How much does YouTube pay per view? A median $4.14 per 1,000 views (2026 data)

YouTube paid a median of $4.14 per 1,000 long-form views to the 73 creators in our data who showed their AdSense numbers. That is about $0.004 per view, or $4,140 for a million views. The middle half of creators got between $2.50 and $8.40. Shorts paid far less: $0.18 per 1,000 views in figures from 2024 to 2026, so about $180 for a million views.

Every number on this page comes from a creator who showed their own earnings, in a video, a post or an interview. We collected 226 of these figures from 92 YouTubers, with a link and a date for each one, and joined them with Virev's data on 10,595 YouTube channels. The pages that rank for this question today give ranges such as "$1 to $20" or "$2 to $5" with no list of where the numbers came from. Here you can check every one of them in the CSV.

What YouTube pays per view, by format

YouTube pays creators in the YouTube Partner Program 55% of the net ad revenue on their long-form videos. For Shorts, YouTube pools the ad revenue from the Shorts feed and pays creators 45% of the share their views earn.¹ The number creators see in YouTube Studio is RPM: what they got per 1,000 views after YouTube's cut. That is the number in every table below. CPM, which many calculators show, is what advertisers pay per 1,000 ad impressions before the split, and it is always higher.

One in ten long-form creators got under $1.16 per 1,000 views, and one in ten got over $14.75. So when someone asks how much YouTube pays for a million views, the answer runs from about $1,000 to about $15,000, with $4,000 in the middle. The rest of this study is about what puts a channel at one end or the other.

Shorts pay went up after the first months of revenue sharing. In February 2023, the first month, creators who spoke to Business Insider reported $0.04 to $0.06 per 1,000 views. Figures from 2024 to 2026 sit near $0.18. That is still about $180 for a million views.

The same creator earns 36 times more on a long-form view

Comparing one creator's Shorts with another creator's long videos mixes up format with topic and audience. So we looked at the 13 creators who disclosed both, and compared each one with themselves.

For the median creator, a Shorts view earned 1.9% of a long-form view. Among the 9 creators whose figures date from 2024 or later, it was 2.7%, so a long-form view earned about 36 times as much.

Allie Ostrander is a runner with 138,000 subscribers. In her 2024 income video she showed both formats for the full year. Her Shorts got 19.2 million views and paid $3,832, an RPM of $0.20. Her long videos got 4.5 million views and paid $31,798, an RPM of $7.07. The Shorts had four times the views and earned an eighth of the money.

To earn what one long-form view earns, a Short needs about 36 views. Even with four times the views, Allie's Shorts earned an eighth of what her long videos earned. Shorts can bring subscribers. In this group they brought little ad money.

The topic of a video moves its pay more than the channel

Many creators showed the pay of single videos. Where one creator showed two or more, the gap between their best and worst video is large: a median of 1.9x, and 3x or more for 10 of the 26.

Ali Abdaal (6.7 million subscribers) showed four videos in "How Much YouTube Paid Me For 10M Views". "How to build a website" got 866,000 views and paid $42,132, or $48.68 per 1,000 views. "How I type really fast" got 8.2 million views and paid $25,143, or $3.07. Ten times the views paid 60% of the money. Advertisers pay more to reach people who are about to buy a website builder than people watching a typing video.

Month to month, the same channel moves much less. Ali Abdaal's monthly RPM in 2022 stayed between $6.73 and $9.44, by the figures he gave Business Insider. Nate O'Brien's stayed between $19.69 and $23.06 from January to May 2021. So a channel's RPM is fairly stable over a year, and the topic of each video decides where it lands.

Pat Flynn runs a business channel and a Pokemon channel. A podcasting tutorial got 1 million views and paid $27,732. A Pokemon video with the same 1 million views paid $3,700.

Finance pays about four times as much as entertainment

Finance creators got a median of $12.55. Lifestyle, entertainment and education channels sat a little above $3. The finance creators in our data include Graham Stephan, Andrei Jikh, Nate O'Brien, Joshua Mayo and Ryan Scribner, all of whom shared months or years of figures.

Joshua Mayo shows how much the topic matters. He told Business Insider his RPM went from about $6 in October 2021 to $29.30 in October 2022 after he moved to personal finance, and he made $55,459 from ads that October with 270,000 subscribers. He has 887,000 subscribers today. Virev's read of his last 22 uploads puts the median video at 30,134 views, about 82,000 views a month from new uploads. Even at his 2022 rate that is about $2,400 a month from new videos, before views on older ones. A high RPM pays only while the views hold.

Kids content is the other end. Videos marked as made for kids cannot show personalized ads. Papa Joel's Tech showed a kids video with 57 million views that paid $244,700 and another with 38 million views that paid $853.

Long videos earn more per view

YouTube allows ads in the middle of a video once it is 8 minutes or longer.² Two creators showed what that does on the same channel. A Korean channel, 스토리, compared two videos with about 1.08 million views each: the one over 8 minutes paid $1,619 and the one under 8 minutes paid $697. Pat Flynn's 28-minute Pokemon video paid $9,000 for 1 million views, against $3,700 for an 11-minute one. Make Money Matt's 30-minute video paid $30.56 per 1,000 views and his 5-minute video $8.71.

Where the viewers live

Advertisers pay more for viewers in rich markets, so the same channel earns less when its audience moves. Andrei Jikh showed this with two of his own videos. A cardistry video with 14 million views, watched mostly in Indonesia, India, the Philippines and Vietnam, paid $3,550, or $0.25 per 1,000 views. A finance video with 691,000 views and 39% of its audience in the US paid $10,227, or $14.80.

