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

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

#31
post #5

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 mon…

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.

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

#32
post #14

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?

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

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

#33
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?

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

#34
post #18
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way people normally plot these kinds of distributions is on a log/log graph (to be clear: where both axes are log'd, not where only one of the axes is doubly-log'd).

That's not true, only if the distribution in both directions is exponential, which is not the case here. The horizontal scale is just the rank, which is linear.

The parent is correct, the claimed relationship being y ~ rank^a for some a x) and look for power law tails.

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

#35
post #33

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://willvideoforfoo…

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.

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

#36
post #32
post #14

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?

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

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

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

#37
post #33

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://willvideoforfoo…

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.

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

#39
post #17
post #5

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 mon…

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, an…

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