YouTube Money Calculator

The formula, and why RPM is the only input that matters

Ad earnings on YouTube come down to one line of arithmetic: estimated revenue = (views / 1,000) x RPM. Everything else is detail about what RPM should be.

RPM (revenue per mille) is your total revenue divided by your total views, times 1,000. It is reported in YouTube Studio and it is the number you keep. It is not the same as CPM, which is what advertisers pay per 1,000 ad impressions before YouTube takes its cut and before you account for the views that never showed an ad at all. For long-form video in the YouTube Partner Program, the split is 55% to the creator and 45% to YouTube, so a $10 CPM does not become $10 of your money. On top of that, only a share of your views are monetised: viewers with ad blockers, Premium subscribers watching under a different payout, and videos flagged as limited-advertiser-suitable all pull the denominator up without adding ad revenue. That is why a channel can see a $20 CPM in Studio and an RPM closer to $5.

Because RPM already contains the revenue share, the ad-fill rate, and the audience geography, it is the only variable worth arguing about. If you have 90 days of your own Studio data, put your real RPM into the fields above and the estimate stops being a guess. If you do not have a channel yet, the niche bands give you a defensible starting range.

Why niche moves earnings more than subscriber count

Two channels with identical view counts can differ by 10x in revenue, and the reason is almost always advertiser demand for the audience, not channel size.

Entertainment and vlog content typically sits in the $1 to $4 RPM band. The audience is large, young, and spread across every country on earth, and there is no expensive product to sell them at the moment they are watching. Personal finance sits at the opposite end, with reported bands running from roughly $10 to $30, because brokerages, credit-card issuers, and insurers are bidding for a viewer whose lifetime value to them runs into the hundreds or thousands of dollars. Real estate ($8 to $20), tech ($5 to $15), and business and marketing ($6 to $12) sit high for the same reason. Gaming ($2 to $5) and beauty ($2 to $6) sit lower, though beauty swings hard with retail seasonality.

Geography does the same work inside a single niche. Views from the US, UK, Canada, and Australia commonly pay several times what views from markets with lower ad spend pay, so two fitness channels with the same subscriber count and the same upload schedule can post very different RPMs purely because of where their audiences live. The practical takeaway for anyone choosing a direction: 100,000 monthly views in personal finance can out-earn a million monthly views in general entertainment, and it is a far cheaper channel to grow.

Shorts pay on a different system, and ads are rarely the whole business

Shorts are not monetised like long-form. Revenue from ads between Shorts is pooled, used first to cover music licensing, and the remainder is allocated to creators by share of eligible views, with creators receiving 45% of the allocated pool. The practical result is an RPM commonly reported in the $0.05 to $0.15 range, roughly one to two orders of magnitude below long-form. That is why this calculator keeps Shorts views in their own field: blending them into a single view count silently destroys the accuracy of the estimate. A channel doing 3 million Shorts views a month might see $150 to $450 from them, which is real money but nothing like what 3 million long-form views would produce in the same niche.

It also explains why mature channels treat ad revenue as one line among several. Sponsorships are priced off audience quality rather than raw views and frequently exceed AdSense; affiliate revenue scales with purchase intent, which is exactly what the high-RPM niches already have; channel memberships, Super Thanks, and merchandise convert the most engaged slice; and for many business channels the video is a lead source, and the actual revenue never appears in Studio at all. Use this calculator to size the ad line, then decide whether that line is supposed to be the business or the top of a funnel.

A worked example

Take an education channel averaging 12,000 views per day on long-form video, plus 400,000 Shorts views per month.

Monthly long-form views = 12,000 x 30.4 = 364,800. The education band is $4 to $10 RPM, so long-form earnings = (364,800 / 1,000) x $4 = $1,459 at the low end and (364,800 / 1,000) x $10 = $3,648 at the high end.

Shorts add (400,000 / 1,000) x $0.05 = $20 at the low end and (400,000 / 1,000) x $0.15 = $60 at the high end.

Combined monthly estimate: $1,479 to $3,708. Annualised, that is roughly $17,700 to $44,500, though the annual figure assumes a flat year, and most channels see Q4 run 30% to 50% above the Q1 trough.

The effective blended rate is worth reading too. Total views are 764,800, so the low case works out to $1.93 per 1,000 views and the high case to $4.85. Both are below the $4 to $10 long-form band, because more than half of the channel's views are Shorts. That single number is the honest answer to "what do views pay on this channel," and it is why comparing raw view counts between channels tells you almost nothing.