PodsGPT.io - Podcasts Summaries and Transcriptions

Hey, before we jump in the show, I want to invite you to a live online class. I'm hosting at thinkmasterclass.com. I'm going to be revealing the one YouTube strategy that we use at Think Media to generate over 330,800 views every single day. If you're just starting, this will give you a head start. And if you're a YouTube pro, this training will help you multiply your growth faster. This class is 100% free to attend and you can register at thinkmasterclass.com. Now, let's jump into today's show. So did you know that where you live determines on how much money you make on YouTube? What are the most profitable topics on YouTube? Why is my ad revenue going down? The content in your videos can drive your CPM down. So how does YouTube monetization actually work? Why do some creators make more money than you? In this video, we're actually going to be defining some key terms. We're going to be talking about what is CPM? What is RPM? And some new updates to how YouTube pays creators. And we're also going to be talking about the seven things that influence how much money you earn on YouTube. Plus the seven most profitable channel topics, according to some research. And really, this is going to be a deep dive training. So buckle your seatbelt and I'm going to be revealing how much money we have made at Think Media over the past 90 days. And some of the insights we've learned from the different types of content that are paying the most. And so let's first define how YouTube pays creators. Once you get approved for the YouTube partner program after getting 1,000 subscribers, 4,000 hours of watch time in a rolling 12 month period, or if you get 10 million shorts views in 90 days, you can qualify plus having 1,000 subscribers. Then you qualify to apply for the YouTube partner program. Once in, you can start earning money. And the first calculation of how you earn money on YouTube is CPM. It stands for cost per milli and it's really cost per 1,000 impressions. Milli is 1,000, I believe in like Roman days or something like that. And so it's the cost the advertiser needs to pay on YouTube for every 1,000 impressions their ad receives on a video. Now, an impression doesn't mean they've clicked through on the video. It just means that the ad was actually seen. There's an additional type of CPM though called playback based CPM. So rather than calculating the cost and advertiser pays for 1,000 impressions, playback CPM calculates the cost and advertiser pays for 1,000 video playbooks, backs where the ad is displayed. So let's simplify. What is CPM? CPM is basically the amount of money an advertiser is willing to pay to advertise on your videos and this varies by industry. And we're going to clarify some of the highest paying industries, all the different details. And to be clear, this is the total amount of money that YouTube collects from a business or a brand that pays to advertise with them before there's any kind of split. And so it's being measured by 1,000 impressions and 1,000 video views. And it's also, I think, important to know that just because, let's say you get 1,000 views, it doesn't mean an ad actually play. Sometimes people use ad blocker. YouTube doesn't always force ads to play. Even if you check every box of monetization, it doesn't mean an ad will play. So without getting too much into the weeds, it's just if you're ever like, well, I got, you know, 100,000 views, shouldn't those all count towards monetization? Well, if it's playback based, it means that actually the advertisers playing when their ad is actually displayed. So then there's a second term. Like what's the difference between CPM and RPM? Well, if CPM is how much money YouTube gets total, so let's say a brand is like, I'm going to give you $100. RPM is how much money you the creator get. So YouTube typically, they say is going to take 55% or rather actually, we'll hit this numbers later and we'll actually maybe reveal why this isn't true. But what YouTube says is that YouTube will pay 55% of net revenues to creators. So they take 45, you get 55. We're going to dispel some myths later because I actually don't think that that is true. But you let me know if you're watching the video version of this podcast and the YouTube comments, what your experience has been in terms of like how much money you earn, but let's break it down. CPM is the let's say YouTube, the YouTube collects $100 from a business. Well, then they would pay the creator, let's say $45 of that transaction, or it could be 30 or 50 or 60. But your RPM is how much represents the amount of money you've earned per a thousand views. So RPM is kind of the more important number in a way, both actually are worth measuring, but RPM, when it really comes to being able to pay your bills, pay your mortgage, you're going to need the money you actually collect, not just the money that YouTube collects. You're going to need YouTube to get some money from a business and then they're going to give you your cut and your cut is what you can actually deposit in the bank. The problem with RPM though, is that RPM is actually based on several revenue sources. And I don't know if YouTube did this to mess with us, but it can be kind of confusing because it is YouTube ads. That'd be the clearest, but it's also channel memberships. It's also YouTube premium revenue. It's also super chats and it's