- YouTube's Partner Program allows influencers to earn money off their channels by placing ads within videos.
- Google places these ads and pays a creator based on factors like a video's watch time, length, and viewer demographic.
- Here's how much YouTube pays creators for a single video with 100,000, 1 million, and 150 million views, according to top influencers.
- Sign up for Business Insider's influencer newsletter, Influencer Dashboard, to get more stories like this in your inbox.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
How much money YouTube pays creators for a single video depends on a number of factors, but the amount of views it gets is a big one.
Creators with 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours are eligible to have their videos monetized with ads by joining YouTube's Partner Program. These ads are filtered by Google, and how much money a creator can earn depends on the video's watch time, length, video type, and viewer demographics - among other factors.
The CPM rate (or cost per thousand views) can vary wildly and some top creators have ad-placement strategies to maximize their earnings.
For instance, a personal-finance influencer, Andrei Jikh, told Business Insider that he earns more money by including mid-roll ads, which can run in videos lasting over 10 minutes. They can be skippable or non-skippable, and creators can place them manually or have them automatically placed by YouTube.
There are also things creators can avoid to try and boost earnings.
Some videos that contain swearing or copyrighted music can be flagged by YouTube and demonetized, earning hardly any money for the creator (or none at all). One of YouTube's biggest stars, David Dobrik, recently said in an interview that he earned only around $2,000 a month from YouTube directly, despite weekly videos gaining an average 10 million views. He earns most of his money through brand sponsorships instead, like his partnership with SeatGeek.
Here's how much money YouTube paid creators for a video with 100,000, 1 million, and 150 million views, according to top YouTube creators.