Thursday, August 19, 2010

Meet The YouTube Stars Making $100,000 Plus Per Year

There are 10 independent YouTube stars who made over $100,000 in the past year, according to a study done by analytics and advertising company TubeMogul.

From July 2009 to July 2010, TubeMogul used their viewership data to estimate the annual income for independent YouTube partners, which they define as anyone who is not part of a media company or brand.

Here's how they got their estimates:

  • Revenue only comes from banner ads served near content (we ignored pre-roll or overlay since we can't easily isolate by publisher).
  • Since YouTube banner ads have a two-second load delay, we estimate 2.59% of viewers click away before an ad loads based on separate research.
  • Ads were served near all videos that loaded (since there are partners, this is generally true).
  • CPM for the banner ads was $1.50 (Google auctions a lot of this inventory off; we rounded this 2009 estimate down to be conversative).
  • YouTube is splitting ad revenue with partners 50-50.

Basically, take their views from the past year, assume a few don't stick around long enough for an ad to load, divide that number by 1,000, multiply by $1.50 and divide that number in half.

Conservative estimates? Sure. But with that math, you get a pretty decent estimate of how much these YouTube celebrities are making from just the banner ads on their channel. So, without further ado, here are the highest earning YouTube stars!

No comments: