How to make $500K a month on YouTube (AdSense only)

When I interviewed Graham Stephan last year he shared that he made $500K from Google Adsense in a single month.

According to Social Blade, in 2020 he was getting around 13M views a month.

My channel Linguamarina generates around 4-5M views a month, but I am not even close to $100K in revenue, my monthly check from that channel is $10K.

Views aren’t the only metric that affects your AdSense income.

First of all, not all views qualify. Some views aren’t suitable for advertisers. At the start of the pandemic, if you used a term “COVID” or “coronavirus” in your video, you got demonetized right away. And generally if you talk about controversial things like guns, war, drugs, you won’t make it too far in terms of AdSense revenue.

Second, there are a lot of rumors right now that courses that promise “get rich fast” schemes are one of the most generous advertisers on the platform. These courses cost around $400, sometimes even more, the margins are very high since the classes are mostly pre-recorded. 

Such course producers could potentially invest up to 90% of what they make from a course into ads and still be break-even. That means that YouTubers whose videos are suitable for those advertisers can make way more than others. Think Youtubers who talk about investing, personal finance, business.

Other advertisers who are willing to pay a lot per click are the ones whose customer’s LTV grows exponentially after onboarding: brokers, banks, credit card issuers.

This explains why guys like Graham, Kevin (MeetKevin), Andrei Jikh have such high CPMs and sometimes make 10x more than YouTubers who have the same number of views.

I make videos about business and investing on my second channel Silicon Valley Girl and sometimes my CPM goes as high as $50 per 1000 views. I never get those numbers on my language learning channel. 

You get paid for the audience that find your content useful. And the more that audience is able to spend online, the more you get paid as a creator (YouTube takes 45% of ad spend, the rest goes to you).

There are two main parameters that affect your revenue: the topic of your videos and where the audience is coming from geographically. Of course, there is more to it - age, interests, etc. We’ve tried and put together a table using the two main parameters. Please note that the numbers vary from channel to channels since there are other factors that I’ve mentioned above that should be considered.

Apart from business and investing, the other lucrative topics are health, auto reviews, real estate, insurance, and online marketing.

2 cents from me: don’t try to make content to make more $$$. Focus on bringing as much value as you can. You’ll figure out how to monetize.

Join my creator course to learn how to navigate the world of creating on YouTube: from choosing a topic to title and thumbnails and ways to monetize your content.