How Much YouTube Pays New Creators in 2025 transcript

After 10 months and now 22 videos on this channel, I have now monetized. I am now about to get my first paycheck from YouTube. And I want to show you the behind the scenes of exactly how much I have made, where it came from, and how I started to make money on this channel before I even got paid from YouTube. By the way, I'm taking America's Worst Train Ride right now. So, we got a couple days in this room to chill, and I thought I would share it with you.

So, start off with when you normally get monetized on YouTube, it's 4,000 hours watch time and 1,000 subscribers. I finally hit that. Uh, about a month ago, the first day I made 88, which is not great, but it's not bad. I started making money. Now, I want to show you all behind the scenes of this, but I also want to qualify this with I had a video go semiviral coming up on 100,000 views that did a lot of this. So, I'm going to also exclude that so that you can see what it'd be like with a viral video versus without.

And of course, other ways that I've monetized this channel before I started making money with this. Now, to start off with, I really started to dial in on what I wanted to talk about on this channel about a month and a half, two months ago, and that's when things really started to go well. I was kind of like throwing stuff around at the beginning, seeing what I wanted to talk about. And then I realized like I really want to teach creators how to go full-time on YouTube.

I've had two people leave their jobs through going through my stuff and I want to get to a hundred people, be able to, you know, ride a train for a living and get paid to do it. Like it's like what better life could you have? So that's when I really narrowed down on that and when I really focused in on my niche, I had my first video pop off like within a couple videos. So that was kind of crazy. So I want to dive into the stats on that video and then we'll go uh full channel and then we'll go other ways I have monetized this channel.

So, start off with that first video that did well got 98,000 views as of right now. It brought in 2700 subscribers and it made $554. Now, that was at a $550 RPM. So, that's the problem when it comes to YouTube monetization. So, this video, you know, made $500, but if it cost me like $200 per edit, which is generally what like decent videos cost to get edited, then I need to get, you know, $50,000 views in order to make a profit or make my money back on YouTube.

So, that's why like when everybody is focused on like, oh, I'm about to get monetized or uh, you know, I just trying to get the watch hours. I'm just like going in one more subscriber. I just like really need to get that. It's like it literally doesn't matter if you're trying to make money with AdSense. It's the horrible, horrible way to make money. That's very stressful. I have a channel with 600,000 subscribers and I went from making $15,000 once a month in AdSense to $3,000 uh just a couple months later in AdSense and my expenses stay the same.

So, I was like went from making decent money to like almost losing money on that channel. So, that being said, AdSense is a great bonus, but it should never be the thing you look at. If your goal is to make passive income, to make a real income, and this is something that you should almost ignore completely. So, while it's cool, it's also literally doesn't matter. I just want to show you one more example. Let's just look at another video with 10,000 views.

This one got 10,000 views, brought in 244 subscribers, and it made 50 bucks. So, I lost like a hundred plus dollars on this video with 10,000 views. Let's look at overall in the past 28 days. So, I got monetized here. 88 cents the first day. Woohoo. and then a $130 and then we're getting up to like $20 a day, $50, $60, and now it's in that like $ 20 to $50 per day, which is pretty good. So, total in the past 28 days for $126,000 views is $690.

Now, for my specific niche where I talk about how to grow on YouTube and how to make money on YouTube and all that type of stuff, which is what I do, it's about that that $5.50 uh range. So, you know, if you're getting 10,000 views, you're going to make 50 bucks more or less. And you can see here what each one of my videos made, which is not super impressive. So, like right now, if you're thinking, Gabe, if AdSense is not something that I should be focused on, then like what should I be focused on?

I want to kind of explain this. I've built multiple income streams uh on different YouTube channels that make five to six figures a year in like almost every category, in almost every way you can make money on YouTube. So, I feel like I'm a good person to talk about this. And what you should focus on is not a one-sizefits-all because there's so many different ways to make money on YouTube. For instance, I have a channel that has like 400 subscribers now.

I do affiliates on that channel. It's not monetized. I don't care if it ever get monetized. So far, I've made almost $15,000 in commission in about a year, year and a half. So, almost $1,000 per month in affiliate revenue from products that I mention on that channel. So, that is one way to make money without ever having to worry about monetization. I would need millions of views to do that and I'm able to do that in thousands of views.

