How much does a YouTuber with 1 million subscribers earn in a year?

YouTuber with 1 million subscribers

YouTuber with 1 million subscribers

A YouTuber’s annual income is made up of these components:

Adsense - overlay bubice and in display ads running on YouTube (this is split between YouTube and talent)

Brand deals - in video mentions, dedicated videos, or social marketing through Instagram and other social media are how YouTubers make the bulk of their income

Video licensing - possible for “high production” value creators who are able to do deals with other video or social platforms, i.e. Vessel, Hulu, etc.

Talent gigs - if the YouTube has talent, they might be case in other TV/movie/digital gigs that don’t live on their channel. This is the lowest hanging fruit in many ways because it only requires the YouTuber to show up. No other oversight.

Merchandise - music, t-shirts, makeup, whatever.

Patreon, Kickstarter, or other fan-based funding

FACTORS TO SUBTRACT FROM INCOME:

Production expenses - does the YouTuber require a team to shoot and edit videos? Are these contractors or employees?

Management/Agency/MCN/Attorney/Publicist fees - at minimum, a YouTuber will spend 5% of any deal on an attorney unless they are paying hourly wages. Management and Agencies typically take 10% off the top, so if you have both, say goodbye to 20% of your deal. If you’re with an MCN, that can get even trickier. I’d say most YouTuber’s end up giving up 20–50% of their brand deals to their team unless they opt to not have one. NO YouTuber should ever not seek professional legal counsel to negotiate deals.

Accounting - most YouTubers file as S-Corps or LLC’s to be able to adequately write off production expenses, which means monthly fees for accounting for taxes.

OTHER INCOME VARIABLES:

The income potential would ALSO depend on the YouTuber’s ability and interest in attracting brand or production deals, sell merch, and their CPM (which typically varies across video genres - makeup and gaming tend to deliver the highest CPMs because advertisers can better target viewers than through comedy, for instance.)

Subscriber count is virtually irrelevant in the equation, though perception of larger numbers typically helps attract brand deals.

So, if a YouTuber with 1 million subscribers is getting an average of 300k views on a video (long tail) twice/week, then he/she is making about $6k/month in adsense (adsense averages around 2k for a 1 million views on a video. It’s pathetic.)

That’s ~ $70k/year in Adsense earnings.

I’d imagine that if that YouTuber optimized toward brand deals, they could bring in another $50–400k that year in brand deals.

If that YouTuber was also running merch, and let’s assume that 1% of their 300k stable views converted into merch buys with an average of $10 profit per piece of merch, that’s another 30k in merch.

If the YouTuber also has some acting, speaking, or hosting talent, perhaps he/she makes another 10–20k in talent fees.

If the YouTuber also runs a Patreon or Kickstarter for a passion project, he/she might have some extra in the pot from those productions, but that’s so variant (and less appealing to large YouTubers), so we’ll keep that out of the equation for now.

SO for the view count you mentioned above (assuming it’s consistent), you’re looking at a range of $70k (low end) to up to $500k/year (high end, assuming no fees are taken out by agents/managers or any hard line production costs) but this really depends on how hard that YouTuber works, how appealing they are to brands, and how low their overhead costs are.