also super stickers. Now, what's kind of nice to think media is these are not really income streams we lean on. We don't do channel memberships. We do earn YouTube premium revenue and that so would everybody who's monetized, it just means viewers that have YouTube premium ads are not being served to them. You pay for YouTube premium to avoid ads. I'm a YouTube premium user. So when I watch YouTube videos, every video I watch, if it's monetized, gets a cut of the pool of YouTube premium revenue. I know. Are we geeky yet? Buckle your seatbelt because we're really getting into the weeds here, but this is a deep dive training. And so the problem with RPM is you can be like, Oh, cool. My RPM is really high. Well, if you're getting super chats, you're getting channel memberships, in my opinion, it kind of dilutes the number. Like I want to know what I'm just getting in the ads relationship and I would love to just separate out these other streams of revenue. So here's a question. How much are creators actually earning and business insider did in article? This will be a range. And we're going to talk about why this could be higher and lower. I know we have an international audience, different countries, different demos. They earn different amounts of money. But here's what business insider revealed and these were RPM metrics. Creators said they got paid between $1.61 and $29.30 for 1000 views on their long form videos. That's a big range. And that's the RPM. That's how much they actually earned. So depending on the niche or the topic, 29 is an insanely high RPM and one 61 is not even necessarily terrible, but is obviously on the lower end. And depending on the niche or the quality of the content, it could be even lower. Let's try to simplify some things. Bottom line, if you ultimately were earning $2 per 1000 views and you got a million views and they were all monetized, you would earn $2,000. If you had a $2 CPM, you would actually YouTube would take like half of that and you'd get the other half of it. So you get it like RPM is how much you keep. CPM is the total amount that you share with YouTube. So if you had a $30 RPM and you got a million views, you would make $30,000. So these things really matter, obviously, in terms of how much is possible to earn. And the questions are, how do we increase this? And what are the best types of content? Now, in this business insider article, they also discovered that shorts make a lot less money. And the average there was creators were earning between four cents to six cents RPM for a thousand views. And we've experienced that at Think Media. We earn six cents for a thousand views at Think Media. That's our RPM on our shorts, but our RPM on our long form videos is much higher. And so in just a second, we're going to get into the seven ways that seven things that affect CPM, RPM, how to raise it. We're going to get into the most profitable niches. But let me reveal some numbers that only I know. And these are just Think Media numbers. At the time of recording the Think Media podcast episode that we're doing, this is January 2023 through almost the end of April, not quite the end of April. There's five or six days left. OK. So when I set a date range inside of my YouTube analytics, it'll fluctuate these numbers. This is a way to measure it. So I actually was able to go back and look at what January, February and March and the RPM changed every month. But this is then when you use your YouTube analytics, you set a date range. I set a date range for roughly three months on our Think Media channel in 2023. Our videos had an RPM of seven dollars and 98 cents. So for every a thousand views, that's how much we get to keep on our videos and fan funding during that entire time was only like $150. Because remember, if we had like a lot of live streaming and super chats with something we really focused on, or there was even channel memberships, those numbers are not really mixed with any any other income streams. That's all just the amount of money we're earning from ads on our videos. Our shorts during the last 90 days earned six cents. And our live streams had an RPM of $15 and 27 cents. Now disclaimer, I don't think that's because I don't think the lesson there is that live streaming inherently pays more. My prediction is from what we've seen at Think Media, that when I go live with like deep dive trainings that are also very educational and they're about YouTube, making money online, very tactical. And I think they attract an audience that's probably similar to you. Someone that's smart, you know, wants to learn serious. You're not just looking for fluff entertainment if you're listening to this deep dive about CPM versus RPM. So apply the insights to your channel or test it how you will, but that's pretty legit. So when I go live and the and the replay values of my live streams are good and they're long. That's maybe helpful as well because they could be closer to an hour. There's multiple ad spots. But even that being said, it wouldn't necessarily mean the RPM is higher. It just mean that more ads are served. So that's it, around $8 per for videos around six cents for shorts and $15 for live streams was Think Media over the last 90 days. Now watch this. CPM over the last 90 days was $20.49. So as I'm able to look, I'm looking to think media. The reason I like CPM in terms of studying things is just to understand, hey, what's the channel worth? It's not what our cut is, but it's like, what is our content worth? What is the value of our content? What are advertisers willing to pay to advertise on our content? And it doesn't necessarily mean advertisers are picking out to advertise on Think Media, although they could be. They're looking for a particular demographic, maybe particular keywords. They're there. That's it's a bidding marketplace that advertisers pay to get in front of certain audiences. And so because it's a bidding marketplace, things get bid up, supply and demand competition. So Think Media in the last 90 days was worth $20.49. But now let's kind of do the rough math. If we only earned $8 RPM, then we earned 39% and YouTube earned 61%. Now, I've been in the YouTube game for a while. As far as I'm concerned, to me, that doesn't seem to be that YouTube will pay me 55% of net revenues. Apparently, I'm getting paid 39% of net revenues. Now, if you're watching this, or especially if you're listening to this, you can't really comment on the audio platforms. But if you're watching this, leave me a comment because maybe there's something I don't know. If you're from YouTube, I'd love to understand this more. But and by the way, I'm not I ain't even mad about it. But we earned 39% according to my horrible math, probably, and YouTube took 61%. So when they say this and they say this on the Google page, that when you turn on ads, YouTube will pay you 55% of net revenues for ads displayed or streamed on public videos on your videos. So that's long form content, not shorts, OK, or just normal videos, not shorts. So there you go. And and that's how I come to that conclude. I look at what our CPM is. I look at what our RPM is. And if you're like, well, I'm making like 80%. Well, is your RPM mixed with super chat, super stickers, YouTube premium revenue. That's something to consider. And ours really isn't. And so let's go a little bit deeper before we get into some of these tactics and tips. But here's also in the last 90 days, where our money came from. I'm going to give you the total. This actually might have been four months, January, February, March, April. There's actually four months to be clear. A like five or six days short of four months for all of these numbers. OK, fan funding, we earned $150. Not a lot of super chats or anything. That's all it would have been. Maybe people doing the thank yous and we never ask for them. And we really don't go live that much. OK, shorts feed ads. So this would be the proper ads playing the shorts feed over four months on our content, $1,197 YouTube premium, $4,280. Watch page ads, your standard in stream ads on normal videos, $151,098. So in Think Media's case, our normal videos with our close to $8 RPM, that's where the game is in terms of making real money from YouTube ad revenue. The total for almost four months in 2023 for Think Media was $156,727. And 21 cents, not too bad. So and as you can imagine, you know, it's a good money. But Think Media is also not a solo YouTube creator anymore. We have multiple creators, editors helping now graphic design. So it is also kind of important for a channel like ours. That's if you could imagine the same kind of content or the same kind of numbers or the same kind of reach. I don't actually have the amount of views that we got in that time. Forgive me because that would be interesting as well. But at least gives you kind of an idea, CPM, RPM. And so let's talk about then ultimately what influences how you could raise your CPM. Remember, that's not how much you get to keep. But nevertheless, let's make that top line number as high as possible. And you can't affect the percentages in the middle, right? The RPM, like how much YouTube is going to give you a cut? I don't I can't think of one activity I could do. But if I can get a higher CPM, meaning what advertisers are willing to pay, then YouTube is going to distribute whatever they want to me. And the caveat for this whole thing is why I 100% recommend you monetize in other ways other than ad revenue. Like if you haven't watched our free class at thinkmasterclass.com, you definitely want to diversify your income. That's actually why I'm not mad about it. Creators probably are a lot more angry about some of these things. Like, wait a minute, I didn't get 55%. Why is this going up? Why is this going down? You got to take your destiny into your own hands. You cannot put the keys to your kingdom in the hands of YouTube ultimately. Nothing but love and gratitude for this free platform, for the opportunity to reach people, for all of the cool technology, upload 1080, 4K content, 8K content, you know, reach people. YouTube's amazing. And I don't think we should ever we should feel grateful not entitled. But I think where a lot of anxiety comes is if you only rely on YouTube ad revenue. It's going to be hard to sleep at night, even if you're really successful because it can be hot, it can go up and down. But nevertheless, $156,727 is a big piece of maybe not even a big piece. It is a significant piece of our Think Media ecosystem. So how can we grow our CPM and how can you increase the CPM on your YouTube channel? Number one, the geographic location listed on your channel. So did you know that where you live determines on how much money you make on YouTube? Some countries have larger economies than others and that abundance translates