So that's one way to do it would be affiliate. Another way would be on this channel, the process channel. I did a video where I promoted in a couple videos this $7 product that I built and I've made almost $300 in the past month from this $7 product that I made in 5 hours. I did a whole video on how I made this in 5 hours that you can check out. Not amazing, but um that's 50% of what I made in AdSense that I made in 5 hours from one video.

So that's just like one product and that'll keep selling forever indefinitely. And if I took more time and I built like a $97 product or a $50 product or just something more expensive, I would only need to sell like six things in order to make up for the entirety of the AdSense that I made. So actually, if you're interested in making a digital product, I have a 21-day challenge to start and sell your first digital product as a creator specifically built for YouTubers that you can check out.

There's a link down below, totally free. It's like how to find your niche, how to actually sell and make YouTube videos that convert to sales and all that type of stuff. So, feel free to check that out. Now, if I could leave you with something, it would be to not wait to reach monetization to start trying to monetize your channel. We have affiliates. Something that you could do would be like coaching just through this channel.

I've already had people reaching out to me on Instagram saying like, "Hey, can you consult? I'll give you money if you'll coach me." And stuff like that for their channels. And I have other people who are friends who do like fitness channels and they're smaller creators as well. And people will reach out to them and like, "Hey, can you mentor me in this and whatever." I don't personally do one- on-one stuff really. So, I've said no to that, but that could be a way that I'm making, you know, $100 an hour to uh I generally charge like $1,000 an hour if I was to do consulting, which is why I don't do it personally.

But you can generally charge anywhere from $50 to $500 an hour even as a very small channel if you have expertise in a small niche like whether that's fitness business anything that's just very very specific. Another way you can monetize is by building a digital product and a cohort. This is something that I teach in my 5-hour YouTuber program which you can join the wait list for if you are interested. We're going to launch that soon.

And that is a oneto- many strategy where instead of doing one-on-one where I would have to charge $1,000 an hour. Well, now I can teach 10 people that only have to pay me $100 an hour, which is, you know, more or less how it works out. And you can just spend, you know, for me I took 6 months to a year like building a program that is proven to work and has had a lot of success. Well, now I only need to run that a few times a year.

And while it's very intense and very in-depth and I give everything that I possibly have for the the 8 weeks that it's running, after that I don't have to continue to do it. Same thing with digital products. If you make them once, you can sell them forever. Whereas a lot of YouTube videos, while you still do get like income more or less forever, they die off often within a couple weeks and then they stop making money.

But especially if you can teach something, you don't have to directly tie money. Same thing with affiliates. I have videos that I made a year ago and they still make me probably like three times a week I get an email that I made like 50 bucks from a video that I literally made over a year ago and it's absolutely crazy. And those videos aren't monetized yet. And so that's why it's great to have multiple ways to make money because yes, the $600 is awesome, but if your goal is to become financially free and leave your job and do all that, then it's going to be very, very hard to do that with AdSense alone.

And you should really be focusing on like how can I make a lead magnet to start collecting email addresses so that when I'm ready to sell whatever my product is going to be, I can actually do that. And then if you want to make, you know, $1,000 a month, you only need to sell like 10 digital products that cost $97 or 10 coaching sessions that cost $97. Or if you're making 10% commission, you only need to sell 10 products at $1,000, which is what I do on on one of my channels to make that $1,000 a month.

And if you only need 10 conversions, you can do that with a 100red views a video. You can do that with a thousand views a video because if it's hyper hyperargeted, then you can make money without major views. Now, if you're just doing entertainment stuff or you're just vlogging your life, you're not really like teaching something or giving specific value, you're just entertaining, then AdSense is probably the the way you're going to need to go for the most part.

That's like a whole different beast and strategy. It's not really my expertise or or my business model, but that's definitely possible, too. So, so hopefully that was cool to see behind the curtain. I'm going to Alaska right now, so I've got another like 25 hours on this train. It's pretty sick, honestly. I've never been on a train before it, but I'll see you in uh another video.