There's no fixed rate per view on YouTube. Two videos with the same view count can earn very different amounts depending on where the viewers live, what the video is about, and how many ads actually ran. To estimate earnings from views, you need to understand one number: RPM.
RPM vs. CPM
- CPM (cost per mille) is what advertisers pay for 1,000 ad impressions. It's measured before YouTube takes its share.
- RPM (revenue per mille) is what the creator actually earns per 1,000 views, after YouTube's share. It counts every view, including views where no ad played.
So RPM is always lower than CPM, often by a lot. When you want to know what views are worth to you, RPM is the number to use.
How the revenue is split
According to YouTube Help:
- Long-form videos: creators receive 55% of the net revenue from ads shown on the watch page.
- Shorts: ads run between Shorts in the feed. Revenue goes into a Creator Pool, is allocated by share of views, and creators keep 45% of their allocation.
Long-form videos of 8 minutes or more can carry mid-roll ads, which can increase the number of ads per view. Shorts don't work per video at all, which is why Shorts RPM is usually far below long-form RPM.
The formula
Estimated earnings = views × RPM ÷ 1,000
Say your RPM is $3 (a number picked for this example, not a typical value). Then:
- 100,000 views × $3 ÷ 1,000 = $300
- Per single view, that's $0.003.
Change the RPM and the result changes in direct proportion, which is why the same 100,000 views can be worth several times more on one channel than on another.
What moves RPM
- Viewer country. Advertisers pay very different prices in different markets.
- Topic. Finance, business and tech usually attract higher ad prices than entertainment or music.
- Season. Ad budgets peak at the end of the year and dip in January.
- Audience settings. Videos made for kids can't show personalized ads.
- Share of views with ads. Ad blockers, very short watches and some playback locations mean not every view shows an ad.
Find your real RPM
If your channel is in the YouTube Partner Program, open YouTube Studio, go to Analytics, and select the Revenue tab. You'll see estimated revenue, RPM and playback-based CPM. This is the only place your actual numbers live. Note that Studio's RPM includes other revenue too, such as memberships and YouTube Premium.
How our Earnings Calculator helps
Enter daily views and choose long-form or Shorts. Then pick your audience's countries and your video's topic. The calculator shows estimated daily, monthly and yearly earnings as a low, expected and high range. If you paste a video or channel URL, we fill in the daily views from public view counts, and you can adjust everything afterward.
Keep the limits in mind: these are estimates. YouTube doesn't publish RPM by country or niche, so our ranges come from third-party reports, and those reports disagree. We list every source and date, and we show ranges instead of a single number for that reason. Use the result for planning, never as a promise of income.