For anyone interested in starting a YouTube project, having an estimate of how much YouTube pays per view is essential for calculating costs and earnings and the viability of turning it into a full time job.
Some YouTubers and corporate YouTube channels accrue millions of dollars thanks to the popularity of their videos. Their success has increased the interest for this business model among content developers and users in general. No wonder why how much YouTube pays per view is one of the most frequent asked questions about YouTube.
But many YouTubers, after uploading content, are disappointed after checking their income. The reasons behind this failure are twofold: either the videos are not attractive enough to get virality, or the market they are targeting is too small. In this article we will focus on the second issue.
How does YouTube calculate payments?
The amount YouTube pays depends on and is based on RTB (Real-Time Bidding). When using Google AdWords, advertisers set their offers for clicks or impressions. Every time a user watches a monetized YouTube video, a very quick, automatic auction takes place, and the ad with the winning bid is shown.
The price is determined by auction, so there is no fixed amount per view or any specific quantity of views. The price is set, not by YouTube, by the advertisers and it is decided in real time. Nevertheless, we can always make an estimate, as we will show next.
How much does YouTube pay?
There is a correlation between market sizes and the amounts YouTubers receive, which means our income will vary noticeably depending on what audience is watching our videos. A YouTube channel visited by users from Latin America will produce less earnings than a YouTube channel visited by users from the US, simply because the advertisers’ budgets are different and the magnitude of the economies are different. In this case the proportion is approximately 1 to 10.
We can be more specific by using RPM (Revenue per Thousand Impressions). A thousand views from Latin America will generate approximately $0,1 USD, while a thousand views from the US will result in $1 USD. In Europe a thousand views will generate 1 euro.
These, of course, are very general estimates and they will vary depending on many factors. One of these factors is the specific geographical location of the audience within a country. It is not the same to target an audience based in New York than it is an audience based in any small town in the US. Language is another important aspect. A channel in French or Spanish will attract less views and viralize slower than a channel in English.
The trick of buying YouTube views
A politically incorrect but frequent question regarding this topic is whether it is possible to buy YouTube views to “cheat” the system and artificially increase the amount of views in our videos. However, the cost of buying YouTube views will be more expensive than the potential earnings we could receive from those views. Also, the views acquired by this method will not be from real users.
Nevertheless, even famous YouTubers still buy views, as shown in our article about the YouTube accounts who buy the most fake views and subscribers. This happens because, the more views our videos have, the more YouTube will consider those videos “important” and will recommend them to other users.