Pretty sure socialblade is unmaintained, if the state of their blog is of any indication. There's been no updates there since 2020, with the last subject relating to COPPA enforcement on YouTube.
Given that specific subject did have a few follow-ups with no relevant notes published, my guess is that the site is mostly in maintenance mode/runs until it breaks with no active features being developed.
Good looking website! And my mind is blown by the figures some of these Youtubers make! $4.6M in revenue. "Last 28 days". (Well, that's Mr. Beast, I think world's most popular Youtuber) Insane!
They will pay whatever the advertisers pay. Certain categories in certain countries can be extremely valuable, and other categories in other countries can be much less.
India, being a poor country, certainly will generate much less revenue than a country like US in the same category because the advertisers will be willing to pay much less per click.
Very much so. Can't speak of India specifically but in my experience with adsense, some of the countries with a similar to India gdp per capita often pay out 50 to 70 _times_ less than the US rates.
$4.6M a month in revenue is not that much honestly. I'm disappointed. The average Hollywoord blockbuster could pay for that about 2 years. And the views/$ are most likely staggeringly lower.
If I do the napkin math: $600 million dollar revenue for Oppenheimer. A movie ticket costs about $10. That means Oppenheimer was viewed 60 million times. Mr. Beast JUST on his main channel has 1.6 BILLION views. And that only for the meager price of $4.6M. Oppenheimer cost $100M to make and it doesn't even touch Mr. Beast.
Movie ticket sales not comparable to Youtube revenue numbers. Studio gets probably 50% of a ticket sales. Movies are getting longer as well and that needs a big cast and crew. Whereas Youtube movies are optimal around the 10 minute mark - so the cost of production will be a lot lower.
True I wasn't adding the additional income from private sponsors, his cloud kitchens, his chocolate bars and the translation service business because you have to consider the platform revenue must be valuable for a buyer too because once Mr.Beast sells his channel there is no guarantee that the private sponsors will still continue with the same arrangements.
Thats the nature of creator economy, his(creator) actions can influence audience reactions towards the channel, affecting the organic revenue drastically.
That describes the "inverted pyramid" model where a lot of the YouTube channels especially reside. Instead of a replaceable CEO at the top of the company, you have a foundational CEO at the bottom, who holds up the rest of the company above.
Probably true, what's the point of owning $1b when you already have $100m? Does your life change in any way if you already have enough money for 10 lifetimes?
I'm surprised that anything like this exists. I considered what it might be like to build some analytics for something like YouTube but figured that I would be killed or copied by YouTube the second the project got any traction
> would be killed or copied by YouTube the second the project got any traction
Why? For Youtube there is little money to be made from a tool like this. The target customers for tools like this are advertisers that interact directly with creators. E.g. that's also what nindo.de, a similar platform in the German social media space, built by a popular Youtuber pivoted to.
In theory yes, but in practice not really. AFAIK Youtube doesn't offer a platform to do direct placements with creators, which make up the bulk of creator earnings (basically every big channel is only profitable via those). That Youtube hasn't built out a platform with tools to enable that, so that they could get a piece of that pie is entirely on them.
I feel like even mid-roll ads are just too different type of advertising medium than a direct video integration so they shouldn't be thought of as alternatives to each other. And it would seem to me that the general vibe is that sponsor spots are more hip and more prestigious for advertisers. I used to see those from new and agile companies whereas any sort of normal in-stream ad type would be preferred by more established and classical companies. I use both uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock these days though so my anecdata might be stale.
Once upon a time YouTube barred creators from talking about how much they made. Over time they have also taken steps to hide the numbers. They seem to have shifted and gotten comfortable with it, but personally I would also be hesitant about putting in the resources to build a YT analytics platform.
There is nothing special here in terms of data. I've worked with the Youtube API before and basically everything that's displayed on this website is easily available there (as long as you snapshot it, which it looks like they started doing in October this year).
I think the only thing they are doing here that I haven't seen on any competitors website is the differentiation between shorts and normal videos. Last time I checked, there was no reliable way to detect whether a video is a short via the API, so you either have to build ugly heuristics for it or build a scraper that tries to access the video as a short. I think this might be quite valuable as the introductions of shorts has disturbed view numbers and accordingly channel/audience valuations quite a bit.
Per-video analytics are also not something that's freely available on competitor platforms IIRC.
> there was no reliable way to detect whether a video is a short via the API
Correct. This is what they say
We use a combination of channel performance along with detailed video performance history to break down longs versus shorts. If you'd like to learn more, please contact our team at...
Why would he have any pull to make Youtube do anything? What's he gonna do if Youtube refuses, stop using Youtube? He needs them much more than they need him.
+3.5B views in a child-oriented channel. It is high, and even more so near Christmas. I would expect a higher CPM for that target, but maybe the category is saturated.