to YouTube. Now actually by the way, did IQ did a cool article and that's where I pulled these seven things and combined it with some of my other research. I will admit that you might feel limited by, okay, well my country pays a lower amount of money, but my studies have revealed that it's actually where your audience is a little bit more than where your actual channel is listed. Like for example, what if I started going nomadic and I started traveling the world and I'm uploading in Thailand and Vietnam and Australia and I'm just traveling, but Think Media is based in the United States. Maybe it's where your channel is started, but the big key is where your viewers and what is the economic spending of your viewers. In fact, who do advertisers want to reach? But number one is geographic location of your channel. Number two is the age of your audience. Advertisers want to be where money flows. So what is their age? Think about this in terms of their buying power and then their buying behavior. Not only how much buying power do they have, how much disposable income do they have, and what is their buying behavior. This is why you might say, well, I wish rich people watched my content on YouTube. Are you creating content that attracts affluent people? This is why getting clear on your target audience and reverse engineering, the kind of content you create is key and advertising ultimately is about getting the right message in front of the right people that take put on the shoes and put on the spectacles of the advertiser, the brand or business that wants to reach a target audience. Would they want to advertise on your channel? And besides your channel topic, in terms of the quality of your content or who you're talking to or who's watching, whose attention can you hold, whose respect can you hold? It's the challenge of like, as a 20 year old life coach, you may not actually be influencing a lot of 40 and 50 year olds. They just might not trust you to coach them on life, which is fine. It would be just being aware of, okay, the content I'm creating, who's it actually influencing? Now, if you were a 20 year old curator of financial experts like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, and you were doing a faceless channel, the audience consuming that content might be people and they're 35 and above 45, 55 that want to learn tips on investing. And therefore, you're getting paid more because you're talking about personal finance, because advertisers want to get in front of people that are watching that content. So there's different ways to look at, okay, who's watching my content? What's the geographic location? What is the age of my audience? Three, what is your YouTube niche or industry? So what are the most profitable topics on YouTube? Now there are many, and there's a lot of opportunity, but there is some research done by a creator that discovered seven niches that make the most money. And here they are, health, business, investing, auto reviews, real estate, insurance, and online marketing. And this data was collected by studying CPMs and different niches across Russia, the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, Australia, and India. So global, deep dive study, what are the highest CPMs? Health, business, investing, auto reviews, real estate, insurance, and online marketing. So what are the most profitable topics on YouTube? Now, if you were trying to financially position your channel to have the greatest advantage, it would be smart to pick a high-paying industry, not just for CPM, perhaps, but because of brand deals, sponsorships, and other opportunities. It doesn't mean, however, though, that you'd have to be in one of those seven. I think you understand that, but it could also speak to the financial upside or lack of upside, at least in terms of how much you're going to make from ad revenue. So one of the questions that you should be thinking is how much is, how much are businesses willing to pay to advertise to this demographic? If you think about it, if it's auto reviews, someone's actually going to buy a car. And if it was a loan product of some kind, perhaps, or if it was insurance of something like that, like these, that'd be a lucrative audience to advertise in front of. It might be harder to sell auto insurance on a Minecraft playthrough video. So again, that's the thinking we want to develop. And so think about this, what products are being sold to this audience? If you're selling medical services to baby boomers, they need a lot more medical services. Medical and health services are incredibly expensive. Think about cancer treatments. So sometimes the CPMs of the health industry can be 50, 60, 80, $100 plus. People that are doing investments are getting loans to Gen X. So now we're combining just age and industry. What about SaaS solutions for business owners? SaaS stands for software as a service. What about luxury cars? What kind of content has an audience that would purchase luxury cars? And then what about fast fashion and drugstore makeup? What kind of content maybe does have a high margin business still, but it's more like, even if it's more affordable products, fashion makeup, what about app downloads to gamers with in-app purchases? Maybe that's not as much of a high CPM, but it's a massive reach. So typically, if you go into something like luxury, you have smaller amount of buyers, a smaller