REAL earnings for a small YouTube channel in 2024 (they’re lying)

I regret to inform you that you’re being lied to every day about how much you can make on YouTube as an early-stage creator.

Today I’m going to reveal what I earned in my first 5 months monetized on that platform and then I’ll tell you about my strategy to grow my channel over the NEXT five months.

Now I have a very small channel at 1,700 subscribers, so you might be wondering: James, who gives a care about your earnings?

But I think it’s important to provide people with a realistic look at what you actually earn without a massive following on YouTube.

That’s because there are so many snake oil salesman on the platform who will tell you it’s just SO easy to become a millionaire FAST with little effort, which is frankly just a straight-up lie.

In fact, I recently saw a video from one guru that seemed to suggest making thousands of dollars within a few months was common and/or not that difficult.

All you have to do, the guru and his associated animation suggested, was make 30 videos and simply have 3 of them go crazy viral, generating hundreds of thousands of views and making your channel blow up.

And there’s $5,000 — EASY PEASY!

Come on now.

I think it’s really frustrating to me because it gives people a false sense of what is realistically achievable.

They think that, if they don’t reach those lofty numbers early, they should just quit — thus preventing them from ACTUALLY making huge money in the long run.

So allow me to walk you through my earnings in my first five months monetized on the platform, and then I’ll tell you how I intend to grow my channel over the COMING months and years.

The numbers

Now as you’re about to find out, these are very modest numbers, but I’m not discouraged by that right now.

There are a few reasons for this:

1. I’m still an early-stage creator on this platform, with 15 months under my belt
2. I still have a small subscriber base of 1,700, which means I need help from search
3. I’ve heard it takes 3–6 months for a video to really get going with search, so all the content I’m posting now likely won’t pay off until later

So let’s take a look at my overall earnings:

When I wrote this, there were seven days left in December, so that won’t be a final number.

And here’s what my all-time top-earning videos have paid me:

Now as I’ve explained before, I look at every digital asset I create, whether it’s a YouTube video or an article here, as a little employee.

Once I hire him, he goes out into the world with his little briefcase and, at the end of the day, he returns home with a bit of money.

Some are top performers and bring home dollars, others are laggards who bring home pennies, but whatever the case, they’re all working for me while I do other things (or sleep).

So all in all, I’m averaging US $0.93 per day from YouTube, or about CAD $1.20.

My CPM, or cost to advertisers per 1,000 views, hovers around $14.

Given I’ve heard that CPM is usually about $6 for lower-value niches like sports, gaming, and lifestyle vlogging, I can’t be mad about that.

Your RPM, or revenue per mille (i.e. the actual amount of money you take home after YouTube’s cut) is usually about half your CPM.

So as you can see, my RPM over the past month is a shade over $7:

That’s pretty good already, but I really believe that, if my finance content ever takes off, that number will go up quickly.

You can see here that the first video I made about the stock market has a CPM well above $20:

So you can see why I’ve started peppering in some investment videos and — bonus — I actually love talking about investing.

My growth strategy

Long-term, I intend to follow the same formula that worked for me on the writing platform you’re on right now: Be super active in my sub-niche, and then keep expanding out into the big boy topics that really get you paid.

Right now, people primarily come to me on YouTube for information about how to make money writing online and, surprisingly, information on quitting caffeine.

Honestly, the latter was not something I planned, I just made one video about it and it took off.

And then some people enjoy my content about building a YouTube channel, though that’s a very distant third.

But I would say my main niche right now is making money online.

It’s a good niche, the CPM is decent, but I know that there’s a pretty limited audience for information about writing here.

That’s why, you may have noticed, I’ve started dabbling in finance and stock trading.

That’s my real love, and the audience is potentially massive for it.

Also, finance content is about as high as it gets for ad payments, so it also has the potential to make me a living in the distant future.

So expect stuff about writing, stuff about YouTube, but know that I’m coming for the investing niche too.

Time will tell

Will it work? Who knows?!

All I can do as a creator is keep working, keep publishing, and keep adjusting on the fly.

Eventually, if you stick with something long enough and get good enough at it, there should be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for you.

This is how I’ve been able to make thousands of dollars a month writing here.

But the reality is that the process happens over months and years, not days.

Ask most creators and they’ll tell you to expect it to take 2–5 years to find any real traction.

So don’t get distracted by the online lies that get-rich-quick is a real thing.

Just get yourself in the chair every day, focus on your process, and I believe the numbers will take care of themselves.

Friends, thanks for much for reading! If you enjoyed this piece, please give it a clap or two so others can find it. I would love to hear from you in the comments too!

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