Most newbies confuse between views and revenue generated . Most common misconceptions include YouTube pays per views or subscribers , neither of which is true. In order to generate revenue first you need to fulfill a specific criteria of at least 4,000 watch hours in the previous 12 months and 1,000 subscribers . To know in detail about it refer to this answer : Debangshu Sett (देबांगशू शेठ)'s answer to What should I do when a YouTube channel has 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time? Now if you have not fulfilled the above criteria , you wont earn a single penny , even if you have 1 Million or 1 Billion views. Coming back to the main answer. So if not by views then how is YouTube revenue calculated ? Well it depends on bunch of factors and mostly on the YouTube algorithm which till date no one has been able to crack. So all of the below points mentioned below are mostly based on observations and comparisons made by creators by closely monitoring their YouTube analytics. Keep in mind the points are based on the fact that in each case number of views is fixed.
What ever may be the category of your channel , the main key is your video . In general Vlogs and Music and Entertainment videos earn a lot less revenue as compared to Technical and Infotainment channels . The reason is obvious , CPC(cost per click) and CPM(cost per mile) . I wont go into detail but to simplify advertisers tend to pay YouTube a lot more to shows their ads on videos containing technical content and hence keywords. This is because most of the ads on the internet are of Technical and Electronic products and hence there is a huge competition in this field. So one has to pay a lot more to promote their product ad as a lot of them are competing for the same space. Hence for same number of views TechnoRuhez will earn more than CarryMinati , SharmajiTechnical will earn more than BB Ki Vines and MKBHD will earn more that PewDiePie 😄😄
he location from where the video is played again messes with the revenue. If your video gets views from countries like UK , USA , Canada , etc. the revenue generated will be a lot more that if the video gets played in countries like Bahrain , Bermuda , Bangladesh ,etc . Again the reason comes back to CPC . The competition is high in the western countires among the advertisers and hence they pay a lot more to advertise which in turns benefits us as YouTube pays us more. Thats the reason I did not compare MKBHD with BBKiVines in the previous example. So for the same video and same number of views , TechBurner will earn less than UnboxTherapy , BB Ki Vines will earn less than PewDiePie , etc. I have considered the video as same for better comparison.
This might seem confusing at first but for the same video that gets a million views between Nov - Jan will earn a lot more compared to when it gets a million views in between June - August. Let me divide 12 months in 3 quarters . Q1 - Jan to March Q2 - April to June Q3 - July to Sept Q4 - Oct to Dec In general revenue spikes at end on each quarter slightly as compared to rest of the months in that quarter. But the massive spike i observed in Q4. This is because its the festive season around the world at this time. To simplify the reason we again come back to CPC. Since Q4 is festive season, there is a huge rush among consumers to buy products and hence advertisers are busy selling them. Now Google(hence Youtube) ,Facebook and other platforms take advantage of it. The competition to advertise on same keywords are high and so are the CPCs.
By now you must have realized that all comes back to the same point of CPC and competition. BELOW ARE SOME BONUS STEPS YOU CAN FOLLOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR VIDEO FOR HIGHER REVENUE GENERATION. Try to optimize your title and description by including keywords that are related to your video and also trending at the time.Use Google Trends niche search for this purpose .The thumbnails and descriptions should also be proper and attractive. Your main aim is to make your video such that people click and watch it. This way YouTube will identify your video as a audience friendly video and will run more ads on it a it gets views. Now if your channel grows to a level where you are the master of your niche or your video goes to a level where its ranks top for a particular keyword search listing on YouTube, in both the cases you can come in the notice of the advertisers. Now Google Display ads allow advertisers to run ads on particular YouTube videos, so this way the chances of your video getting chosen by the advertisers increases. Everyone is here to earn money YouTube , the advertisers and also the creators. So advertisers will try to benefit by promoting their ads as cheap as possible and you as creator have to try to benefit by optimizing your videos using related high CPC trending keywords in order to get them on top and trending to get as much ad impressions as possible . Well thats pretty much it for now.Contact me @debangshusett on Instagram in case you have any further queries. Please Upvote the answer if it helped you . Finally here are an article to help you Scale your channel and what to do after you grow, in order to sustain that growth. Have a great day ! 🙂