YouTube's top 1,000 channels average $23K each month in ad revenue

YouTube's top 1,000 channels average $23K each month in ad revenue(readwriteweb.com)

111 points by vindicated 13 years ago | 40 comments

nostromo 13 years ago |

The channels follow a power law. I got the number of views from here (http://socialblade.com/youtube/top/5000) and plotted them: http://i.imgur.com/X6nEL.png

If the $23k average for the top 1k is correct, then only the top 250 or so actually make $23k a month or more. At that line are some pretty big channels, like Husky Starcraft and big bands like Kesha and Muse. In which case, this doesn't seem like a lot of money.

ChuckMcM 13 years ago | |

That is an awesome plot. That combined with a combined with a tenancy plot to determine what sort of churn there is in the top 500 and its mix would really illustrate what sort of 'opportunity' YouTube is.

majani 13 years ago | |

Note that syndication is very popular with the top channels, so you have top creators like RWJ owning 3 of the top 1000 channels, VEVO owning more than 50, same with machinima.com, Demand Media and others which I might have missed.

That skews the power law even further.

rorrr 13 years ago | |

I charted the LOG(video views) here:

http://i.imgur.com/WubeX.png

What's really interesting is that LOG(LOG(video views)) looks pretty much the same:

http://i.imgur.com/NnSrA.png

So I'm not sure what law the distribution follows, but the top players get a TON more money than the rest. The top 211 players make more than the rest 4789.

EDIT:

It also means that the top player universalmusicgroup makes $485,707/month, and the 1000th player playboy makes only $7,880/month (assuming payouts are proportional to the views, which isn't perfectly correct)

Here's the table:

      universalmusicgroup    $485,707
      machinima              $261,804
      JustinBieberVEVO       $206,638
      RihannaVEVO            $198,898
      expertvillage          $182,052
      LadyGagaVEVO           $160,885
      AtlanticVideos         $147,373
      EminemVEVO             $145,593
      RayWilliamJohnson      $141,569
      IGNentertainment       $139,634
      failblog               $134,727
      UltraRecords           $134,724
      muyap                  $126,330
      smosh                  $124,425
      shakiraVEVO            $122,633
      hollywoodrecords       $121,395
      FueledByRamen          $113,681
      beyonceVEVO            $109,576
      barelypolitical        $104,784
      collegehumor           $103,772

InclinedPlane 13 years ago |

I'm glad to see more attention paid to this. The idea of the "youtube celebrity" has been around a while, but to my mind that's less interesting than the idea of people making a living off of youtube. And the fascinating thing is just how many people are now gainfully employed making youtube content. This is a phenomenon that has crept up rather rapidly and hasn't received very much attention in traditional media channels or even in business channels. I find it odd that traditional television networks and movie studios have basically been trying their hardest to pretend that youtube doesn't exist, or that it is merely a repository of funny cat videos.

There's a real revolution in video entertainment going on right now. And youtube is still growing at a phenomenal rate. The recent example of the explosive popularity of the Gangnam Style music video is a perfect case in point. It's not just "viral", it's a cultural phenomenon, and it's taking place on youtube whereas in the past you'd expect people to be exposed to popular music videos through television.

If I were in the traditional TV business I would be all over this. I'd be snapping up talent off youtube and I'd be setting up deals and producing content for the internet, etc. But it looks like this is still a case of two separate worlds. I suspect the "oh shit" moment will come when a more traditional format TV show or movie published on youtube becomes wildly successful, and it's really only a matter of time until that happens.

andrewvc 13 years ago |

In a hits based industry the 'average' isn't very interesting. What's the variance across those top 1000 channels?

I'm really curious to see some more data here, I have a feeling that the disparity is severe.

confluence 13 years ago | |

Long tail risks makes avg/var/standard distribution stuff useless. Best measure here would be the median income (50th percentile - or the 50th person out of 100).

Same thing with wealth distribution and taxes - averages are pointless since 1 rich guy + 99 poor guys will have an average of ~1/100 the rich guy (which is still a lot of money) - even though the poor guys have $0 in assets (usually negative equity because of debt).

The median of that distribution would be $0 - hence providing a better representation of actual probabilistic income/taxes.

tehwebguy 13 years ago | |

This looks way more like a long tail than a bell curve.

Pick a channel, multiply views by a ~$2.00 mixed CPM. It takes around 11.5m views to make $23k.

It would be interesting to know if this data includes PSY, who accounts for nearly a million dollars in the last 30 days alone.

jeffool 13 years ago | |

I'm absolutely with you; I would love to see more data on this.

That said, while we definitely exist in a "hits" driven culture, I expect such hits would be boundary crossing, and I see no reason to presume a middle class can't exist in any given boundary. (Or, maybe, it could grow toward that.) I'm reminded of the recent post on Pandora talking about "middle class musicians".

My point being you're right. We need more data.

David 13 years ago |

What is the distribution like among the top 1000 channels? Presumably the top of the top 1000 channels far outproduce the bottom, just like the top 1000 far outproduce the rest of youtube. Given such a distribution, what are the top few channels earning? 100,000 a month? 1,000,000 a month? Even more?