audience, but a higher value. And then on the flip side, if you go into something like gaming or mobile gaming, you have millions and millions and tens of millions of customers potentially, but maybe the amount you're earning, the CPM per view, and even the economics of the app itself, it's a one to many play. It's a digital good. It's in-app purchases. So a brand is willing to, their cost of acquiring a customer is a lot lower than somebody that is the cost of acquiring a customer for a retirement home or for a cancer treatment. Number four, seasonal changes in your niche or your industry. If you're ever wondering, why is my CPM going higher or going lower? If you're ever concerned about, man, why is my ad revenue going down on YouTube? One of the things to know is that it does fluctuate through seasons, which is out of your control. In fact, there's many external factors. Some certain seasons, it just goes down. There's also times when advertisers spend more, they spend less. There's times when the US government was printing insane amounts of money and the whole stock market and businesses and everything was just getting absolutely inflated. So everything inflates during a season like that. Unless you are Jerome Powell and you work at the Fed, you can't really influence that. There's certain seasonal things and then certain niches go up or down. Perhaps in January, you have a fitness channel or health and it's related to somebody thinking, new year, new you. Lots of people want to get in front of them at the end of December in the end of January with health products because people are thinking diet, they're thinking lose weight, they're thinking get fit, they're thinking productivity, they're thinking goal setting. And so your content might go through the roof during that time. And then there's maybe other times where by February and March, people are like, I gave up on my diet, I gave up on my goals, I gave up on my productivity, I gave up on my fitness. And so CPMs are going down and it's out of your control. I have a tech channel, right? Think Media Talks about cameras tech and during Christmas or even pre that you go Black Friday, Cyber Monday, our ad revenue usually, not only usually, always is high towards the end of the year as it's that season where a lot of people have sales, holiday sales. So that's number four, number five, the types of ads placed on your videos. When you get monetized and you upload a video, you can say turn on ads and then you can go into monetization and you can check boxes of the type of ads you want played on your videos. We typically and sometimes by default, I think just all the boxes are checked. But a key here is you could, for example, say I never want non skippable ads played on my videos. Have you ever watched those? Like you have to watch the full 15 second ad or the full 30 second ad. I never want that. I only want skippable. What I've learned is I just check them all because what I've also learned is they just don't always play. Like YouTube is curating the viewers experience. They want to push ads to make money because that is how YouTube owned by Alphabet, the parent company of YouTube and Google. That's how they make money. But they also don't want to spam people so many ads that they lose goodwill. And it's probably a tension that's constantly being managed. That's just why non skippable ads are not always playing or it's up to YouTube basically. So I just check all the boxes. But here's a key. I went into the last about four months of Think Media. And close to 80% of our ads were skippable video ads and 6% were non skippable and 6% were display ads and 4% were bumper ads and 4% were non skippable ads. And so the way you see this is you go to Analytics, Revenue, Watch Page Ads, which is how different ads make money. And if you say, Sean, why does this matter or what should I do to influence this? I would say probably nothing. I would, I personally would just check all the boxes and let YouTube do its thing and focus on making your next best video. But the key is that different ads pay different amounts. Number six, made for kids content. If you check the box that this content was made for kids, and if the content was made for kids, you should check the box. A couple years ago, YouTube was fined $170 million for violating the Children's Online Privacy Act. This law states that websites can't collect personal information from users under 13 years of age. So that means that if you have a kid's channel, it essentially means that you're going to make less ad revenue. So YouTube isn't allowed to collect personal data from most children or from children. And as a result, those views are not going to be as targeted as other views. What does that mean? It means that users that are over 13, you've probably seen this, all the websites are going to all your activity on Google, all the other watch history of videos you're watching, everything you're doing, even other data about you through all kinds of different tactics. Google knows a lot, meta knows a lot about maybe how much money you make roughly, or what your habits are. They know a lot about you, right? It's a whole privacy conversation. But what the law states the Children's Online Privacy Act is that businesses are not allowed to collect that information about people under 13. Okay, so if that's true, all these advertisers are willing to pay $100 CPMs