The 14 Japanese and Korean channels in our data make lifestyle, how-to and side-business videos. Against English-language channels outside money topics, the Japanese channels earn the same, $3.34. The Korean channels earn about 40% less, at $1.98. One Ghanaian travel creator, Scanty Explores, showed a video with 2 million views that paid $9.

Most English-language creators in our data have most of their viewers in the US, UK and Canada. A channel with the same topic and a younger or more global audience will sit lower.

What a typical channel earns per month from views

The RPM is half of the answer. The other half is how many views a channel gets. We took 10,595 public YouTube channels with 1,000 or more subscribers from Virev's crawl and measured, for each one, how many long-form videos it posts per month and the median views of those videos. Then we multiplied those monthly views by the disclosed RPM for the channel's topic and market. We did this for the 3,696 channels in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia, where our disclosures are dense enough.

A channel with 100,000 to 1 million subscribers posts about one long video a week, gets a median of about 69,000 views per video, and makes about $930 a month from the ads on those new videos. That is less than most people guess when they see the subscriber count. Views on older videos add to it.

In Japan (358 channels), the 100K to 1M tier makes a median of $1,382 a month by the same method, because the Japanese channels in our data get more views per video. In South Korea (97 channels) it is $758.

Graham Stephan is the top end of this picture. In February 2020 he made $141,356 from 8.9 million views, an RPM of $15.88, as he told Business Insider. He now has 5.18 million subscribers. In Virev's read of his last 53 uploads, the median video got 375,748 views and he posted about 4.5 a month: 1.7 million views a month from new videos. At his 2020 RPM that comes to about $27,000 a month from new uploads alone. When we opened his channel on October 3, the newest public video had 1.6 million views after four days.

You can run this for any channel in our YouTube money calculator. It reads the channel's recent videos and applies the RPM for its topic.

What to do with this

For creators

• Plan with $4 per 1,000 long-form views, or $3 if your channel is about entertainment, lifestyle or gaming. Use $12 only if your videos are about money and your viewers are in the US, UK or Canada.
• Make videos of 8 minutes or more when you want ad income. On the same channel, they paid 2.3 to 3.5 times what shorter ones paid.
• Treat Shorts as a way to get subscribers. A Shorts view paid about 1/36 of a long-form view on the same channel.
• Look at the RPM of each video, not only the channel average. The best and worst video of the same creator were 3x or more apart for 10 of 26 creators.

For brands

• Use a creator's ad income as a floor when you read a quote. A channel with 100K to 1M subscribers makes about $930 a month from ads on its new videos. Our YouTube money calculator gives the figure for one channel.
• Compare a quote with the creator's views, not their subscribers. Our influencer rates study prices sponsored posts per 1,000 views, and our sponsored post engagement study shows how much a paid post gets against the creator's normal posts.
• Find creators by recent views and topic in Virev creator search. For Instagram and TikTok creators, the Instagram engagement rate calculator and TikTok engagement rate calculator give the median-post rate.

How we measured, and what can be wrong

• Disclosures: we searched for YouTube ad revenue figures that creators made public: income videos on their own channels ("how much YouTube paid me"), Business Insider's creator money logs, and Digiday. We kept only figures for YouTube ad revenue (the Partner Program), not sponsorships, memberships or total income. 226 figures from 92 creators remain after we removed three (a loose "one cent" quote, a "less than a cent" quote with no number, and one figure whose period covered months before the channel was monetized).
• Unit: one median per creator, so a creator who gave 14 monthly figures counts as one. Where the creator gave revenue and views but no RPM, we divided them (128 figures). Korean won, Japanese yen and British pounds are converted at the European Central Bank rate on the day of the figure.
• Hand check of the extraction: a second reviewer opened the source of 44 random figures (22 from creator videos, 22 from articles) and compared the creator, format, number and period. 43 were correct, 98%. The one error was a period, and that figure is out of the analysis.
• Hand check of the topic groups: we sorted each figure into five topic groups by the creator's own description. In 25 random figures, 22 groups matched the source, 1 was wrong (a teacher's lifestyle vlog sorted under education), and 2 Shorts creators gave no topic and were sorted by us.
• Hand check of the Shorts flag in Virev's data: YouTube serves a Short at youtube.com/shorts/ and sends a long video from that address to the normal player. All 34 videos our crawler flags as Shorts that we tested opened as Shorts. A rule of "60 seconds or less" would have been right for 4 of 30, because many short videos are normal uploads, so we did not use it.
• Years: the figures run from 2017 to 2026, and most long-form figures are from 2019 to 2023, when Business Insider ran its series. The creator median was $5.80 for figures from 2018 to 2020, $3.73 for 2021 to 2022 and $3.80 for 2023 to 2026. Use the recent figure when you plan.
• Who discloses: creators who make income videos are more often in finance, business and creator-economy topics, and more often in the US. That raises the overall median. The topic and market tables show each group on its own.
• Monthly income: Virev's crawl reads a channel's recent uploads, not its private analytics. Monthly views count only the videos posted in the window (August 2025 to September 2026), with each video's views at our read. Views on older videos, YouTube Premium revenue and Shorts are not in the monthly figure. Our crawler stores few Shorts (878 of 390,025 videos), so the channel side covers long-form only. Channels are matched to a topic by the YouTube category of their videos, and channels outside the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Japan and South Korea are left out of the income table because we have too few disclosures for their markets.

Download the data

youtube-rpm-disclosures-2026.csv has one row per disclosed figure: creator, channel, format, RPM as disclosed, views, revenue, period, topic, market, publisher, link and date. youtube-rpm-aggregates-2026.csv has the tables behind every chart. Please cite "Virev, October 2026" and link this page.