How Much Money Did My Viral Video Make?

How Much Money Did My Viral Video Make? Is youtube viable?
I made a video titled "How many pull ups can the world's strongest man do?" I and this video blew up and i'm going to show you all the analytics of the video and exactly how much revenue this video made, so I would like to first show you all the analytics of the video and then I'll show you the revenue because I want you to guess in the comments how much you think the video made before i unveil the number to see what the typical person thinks a popular youtube video generates. Today It has 2,238,854 views, 115.2 thousand watch hours which is equivalent to over 4800 days of watch time, it has had nearly 25 million impressions with a 6.7% click through rate and average view time of 3 minutes and 5 seconds, 21,128 likes which is 96.4% likes vs dislikes. This video is pretty much done growing at this point so these stats will not change much going forward. So, with these non revenue related stats out of the way, how much money do you think this video genterated? it has made a grand total of 1291.61. Let me know in the comments if this is more or less than what you were expecting.
There are several ways someone earns money off their video on youtube which include ad sharing revenue (or the money you get from advertisers rolling ads in your videos), channel memberships, super chats, super thanks, youtube premium revenue, and super stickers. How you know how much money you are making is by the RPM or Revenue Per Mille which represents how much money you’ve earned per 1,000 video views on your channel or individual video. RPM is based on those revenue sources we just mentioned: Ads, Channel memberships, RUclips Premium revenue, Super Chat, and Super Stickers. The RPM for this video is 0.58, so for every 1000 views on this video I get paid 58 cents. The CPM or Cost per 1000 ad impressions is the amount of money advertisers pay per 1000 ad impressions before RUclips takes its cut from the revenue of the video, and mine is 6.29. So RPM is your total revenue after RUclips takes its cut of the earnings per 1000 views. youtube takes approximately 45% of the revenue from a video leaving the creator (me in this case) with approximately 55% of the earnings. So not a very good deal for the creator if you ask me. at an RPM of 0.58 cents, which is quite low as many creators can have a much higher RPM. This RPM is just for this video, but the Channel average RPM is $2.05 which is also very low. an RPM of 5, 6, 7, or 8 is not uncommon and some people have significantly higher RPMs even as high as double digit numbers, but my guess is that is because of donations from super thanks, super chats, and super stickers. For example, If I had an RPM of 6 (assuming this all came from ads) I would have made about 13.5 thousand dollars for this video which would be very lucrative.
So the question is ... is youtube viable? well to be honest making a video that gets 2.2 millions views is VERY hard to do in modern times when youtube is extremely saturated with content and content creators. so to get another video to do this well is going to be extremely rare and to have only made 1.3 thousand dollars of this video should highlight the extreme difficulty it would be to make a living off of youtube. RUclips expects creators to make the majority of their income from getting sponsored which means you have to do an advertisement for a product in your video, or by fan donations through super chats, stickers, and thanks or buy selling merchandise such as clothing. Also a lot of creators have Patreons to support their channel otherwise it would not be financially viable with the income from youtube alone. So if you want to support a creator buying their merchandise or donating goes a long way sense youtube does not pay much from views.
as an exercise to show the difficulty of having a popular video, look at some of the channels you follow and see how many of them have videos with 2.2 million views or more. it won't be that many unless they are a very popular content creator. Maybe the niche that I have on my channel is the cause for my low RPM, however, my audience is mostly men aged 18-44 who live in the United States which is a great demographic for advertisers. I have no intention of making a living off of youtube due to the extreme difficulty of it, but I wanted to share my thoughts with you all about what my experience has been since my video went semi viral because I have always wondered how much money some of these videos make with a lot of views. Let me know what you think about youtube being viable in 2023. and I don't mean to sound ungrateful, I am thankful for all the positive comments and I hope I can continue to share my passion for health and fitness with those out there who watch my videos. Thanks again for watching.
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