How Much Do YouTube Channels with 1,000 Subscribers Make Per Month?

A channel with exactly 1,000 subscribers could reasonably expect to bring in $10 to $300 in monthly AdSense revenue.

This incredibly oversimplified answer is based on what real YouTube creators are reporting to have earned here ($16.44), here ($22.41), here ($270), and here ($108). Check the videos out for significantly more detail on where these numbers came from.

You’re probably wondering why the range is so wide. After all $10 and $300 are more than an order of magnitude apart. There are several reasons for this including.

• Ads pay significantly more on a business channel than they do on a gaming channel.
• Ads pay more around the holidays than the rest of the year.
• Two 1,000 subscriber channels could have very different growth rates (if you’re doubling fast you’d make more in your first month of AdSense approval).
• Watch times vary dramatically by channel.

What Are The Ad Rates for a 1,000 Subscriber Channel?

I’d expect channels with 1,000 subscribers to earn $2 to $20 per 1,000 views. And this is evidenced by our four example channels with 1,000 subs (here, here, here, and here), that earned RPM’s of $17.95, $2.80, $7.52, and $8.32 respectively.

This is because of what I said above, certain audiences are simply more valuable than others. And if you happen to have a very valuable audience to advertisers you might become an outlier on the high end of the spectrum.

How Much Watch Time is a 1,000 Subscriber Channel Getting?

A 1,000 subscriber YouTube channel will likely have 100-5000 hours of watch time each month. This is evidenced by our example channels ( here, here, here, and here), with watch times of 380 hours, 568 hours, 4,900 hours, and 700 hours respectively.

Increasing your watch time will improve your YouTube earnings more than increasing your views will. And improving retention rates is the key to growth on YouTube, so don’t just focus on this for better ad rates.

How Much AdSense Revenue Does YouTube Keep for Themselves?

YouTube keeps 45% of Adsense revenue earned while creators get 55%.

At first this feels monopolistic (and it is). The 45% YouTube keeps is more than the 32% AdSense takes from bloggers, but the YouTube’s creator fund is actually dramatically more generous than other creator funds out there.

• TikToK: Kept 99.7% of revenue ($200M creator fund, of $58 billion dollars revenue).
• Horizon Worlds Creator Fund: $10M creator fund. Hard to say how greedy this is. On the one hand Oculus currently operates at a loss. That said, the VR/AR division make billions in yearly revenue and Facebook makes billions yearly profit. It’s chump-change to the company overall.
• YouTube Shorts Creator Fund ($100M, smaller than TikTok with just as big a platform).
• Medium Creator Fund: Kept 75% of revenue in 2019 ($6M to writers, on $24M revenue from 400k subscribers)

While the YouTube platform taking 45% isn’t great, it’s a heck of a lot better than the flat fee creator funds of rival companies and a big driver of the creator economy.

Conclusion

You’re not going to be making a living off of YouTube with 1,000 subscribers. In fact, you’ll be lucky to be a hundred-aire at that point.

That said, the amount of money you can make from AdSense actually can become substantial if your channel continues to grow. If you were making $100/m for a 1,000 subscriber channel, it’s $1,000/m for 10k subs, and $10,000/m for 100k subs.

The amount you could be making at 10k or 100k subs is not a joke. In that range we’re starting to talk about doing YouTube as a career.