Recently, I’ve been wondering how many views are needed to earn enough income, say the average wage, if I want to have a guess.

I began to collect numbers from some channels, recorded their subscriber and view counts, then averaged out the number by days. Using 70 cents as estimated CPM (Cost per mille) impressions, which is not really high. I got the number from this 2012 estimation about some top channels.

Average per Day Estimated Revenue (USD)
Subscribers Views Day 30-Day Year
2 230 $0.16 $4.83 $58.77
1,925 192,463 $134.72 $4,041.72 $49,174.30
374 29,496 $20.65 $619.42 $7,536.23
9 362 $0.25 $7.60 $92.49
873 115,322 $80.73 $2,421.76 $29,464.77
1,932 98,206 $68.74 $2,062.33 $25,091.63
30 1,768 $1.24 $37.13 $451.72
42 5,432 $3.80 $114.07 $1,387.88
724 72,841 $50.99 $1,529.66 $18,610.88
10 2,959 $2.07 $62.14 $756.02
390 99,887 $69.92 $2,097.63 $25,521.13
267 20,729 $14.51 $435.31 $5,296.26
-1 1,550 $1.09 $32.55 $396.03
81 8,914 $6.24 $187.19 $2,277.53
3 1,015 $0.71 $21.32 $259.33
3 1,596 $1.12 $33.51 $407.65

If you are an American, the average income is about US$52,839 in 2013 according to International Monetary Fund. That’s

52,839/12months/30days=146.775/day

Assume CPM is 0.7, then

146.775/0.7*1000≈209,679 views/day

You will needs over 200k views a day. Based on that, none of these channels has reached that, and some of them are quite big channels in my opinion. Although they are nowhere near the top 25 mentioned in that post.

70-cent CPM really is a very low estimation, yet 7-dollar CPM is way too high. So what’s a good estimation? I would say the CPM you get from your channel since you want to project on your own channel. And what’s my projection? Well, you definitely don’t need 200k views, but even only 10%, 20k is still a lot for a single day.

It’s pretty sad to see all of the top 25 channels are so alike, what I mean by that is none of them are really educational. Don’t get me wrong, they provide sources of laughter triggers, but all 25 are like that? No wonder it’s believed that our intelligence is getting lower. I still can’t wrap my head around why people editing so-called Vlog style videos, but more mysterious to me is why people can watch those. I just couldn’t stand watching those. They talk and usually don’t have anything meaningful to convey beside squeezing their facial muscles for trying to make the video interesting.