Add your views and niche to get a rough range of what YouTube ads might pay you each month and year. Then see what the same audience could earn from your own offer.
Ads pay you per thousand views. Your own offer pays you per buyer. Add a price and two honest guesses, and we compare the two side by side.
YouTube pays creators a share of ad revenue, not a fixed amount per view. What you earn per 1,000 views is your RPM, and it swings a lot with niche, country, season and whether views are Shorts or long-form. For coaches and educators, a simple offer linked under each video usually earns far more than ads.
Who this is for: Coaches, educators and founders on YouTube who want to know what their views are worth, and where the bigger money is.
| What it does | Gives a rough range of what YouTube ads might pay you a month and a year, then compares it with selling your own offer to the same viewers. |
| Who it is for | Coaches, educators and founders on YouTube who want to know what their views are worth. |
| You put in | Views per month (or views per video and videos per month), long-form or Shorts, your niche, the share of views with ads, and your RPM if you know it. For the offer: a price and two guesses. |
| You get | A low, typical and high estimate per month and per year, the sum written out, and your offer earnings side by side. |
| Ranges used | Per 1,000 views with ads, long-form: business, finance or marketing 8 to 25; education 4 to 12; health and fitness 3 to 10; lifestyle 2 to 8; entertainment or gaming 1 to 5. Shorts 0.02 to 0.15. Rough guides, not YouTube data. |
| Runs | In your browser. Nothing is sent or stored. |
| Price | Free. No sign-up. |
Last reviewed 29 October 2026 by Mohamed Bashir. Benchmarks change, so check them against your own numbers.
YouTube does not pay a set amount per view. Once you are in the YouTube Partner Program, you get a share of the money advertisers pay to show ads on your videos. YouTube's own explainer puts the creator share at 55% for long-form videos and 45% for Shorts.
So a view is worth whatever the ads on it earned, which might be nothing. Put another way, as a rough guide a long-form view might be worth somewhere around a tenth of a penny to two or three pence, and a Shorts view far less. That is why people talk in thousands of views, not single views.
The fastest way to an honest number is your own channel. In YouTube Studio, open Analytics and look at RPM in the revenue tab. Put that in the calculator above and you will get a much better estimate than any niche average.
YouTube's help centre defines RPM (revenue per mille) as how much you have earned per 1,000 video views. It is counted after YouTube's share, and it includes ads as well as memberships, YouTube Premium and Super Chat. Crucially, it counts every view, including the ones where no ad ran.
CPM is the advertiser's side. It is what advertisers pay per 1,000 ad impressions, before YouTube takes its share. CPM is always higher than RPM, so if you see a big CPM figure online, do not plan your income around it.
That is also why this calculator has a "views with ads" field. Our niche ranges are a guess at earnings per 1,000 views that carried ads. If you paste in your real RPM from Studio, we use it directly, since it already allows for views without ads.
Five things move RPM more than anything else:
These are the ranges the calculator uses. They are a rough guide, not data from YouTube, and your own numbers could sit well outside them.
| Niche | Rough long-form range per 1,000 views with ads | Typical point we use |
|---|---|---|
| Business, finance or marketing | 8 to 25 | 14 |
| Education | 4 to 12 | 7 |
| Health and fitness | 3 to 10 | 6 |
| Lifestyle | 2 to 8 | 4 |
| Entertainment or gaming | 1 to 5 | 2.5 |
| Shorts, any niche | 0.02 to 0.15 | 0.06 |
We show the same figures whether you pick £, $ or €. At this level of roughness, exchange rates are the smallest of your worries.
You need to be accepted into the YouTube Partner Program. According to YouTube's help page on Partner Program eligibility, to apply for ad revenue sharing you need 1,000 subscribers plus either 4,000 public watch hours on long-form videos in the last 12 months, or 10 million public Shorts views in the last 90 days. Shorts watch hours do not count towards the 4,000. YouTube also reviews the whole channel before it says yes.
For a new channel that can take a long time. Until then, the ad numbers in the calculator are zero, however many views you get.
Usually not. Take an education channel with 50,000 views a month. At our rough typical rate, ads might bring in a few hundred a month. Now say 1% of those viewers click a link to a £300 programme and 2% of them buy. That is 10 sales, or £3,000, from the same views.
The numbers are guesses, so change them to fit you. The point stays the same: ads pay per thousand views, and your own offer pays per buyer. A channel with modest views and a clear offer can out-earn a much bigger channel living on ads.
What makes the offer side work is the path after the video: one clear link, a page that says what the offer is, and a way to follow up with people who were interested but did not buy yet. Our guide on how to turn your audience into paying customers walks through it, and the funnel leak calculator shows which step is losing you the most buyers.
Sources: YouTube Help, "Understand the difference between RPM and CPM"; YouTube Help, "YouTube Partner Program overview and eligibility"; YouTube Help, "YouTube Shorts monetization policies"; YouTube Official Blog, "YouTube Partner Program, explained". Niche RPM ranges are our rough guide, not YouTube data.
There are two ways the calculator works, depending on whether you know your RPM.
If you enter views per video, it multiplies them by your videos per month first. Yearly figures are the monthly ones times 12. The same figures are shown for £, $ and €, with no currency conversion.
The offer comparison is views × % who click your link × % of clickers who buy × your price. The two percentages are guesses you control. A cautious start is 1% clicking and 1 to 3% buying.
If your views are steady but the money is not, the bigger lever is usually an offer and a simple path from video to sale. Our guide on turning your audience into customers shows how.
It depends on your RPM, which YouTube defines as what you earn per 1,000 views after its share. As a rough guide, long-form videos often land somewhere between about 1 and 25 per 1,000 views depending on niche and country, and Shorts usually far less. Your own RPM in YouTube Studio is the only reliable number.
Not directly. YouTube shares ad revenue with creators in the YouTube Partner Program. You earn when ads run and are paid for, so earnings follow views loosely, but two videos with the same views can earn very different amounts.
The usual reasons are a niche advertisers pay less for, viewers in countries with lower ad prices, a lot of Shorts views, videos that are not suitable for most advertisers, or the time of year. RPM also counts views where no ad ran, which pulls it down.
Not from YouTube ads. But you can sell your own offer from day one by linking to it in your description and pinned comment. For coaches and educators this often earns more than ads ever would, even on a small channel.
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