YouTube money calculator

How to estimate your YouTube ad revenue

The calculator runs on two inputs: how many views you get in a month, and the niche an advertiser thinks it is buying when it bids against your videos. Everything after that is arithmetic you can check on paper.

1. 1Get a view count you can defend. In YouTube Studio open Analytics, set the range to the last 28 days, and use that figure rather than your best month.
2. 2Type it into Monthly views. Rates are quoted per 1,000 views, so the tool divides before it multiplies.
3. 3Pick your niche the way an advertiser would, not the way you would. A cooking channel sponsored by kitchen brands sits in Food and travel, not Education.
4. 4Read the low and the high together. The spread is the answer; the middle figure is only the most common outcome inside it.
5. 5If you are already in the Partner Programme, compare the result with your real revenue for the same 28 days and believe Studio over this page.
6. 6If you are not monetised yet, plan against the low figure. Nothing about a channel that has never served an ad justifies using the high one.

What the figure is built from, and what it cannot see

Nothing is fetched from YouTube. The page has no idea whether your channel exists, so two people typing the same inputs get the same answer, and the only thing that makes yours realistic is the honesty of what you typed.

• Advertiser CPM runs from USD 2 at the Entertainment and vlogs floor to USD 40 at the Finance and investing ceiling. That spread moves the answer far more than a change in view count does.
• Worked example, so you can check the arithmetic: 100,000 monthly views in Education and how-to is 100 lots of a thousand views, multiplied by the band and then by the creator share, which gives USD 220 to USD 660, with USD 385 in the middle.
• The input is views, not monetised playbacks. Part of your traffic carries no ad at all, and that gap is the usual reason a Studio figure lands under an estimate like this one.
• Advertising only. Memberships, Super Thanks, affiliate links and brand deals are outside this number, and past a few thousand subscribers they often add up to more than the ads do.
• Everything is gross USD. Your own tax, any currency conversion and anything you pay an editor all come out afterwards.

Where these estimates go wrong

Almost every complaint about a revenue calculator starts the same way: a range gets flattened into one number, the number gets repeated, and then somebody plans against it.

• Quoting the middle as your income. On Education and how-to the same month honestly spans USD 220 to USD 660, and both of those ends are ordinary outcomes.
• Estimating from a breakout month. A video that carried a month rarely repeats, and the month after it is usually the truer input.
• Comparing against a screenshot from another creator. Their audience sits somewhere else, and where an audience sits moves the rate hard.
• Reading gross as spendable. What you can actually commit is the figure after the split, after tax, and after everyone else who gets paid first.
• Trusting a number quoted to the penny. A calculator that returns one exact figure is presenting a guess with the manners of a fact.

When this is the wrong tool

This page is most useful before you have any data of your own and close to useless afterwards. It answers "is this niche worth a year of evenings", not "what will I be paid in March".

• You are already monetised. Studio knows your real RPM, your monetised playback rate and your actual payments, and none of that is guesswork.
• You are pricing a sponsorship. What an advertiser pays for a mid-roll has nothing to do with what a brand should pay you for a dedicated video.
• You need a defensible figure. A channel valuation, a loan application or an investor deck needs payment records, not a benchmark range.
• You are deciding whether to leave a job. The low figure, after tax, after a bad month, is the only version of this estimate that decision should touch.