I wonder if the revenue stats are accurate. The #1 site on YouTube according to this is https://www.youtube.com/@tseries making near $20m in the last month. However, it is India focused. My understanding is that India has the lowest monetization rates.
I’m pretty sure this is just estimating Adsense revenue based on some fixed CPM. Many large YouTubers make the bulk of their revenue from sponsorships and brand deals. I would take the numbers with a large grain of salt.
This is really neat, I expected it to be a priced service but I was able to look up my friends' channel for free. Great stats, though I'll have to ask them what information this has that isn't available on their own platform.
Look at a channel I watch (RMTransit). 269k subscribers and only the 191,056th most popular channel. Never would have guessed there were over 200,000 channels each with over 200,000 subscribers.
https://www.viewstats.com/@sssniperwolf/channelytics -77m views on December 15, removing bot views? Choosing 7 days here gives a negative revenue - now I wonder what happens when somebody got paid and then a lot of views were removed, does YouTube actually subtracts paid extra from next payment?
If it works like on Socialblade, a drop in views usually indicates video delistings (potentially due to copyright claims as she runs a "reaction" channel). Detection of view botting is usually punished a lot more harshly with whole channel demonetization, which I'd be surprised if any big creator were to risk that.
Even if it were view botting, in those cases they rarely reverses payments AFAIK (as that would mean them having to pay back advertisers and losing out on revenue).
is there any way to see the avg time users watch the videos? Long videos get fewer views naturally but the views can be longer. So the total user time can be the same (more views * less time spent per view = less views * more time spent per view). So I am interested in how yt determines monetization for this case.
also, is it possible to see distribution of users based on geography? would be very interesting
It makes sense. He loves stats and uses them a lot to improve his videos so with this, he can have a platform that can monitor the entire ecosystem.
Right now it's pretty basic but I would bet it will become more complex and have some paid membership for advanced stats and suggestions for your videos.
Let's please clarify the term "improve" and remove the positive implication -
What he's doing is making his videos "more effective at monetization" and that has fuck all to do with quality.
You may disagree with my tone here but I'm biting my tongue at the Little Bobby Tables view of children's attention and development (qualified Educator so I can talk shit about Mr Beast any day) so I'd like to keep it analytical as possible.
I very much appreciate Ed Bolian at VinWiki for his behind the scenes discussions about monetization. They are healthy! Because of those, I genuinely have tried to follow quality channels and bring them revenue via their presence (Ammo NYC, VinWIKI, TomleyRC) sitting through ads or maybe checking out sponsors. It's not that hard to be adult about it.
One of these days I hope we get to see a breakdown of where all Mr Beast's money is / was used, how it was sheltered, taxed, moved, or otherwise employed because that didn't just sit in the bank. Reference: Taylor Swift. Citation: Scott Swift FINA Report.
I wonder why you are downvoted.
I have no skin in talking about your second part (other channels + breakdown of MrBeast money), but I sympathize with your first part.
Optimizing for monetization seems to degrade quality most of the time.
E.g. click bait video names/thumbnails that do not tell the viewer what they are about to watch. Or reducing the feature set of apps so no casual user is confused, but advanced users are left behind.
Or stretching video lengths to improve ad income without actually adding any valuable content.
...
I suspect others downvoted due to the waffly style of the comment. What was that last Swift thing about? Reads like someone with multiple bees in their bonnet
Of course, if you take "improve" to your terms. For MrBeast, it is to have more views (other than monetization itself); he deliberately works towards it and is public about how he uses YouTube tools to get more views and retention. So, I think my comment is on point.
Other creators will fight for different ways to improve their content, which can technically be 4K HDR or having better guests, etc.
Do youn't like Mr. Beast's "empty" content? Then you don't like society, which is the one taking MrBeast to the top, and I would completely agree with you.
Do you think MrBeast is lying when he says that his videos on his main channel lose money because of the production costs and that he just puts the money he makes back into making more videos?
Without commenting on the accuracy of the numbers, Youtube is very much a rockstar platform. Similar to the music industry, it's largely a winner-takes-all situation, where a few top players make almost all of the income. The top channels are not single people doing it as a hobby, they're production companies, often with considerable teams working behind the scenes.
Mid-sized creators want to get money from Patreon because YouTube is Google platform which means it's absolutely unreliable source of income with no one to talk to in case you channel get demonetized or banned. Algorythm can change at any moment and make any mid-sized channel 90% less popular.
And Patreon is kind a exactly what every creator want - to just get support from dedicated fans who going to stick to their content no matter what platform they're on.
Maybe what the market needs is a Substack or OnlyFans-style monetization site for video. This would have the effect of smoothing out revenue streams for creators. I am sure it exists a few times over...
