YouTube's top 1,000 channels average $23K each month in ad revenue

The channels follow a power law. I got the number of views from here (<a href="http://socialblade.com/youtube/top/5000" rel="nofollow">http://socialblade.com/youtube/top/5000</a>) and plotted them: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/X6nEL.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/X6nEL.png</a><p>If the $23k average for the top 1k is correct, then only the top 250 or so actually make $23k a month or more. At that line are some pretty big channels, like Husky Starcraft and big bands like Kesha and Muse. In which case, this doesn't seem like a lot of money.

I'm glad to see more attention paid to this. The idea of the "youtube celebrity" has been around a while, but to my mind that's less interesting than the idea of people making a living off of youtube. And the fascinating thing is just how many people are now gainfully employed making youtube content. This is a phenomenon that has crept up rather rapidly and hasn't received very much attention in traditional media channels or even in business channels. I find it odd that traditional television networks and movie studios have basically been trying their hardest to pretend that youtube doesn't exist, or that it is merely a repository of funny cat videos.<p>There's a real revolution in video entertainment going on right now. And youtube is still growing at a phenomenal rate. The recent example of the explosive popularity of the Gangnam Style music video is a perfect case in point. It's not just "viral", it's a cultural phenomenon, and it's taking place on youtube whereas in the past you'd expect people to be exposed to popular music videos through television.<p>If I were in the traditional TV business I would be all over this. I'd be snapping up talent off youtube and I'd be setting up deals and producing content for the internet, etc. But it looks like this is still a case of two separate worlds. I suspect the "oh shit" moment will come when a more traditional format TV show or movie published on youtube becomes wildly successful, and it's really only a matter of time until that happens.

In a hits based industry the 'average' isn't very interesting. What's the variance across those top 1000 channels?<p>I'm really curious to see some more data here, I have a feeling that the disparity is severe.

What is the distribution like among the top 1000 channels? Presumably the top of the top 1000 channels far outproduce the bottom, just like the top 1000 far outproduce the rest of youtube. Given such a distribution, what are the top few channels earning? 100,000 a month? 1,000,000 a month? Even more?<p>Other interesting questions: How much of that is profit? Relatedly, does it cost a prohibitive amount to have a highly successful youtube channel? Does amount spent on production each month correlate with amount earned, or do consumers care much more about the content than the production quality?<p>What is the median income of the top 1000 channels? What's the overall median income of active youtube partners? What's the median income of channels produced (primarily) by a single person?<p>Some of these questions should be answerable by looking at available stats, like views for the top couple of channels versus the lower end of the top 1000. (Are the actual channels in the top 1000, preferable ranked, available somewhere?) I'll see if I can answer any more of them in the morning...

Trying to make sense of a power law distribution using average of the head is an interesting crutch, but a fairly crude one.<p>What are other ways to intuitively understand power law distributions? Where are the raw data for this one?

11.3 Billion Views (by top 1000 channels) 23 Million Ad revenue (by top 1000 channels)<p>2$ ECPM.

Nice headline but in HN you need to talk in median terms - people here aren't that stupid

That's odd. I recall several channel owners claiming million dollar revenues, eg. Jason Njorku from irokotv claimed 1m in annual revenue on this channel for Nigerian movies:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/NollywoodLove" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/user/NollywoodLove</a><p>The TechCrunch article with the claim:<p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/14/you-think-hollywood-is-rough-welcome-to-the-chaos-excitement-and-danger-of-nollywood" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/14/you-think-hollywood-is-roug...</a><p>RWJ claims here that he earns over a million dollars a year purely on Adsense:<p><a href="http://willvideoforfood.com/2011/04/01/ray-william-johnson-is-youtubes-first-millionaire-creator/" rel="nofollow">http://willvideoforfood.com/2011/04/01/ray-william-johnson-i...</a><p>So who's fooling who?

What strikes me is how little money is being made here. $2 CPM rates will not support the production quality we all expect in our entertainment. The dream of the internet supporting a large creative class self publishing is still far off.

What matters is the median, not the average. Advertising analysts have their own special circle in marketing hell.

Well, what I do not understand is the 2$ eCPM, that is thrown in in the comments.<p>If the average 23k$ hold true for the Top 1000 and if the 2$ eCPM holds true, why did the 5.000th channel make an estimated 57,371.70$? (28685850 AdViews * 2$ eCPM / 1000)<p>What am I getting wrong here?<p>Edit: The numbers are totals... OK, I get it. ;-)

Unfortunately, this invites people to turn the signal to noise ratio to crap.<p>Case in point: <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/reply-girls-yogscast-meganspeaks/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/reply-girls-yogscast-m...</a>

I recently got an email from youtube suggesting that I monetize my channel as they'd noticed that one of my videos was becoming quite popular. It's had about 500 (five hundred) views after 4 years! How much would I make?

that's a massive range; just in top 1000 sites make millions!