to reach baby boomers, because that are maybe even of a certain economic level to get a certain medical solution in front of them. Cool kids, they go, okay, we know these are children, but that's all we know. Like we know they're under 13, so it just does not command as high of CPMs. So the bottom line is just like you, if your content is for people under 13, you should check the box that this content is made for kids. But if you have a kid's channel, that is a factor that could be driving your YouTube CPM way down. And don't sweat it. I know that could be stressful. I wish the world was different. Wishing things were different than they are has turned out to never really be much of an effective strategy. I think you just kind of embrace the reality. Or should I not do a kid's channel? Well, that's up to you. But if you can put out great kids content, you could get millions and millions of views. You could still make good money. If you put out great kids content, I hope Blippi is checking the box for made for kids because I think it is. And obviously it's a pretty crazy case study, but Blippi's got, he's got the fake Blippi. You know that guy? Have you seen him? Like it's not the real Blippi. I happen to be a Blippi expert now that I have a two and a half year old. You've got his Blippi's YouTube channel not only blew up, he hustled, he started building it. But then you've got action figures. You've got Biz Dev. You've got Netflix shows. Now you have Blippi and Mika. You have all of this. He scaled an empire. Well, you can build drawer empire as well. So remember that CPM is not everything and ads are not everything. Building a brand, becoming known at the end of his episode, he goes, let's spell it out together. If you're ever looking for more Blippi, let's do it. B-L-I-P-P-I. My son doesn't even know how to spell or letters or words. And he knows how to spell Blippi and find him on my smart TV. Like branding, right? And so even if your CPM is driven down because of kids content, it's okay. We're going to be okay. You can adapt and create the ideal strategy for your YouTube business model, your target audience. However, these seven things could be very helpful for us, right? For making informed decisions about our content in the future. Number seven, how safe are your videos for viewing? The content in your videos can drive your CPM down. So there's an article that Google has out of what content is not suitable for ads or will result in limited or no ads when it comes to monetization. So there's two things that could happen if you have questionable content in your videos. Number one, ads are just disallowed completely. Or number two, they're limited or no ads, which typically tanks your CPM. You might make it instead of making 10 or 20 grand a video for big creators, they'll make two grand significantly throttled amount of money. So here are some of the main topics that are not advertiser friendly. And this is not even an exhaustive list, but it's quite a bit of things. So these things can drive down how much money you earn from YouTube, inappropriate language, violence, adult content, shocking content, harmful or dangerous acts, hateful or derogatory content, recreational drugs and drug related content, firearms related content, controversial issues, sensitive events, incendiary or demeaning content, tobacco related content, and adult themes in family content. So the summary there is PG PG 13 family friendly content is going to have the greatest opportunity for the most ads. This is a whole conversation in and of itself, because some creators who have more adult themed content want, they say, well, there's a lot of brands or businesses that would want to reach our audience. But my rebuttal to that would be, yeah, and that's why you can do brand deals. And that's why you can do your own thing. And you can build your own platforms other places or you could have, you build an email list and you can sell email drops to sponsors. But I empathize, I mean, I see the frustration is sometimes people, sometimes these things run clear or sometimes you don't know why your video has limited or no ads. But nevertheless, if you want the safest bet of not having limited ads on your YouTube videos, then being thoughtful of those types of keeping inappropriate language and violence and harmful content out of your videos would be an important factor for just avoiding any of that drama and any of that trauma. So ultimately, what questions do you still have about monetization? Let me know, especially if you watch this on YouTube where you're able to comment. If you are part of our audio community, then it would mean the world to me if you reviewed the podcast on Spotify or you left a review and rated this on Apple. Seriously, if you got value out of this episode, that would go a long way for all the research that went into it. And we covered right these seven different distinctions of CPM and seven most profitable channel topics in there. And also how much we made it think media. So we covered a lot. So save this one for reference and even share this with maybe somebody else that would benefit from some of this information. And I am Sean Cannell, rhymes with YouTube channel. This has been the Think Media podcast and I look forward to connecting with you in a future episode.

215: YouTube Monetization Explained: Highest Paying Niches, CPM vs. RPM, and Insider Tips