How do you(Tube) earn a living as a content creator?

From the Partner Program to brand deals, full-time YouTubers make money in several ways. 

The magic of monetization 

How do YouTubers make dough? It depends on the creator. Obviously, some genres of YouTube content are more monetizable than others. And the less bank that a creator makes from their video, the more they’ll have to rely on outside streams of income like brand deals and affiliate codes. 

If a creator is lucky enough to get most of their income from ad revenue, this is how it works: You can apply for the Youtube Partner Program and start earning when you have at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours on your channel in the past year. 

As a Youtube Partner, you can monetize your channel through ads, subscriptions, and memberships. You’ll be assigned a CPM rate (how much advertisers pay YouTube per 1,000 views) and an RPM rate (how much you earn per 1,000 views after YouTube’s 45% revenue cut).  

How much do creators earn? 

When it comes down to it though, what does it all mean? The general rule of thumb is that a YouTuber is good to go full-time and make YouTube their sole source of income when they’ve reached a million subscribers. This might seem like a lot, but it’s only a fraction of the available audience on a platform with approximately 122 million daily users.  

Tech and lifestyle YouTuber Shelby Church (who had 1.5 million subscribers at the time) told Business Insider in January 2020 that she earned between $2,000 and $5,000 on videos with about a million views. Finance and lifestyle YouTuber Nate O’Brien meanwhile, was pulling a monthly salary ranging between $14,000 and $54,000 in the first five months of the year.  

Think you have what it takes? We’ve got the tripod set up already.