Nebula is probably the biggest and most mainstream, but like Floatplane it has a certain kind of niche it serves, and typically only existing fans of the channels that are available on it join, it doesn't have the same kind of audience that can sustain new content creators who don't already have an audience elsewhere.
For most creators this is the wrong monetization model, or they do it very poorly (E.g. paywall content no one wants to see). Launching merch/products and/or doing brand deals is much more effective.
Thanks for that answer, and I fully agree, it only takes some copyright strikes, algorithm changes, a locked Google account and the money from Google stops.
"Damn, Jeff Bezos is making billions...let me just start my e-commerce company and get rich!"
If life were that easy, we'd all be at the top making millions. The amount of effort it takes to nurture and maintain a successful YouTube channel is staggering...not to mention a lot of luck involved because you could put in all the energy and make nothing at the end.
... or fair. Check some channels you enjoy on the site and mentally rank them by quality. The ones you've unsubscribed from (or are considering) seem to be among the top of the revenue. Quality doesn't pay; superficially that suits a broader audience and jokes do. In other areas, encouraging healthy competition doesn't pay as much as shoring up your duopoly. Etc.
Nobody is so fast that they can outrun what five others can transport. Nobody so strong that they can replace five others can lift. Nobody so smart that they get five times as much office work done as anyone else. Yet many people make five times more money than others. Looking at the channel stats, more like thousands of times more.
Success has very little to do with one's individual performance (although it certainly plays a role) and much more with luck
(I am well off in life, but I don't think that's because I've worked harder than the average person. I just liked learning about computers as a kid and that's what got me where I am.)
I mean, what do I loose? 2 to 3 hours per week, half of it for editing? Some $$ for equipment? If I get some 1k subscribers, it's already worth the ongoing effort. If not I can still drop it and look out for another hobby.
You're grossly underestimating the effort. There are many ballpark measurements, but a common one is one man-hour of work for one minute of video. It's an open market and you're literally competing with the world's best.
I tend to disagree on this one. It surely helps to enter the market with a top notch production team in the background or investing a lot of time into your videos.
However, I've seen enough people babbling into a 720p web cam already having a 10k subscription base to assume it's possible to start something without spending whole days every week on the channel.
> However, I've seen enough people babbling into a 720p web cam already having a 10k subscription base to assume it's possible to start something without spending whole days every week on the channel.
Sure, but for every channel like that with 10k subs there'll be another 100 with no subs. It's a reasonable starting assumption that you'll need to put some effort in to video production if you want to start a yt channel.
This is correct. If you're around the space long enough, you can see the hundreds (thousands) of tiny channels (per big channel that could conceivably grow into anything resembling a business) that are pulling in 50 views per video with 22 subscribers, languishing for 5+ years.
Unless you are extremely lucky or already have things set for you, building an audience is a very long-term grind, and typically a large percentage of those with some potential get burned out after 1, 2, or 5 years.
(None of this to say you shouldn't try, especially if you love the work... I enjoyed editing video since grade school when my Dad first bought an analog video capture card so I could dump a few minutes of VHS footage into a video editor and make dumb family videos.)
Those talking head vlog-style channels are more personality driven whereas big production channels are usually more content-driven. Big grain of salt here obviously, but IME the chips more or less do fall this way when you look at the bigger picture. If you're not going to put effort into standing out on the editing and production style, do you have a good enough on-screen personality to compete with the current top-dogs in whatever niche you'd enter? My guess would be that it would be much easier to stand out based on your knowledge you have to share and the effort you put into the presentation than on personality, because not everyone can be authentic and interesting enough on camera, or be a good enough actor.
Edit: on second read I realized the tone of this comment could be read as dissuasive. I wanna clarify that I mean the opposite, I do support you in trying to launch a YouTube channel, I know far too many people who I think would make for great YouTubers I'd watch! But I do feel like you're underestimating aspects of this just based on a figure estimated by a web-site which probably doesn't have fine-enough grained access to YouTube data anyway and I think it would be better to come into it with realistic expectations.
I'm sure success will heavily depend on my personality and the topics I choose. I may not ever reach 10 subscribers. But every shot you don't take is a missed shot.
I'm aware that chances of becoming rich as a creator are minimal, but it may develop into a worthwhile hobby with an active community nonetheless. And if I utterly fail, I still have some experiences and a story to tell.
Well there are two countries each with at least four times the amount of inhabitants of the USA and both are non-English. It's not really surprising that the most popular channels would be non-English tbh.
This seems like a more "honest grift" than a lot of the influencers trying to monetize "how to be an influencer" type content.
If anything this is an anti-grift as it's most useful only to existing high follower count type "creators" and will illuminate lack of success to those who might otherwise be pulled into buying BS how-to content.
