, you have the beauty vloggers and the car channels who make on average seven to $10 per thousand views. Again, the advertisers can target our ads to these two subjects very easily with makeup and car products to name a few. And at the very top, you have the highest paid and you may have guessed it by now, it's finance and business channels, which of course is what I talk about. Now, we don't have to guess about this one because I can just show you my average CPM, which is $45 per thousand views. This is of course before YouTube, boom, take their cut. These earnings in all categories depend on factor number three, whether you're family friendly or not. A few swear words can really cost you a lot of money. It's not YouTube itself, it's because a lot of advertisers don't want to be associated with this kind of content. I've always had the rule to avoid swearing on the channel and to keep it family friendly as more people can enjoy the videos and we don't get censored. The length of the video is the four factor that goes into this big calculation. This is because the longer the video, the more adverts can be placed inside it. If you make your video over eight minutes, you can actually place an advert every 10 seconds if you wanted to, but this would be just silly because no one would watch it. YouTube is obsessed with watch time. So as a creator, it's really important to be a good storyteller. So people want to watch your video in full. This makes sense as YouTube wants to keep viewers on their platform for as long as possible. Number five is the time of the year. This has an impact on YouTube's earnings. That's why lots of them do Vlogmas in December and upload every single day. As near to the holidays, advertisers have lots of money to spend. And also, you may have noticed, a lot of them go away in January for a break because the advertiser's budgets drop through the floor. My video that hit 2 million views luckily seemed to be the perfect combination of all of these factors. Firstly, it's in the investing niche. As I talk about all the different options people have to invest $100 and I actually do it myself. Next, the watch time is extremely high. The average view duration is nearly 40%, which is pretty good when you consider it's quite an in-depth topic, which most people would usually find boring and click off. I think it's great there's still 30% of people watching right to the end. They must have really loved watching me go through those lotto scratchers. And it's also very family-friendly. I even have my son in some of it. And to top it all off, it was posted in November, which is great for the December advertising rates. Not that that was planned. It was just good luck. Looking at the graph, the video actually did really well in the first few days, but it wasn't until day 20 that it actually hit the YouTube algorithm and it actually exploded. Look at that. One of the questions I get asked the most is why I speak in dollars and not in great British pounds as I'm from England. So now's the perfect time to answer that. US dollars are seen as the currency of the internet and most people understand their value. So it's just a good way for more people to get as much as possible out of the videos. This is actually one of the reasons that I think this video has done really, really well and got the amount of views that it did. Looking at the stats, nearly half of the views come from the United States of America. And it's not just the US that uses dollars. Australia, Canada, and many others have their own versions. So it just makes more sense to use this currency. The CPM for this video is $55, which is a lot higher than usual. This is probably due to the video being 18 minutes long, meaning YouTube can show more adverts. This number's the RPM and this is what I actually get paid after YouTube take their cut. And that comes out at $32 per 1,000 views. So if you're quick at the maths, then you'll probably be able to work out the total, but I'm not gonna make you wait any longer. So here are the numbers that you've all been waiting for. Over the last four months, YouTube have paid $76,391 for the views on this video, which I'm still trying to wrap my head around. What makes me even more happy is it brought in over 100,000 subscribers, which meant we managed to get this award from YouTube. Without you guys, that wouldn't happen. I remember wanting to thank each and every one of you individually who subscribed to the channel. It also had a knock-on effect on my other videos as they started to gain more traction. So in reality, it could be more valuable than the final figure suggests. Just to show you the difference the niche makes, let's have a look at the video all about my Tesla. The idea behind this video is to make the money back for the car in different ways, like renting it out and wrapping it in adverts. And if I manage to succeed, then I'm giving away $5,000 to a random subscriber. As you can see, the CPM is much, much lower on this. It's only $25 per thousand views. And the amount I get is $14. This video is a mixture between the car and the finance niches. So it does make sense. I'm looking forward to releasing episode two soon as we've been working really hard on it. This video has outperformed every video I've ever posted. And please don't think I take any of this for granted. 35 years ago, I started my business and investing journey. And now I'm really happy to get the chance to be able to pass some of that knowledge onto you. And I really appreciate all of your support. It means so much to me. And now I can spend more time creating more videos and also improving the camera equipment. I really love that YouTube allows me to do all this for free and that's how I'm gonna keep things. So I'm gonna leave the next video right up here, but don't click on it just yet. Remember to subscribe to the channel and pick up your free stock. Worth up to $50 from public.com. I'll leave the link in the description below. All right, see you over there.