How Much YouTube Paid Me For 5 Million Views in 5 years

It’s been 5 years since I started publishing consistently on YouTube, and I’m nearly up to 5 million views (close enough) so it seems like a good time to answer the question… how much YouTube paid me for 5 million views!

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How Much YouTube Paid me for 5 Million Views

Wow! Looking back over the last 5 years…the evolution of my channel and my business and myself self…it’s so interesting. I didn’t realize YouTube even paid people when I started! So when I made my first 12 cents–then 12 dollars–I was surprised. So in this video, I’m sharing how much I made after 1 year on YouTube, how much YouTube paid me for 2 years on this platform, plus how much YouTube paid me for 3 and a half million views and of course, how much I made on 5 million views.

But it’s that time of year when we reflect back on the past, and plan for the future and in this video, I’m going to reflect back on how much money YouTube has paid me for my 5 million views in the 5 years that I have been publishing videos on this platform.

Don’t Get Obsessed With Ad Revenues and Subscriber Count

It’s not actually bad to have the desire to increase your earnings from the content that you make on YouTube. However, always keep in mind that ad revenues are something that content creators have no control over with. That being said, we should focus and devote our energy more to other revenue streams that we can really take control; which I will mention on the latter part of this blog.

Another thing that most content creators tend to get obsessed with is their subscriber count. Here’s the truth: YouTube doesn’t pay you based on the number of your subscribers, which is why it is not that actually important of a metric in terms of income but more of a success indicator whether your channel is actually improving and growing.

What Really Matters The Most?

Now that we already know that the subscriber count and ad revenues are not the metrics that we should focus on, the best metric that we should spend our effort to increase is the number of views. When you go to your YouTube channel analytics, the first thing that YouTube will show you is the total number of views that your channel gained, then the total hours of watch time, then the number of subscribers, and lastly is the ad revenue.

YouTube makes money when people watch videos. Therefore, you should also want more views and watch time on your channel to get a bigger cut from YouTube’s revenue. So, you might wonder how these things are connected to how much Youtube paid me for 5 Million views in 5 years, below is the screen capture of my annual YouTube revenue for the past 5 years, and you will see the correlation of my watch time and views metrics to my YouTube revenue.

It’s Not Yet The Full Picture

Earlier, I’ve mentioned that ad revenue is one metric that will give us earning from the content that we are creating on YouTube. While that is true, it’s just one way of earning passively as a content creator. You can also earn through:

Affiliate Marketing
Ad Revenue through blogs
Clients
Crash courses
Membership programs
Sponsored brand deals

In addition, this kind of business model still generates income even if you are inactive in publishing YouTube videos for some time. The main thing that you should always focus on this business model to work is content that will generate many views. If you are interested to learn how to make that type of content, you can get my “Fast Way to 1K YouTube Subscribers” guide here.

Related: Video Editing for Beginners

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