Other interesting questions: How much of that is profit? Relatedly, does it cost a prohibitive amount to have a highly successful youtube channel? Does amount spent on production each month correlate with amount earned, or do consumers care much more about the content than the production quality?

What is the median income of the top 1000 channels? What's the overall median income of active youtube partners? What's the median income of channels produced (primarily) by a single person?

Some of these questions should be answerable by looking at available stats, like views for the top couple of channels versus the lower end of the top 1000. (Are the actual channels in the top 1000, preferable ranked, available somewhere?) I'll see if I can answer any more of them in the morning...

citricsquid 13 years ago | |

There are literal kids (teenagers) making 6 figures a month from their Youtube channels with absolute 0 production costs. The best example would be a guy called Pewdiepie[1], he makes gaming videos and does something like 5 million views per day (which is probably around $10k revenue assuming he has a good deal...). He isn't alone, there's quite a few others approaching his level of success.

Something a lot of people seem to forget too is for every video they put out their old videos still get views. It's like investments, the money they make compounds over time because for every new video that's more and more views. So as their viewership grows, so does their previous video views and so do their potential views for the future. Even if someone "only" does 10,000,000 views from new videos in a month they can still be doing substantial revenue from old videos. This is how some of the bigger channels work, they produce incredibly popular videos every couple of months and fill the time with smaller videos.

A good example of that would be Captain Sparklez [2], a guy that makes video game music and commentaries, his music videos can do anywhere from 10 million to 70 million views and he then produces game play commentaries between his bigger hits.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/pewdiepie [2] http://www.youtube.com/user/CaptainSparklez/videos?sort=p...

ntoshev 13 years ago |

Trying to make sense of a power law distribution using average of the head is an interesting crutch, but a fairly crude one.

What are other ways to intuitively understand power law distributions? Where are the raw data for this one?

kumarm 13 years ago |

11.3 Billion Views (by top 1000 channels) 23 Million Ad revenue (by top 1000 channels)

2$ ECPM.

propercoil 13 years ago |

Nice headline but in HN you need to talk in median terms - people here aren't that stupid

majani 13 years ago |

That's odd. I recall several channel owners claiming million dollar revenues, eg. Jason Njorku from irokotv claimed 1m in annual revenue on this channel for Nigerian movies:

http://www.youtube.com/user/NollywoodLove

The TechCrunch article with the claim:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/14/you-think-hollywood-is-roug...

RWJ claims here that he earns over a million dollars a year purely on Adsense:

http://willvideoforfood.com/2011/04/01/ray-william-johnson-i...

So who's fooling who?

rplnt 13 years ago | |

The article talks about monthly revenue. And even if the average was in the middle (ignoring the "power law" mentioned above) then you would have a lot of channels making over $83k which equals over 1m annually.

citricsquid 13 years ago | |

What do you mean? $23k is the average for the top 1,000. The top 10 (and maybe even 100) (which includes RWJ) are making millions, this article doesn't dispute that.

willholloway 13 years ago |

What strikes me is how little money is being made here. $2 CPM rates will not support the production quality we all expect in our entertainment. The dream of the internet supporting a large creative class self publishing is still far off.

anigbrowl 13 years ago |

What matters is the median, not the average. Advertising analysts have their own special circle in marketing hell.

sdoering 13 years ago |

Well, what I do not understand is the 2$ eCPM, that is thrown in in the comments.

If the average 23k$ hold true for the Top 1000 and if the 2$ eCPM holds true, why did the 5.000th channel make an estimated 57,371.70$? (28685850 AdViews * 2$ eCPM / 1000)

What am I getting wrong here?

Edit: The numbers are totals... OK, I get it. ;-)

KnowledgeSponge 13 years ago |

Unfortunately, this invites people to turn the signal to noise ratio to crap.

Case in point: http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/reply-girls-yogscast-m...

barking 13 years ago |

I recently got an email from youtube suggesting that I monetize my channel as they'd noticed that one of my videos was becoming quite popular. It's had about 500 (five hundred) views after 4 years! How much would I make?

brackin 13 years ago | |

Some YouTube partners I know get paid per 500 views so if you got another 500 you'd make a few dollars.

barking 13 years ago | | |

I'm amazed that such low numbers could be worth anything more than a few cent

sstrudeau 13 years ago | |

If you got the average eCPM that these numbers indicate ($2) then you'd make about $1 for 500 views; could be more, could be less (CPM = cost per thousand)

supersaiyan 13 years ago |

that's a massive range; just in top 1000 sites make millions!

universalmusicgroup $485,707 machinima $261,804 JustinBieberVEVO $206,638 RihannaVEVO $198,898 expertvillage $182,052 LadyGagaVEVO $160,885 AtlanticVideos $147,373 EminemVEVO $145,593 RayWilliamJohnson $141,569 IGNentertainment $139,634 failblog $134,727 UltraRecords $134,724 muyap $126,330 smosh $124,425 shakiraVEVO $122,633 hollywoodrecords $121,395 FueledByRamen $113,681 beyonceVEVO $109,576 barelypolitical $104,784 collegehumor $103,772