Since 2017, I’ve made a living writing scripts for large YouTube channels. But for years, I didn’t really understand how the YouTube economy worked.
This changed in 2020, when I launched an indie video game and started buying YouTube ads to promote the game. When I started interacting with the internet money machine from the other side, I finally began to understand what advertisers were actually paying for, and why the biggest YouTubers do not make most of their money through AdSense. (This comes as a surprise to some: “wait, the ads that play in front of the videos don’t pay for the videos?”)
My biggest breakthrough in understanding came about as a result a major error on my part, one that I was lucky enough to make in private. But several recent private conversations have made it clear that plenty today have the same misconceptions that I had 5 years ago, and I feel obliged to share my own discovery in hopes that it will help you update towards a fuller understanding of how the YouTube economy actually works.
Where does the money go?
Back around 2020, the rule of thumb I had been taught is that the typical CPM (“cost per mille,” or cost per 1000 ad views) that YouTubers could expect to earn for a gaming video was somewhere in the neighborhood of $2-5.
For example, a YouTube video with 100,000 views could be expected to earn around $200-500 in ad revenue for the creator.1 Notably, that works out to a total revenue for the creator of less than half a cent per view (let’s call it $0.003 per view).
However, when I went to buy YouTube ads to promote my games, I seemed to be paying a very different rate. I’d spend $50 on ads, and my ad would get viewed 1,000 times, for a cost of $0.05 per view, yet the creator was only getting paid around $0.003 per view on their YouTube video.
The astute will recognize that these numbers are more than an order of magnitude apart! What accounts for this discrepancy? YouTube does take a cut, but their cut is ~50%, not ~94%.
When I looked at the numbers, it seemed like only 5-10% of my money was actually going to the creator, but I was fundamentally misunderstanding what I was paying for. So, why the big discrepancy between the advertiser’s $0.05 cost per view, and the YouTuber’s ~$0.003 payment received per view?
My big (embarrassing) error: a “view” is not a “view”
The dash board for my first experimental ad campaign looked something like this:
The impressions column (blue) represents the total number of people who were shown the ad, and the views column (red) represents the total number of those people who, upon seeing the first few seconds of the ad, decided to watch it long enough for it to count as a “view.”
When someone sees the first few seconds of an ad and immediately mashes “skip,” it does not count as a “view,” and this is what the overwhelming majority of users do. (As you can see, only ~14% of people were enticed by the first few seconds to keep watching it.)
Here’s what I took embarrassingly long to realize: a “view” on my Google Ads dashboard is not the same thing as a “view” on the YouTuber’s creator dashboard, because AdSense doesn’t sell “ad views,” they sell ad impressions.
902 people watched the ad, but to get that many ad views, a bunch of YouTubers had to make videos that naturally attracted 6340 viewers.
My mental model was “I am paying $45 for 900 people to view my video,” and that is sort of correct, but what I was really doing was bidding for impressions, at a rate of $45 per 6340 views, or $7.10 CPM. And if we cut that in half to account for Google’s cut, we see that the YouTuber is earning a CPM of $3.55, which is almost exactly in the middle of the $2-5 CPM range that is typical for gaming YouTubers.
The math works out perfectly, as long as we correctly understand that a “YouTube view” is not generating an “ad view,” but rather generating an “ad impression.”
The funnel is leaky (but some funnels are less leaky than others)
My embarrassing mistake was ignoring an entire layer of the sales funnel. Most YouTube users skip ads 90-95% of the time, resulting in a “view rate” of 5-10% for most ads. I was doing somewhat better than that, with a view rate of ~14%, roughly double the average, at least compared to the average YouTube video.
As it turns out, this “higher-than-normal ad view rate” of 14% that I achieved for a video game trailer is true for many video game ads. I’ve run more targeted video game ad campaigns where the rate at which impressions translate into views is as high as 38%, which is crazy if you’re familiar with the behavior of the typical YouTube viewer: they skip ads quickly and compulsively.
However, video game trailers have a fairly unique property: people seem to enjoy watching them. They’re seen less as “ads,” and more as “content.”
People willingly subject themselves to video game ads all the time, as evidenced by the legions of viewers who show up to watch the “Nintendo Direct” and “Xbox Games Showcase” livestreams, and all of the other parts of E3 Summer Games Fest. So, it shouldn’t be that big of a surprise that a gamer clicks on a YouTube video, and sees that the ad is a video game trailer, they might be willing to watch the full trailer.
(A word of tautological advice to the would-be advertiser: more people will be willing to watch your ad if your ad is the kind of thing that people want to watch.)
If you want twice as many people to see your ad, one way to do that is by paying twice as much to buy twice as many impressions, but another way is to just make a more appealing ad that is better at converting “impressions” into “views.”
The YouTube recommendation algorithm is a “free advertising” machine
There’s another reason to make your ad “content that people actually want to watch”: when you post your ad, you upload it in the form of a regular YouTube video. And like any other video on the site, that video upload can get organic traffic.
While I did get some views for the game trailer by paying for impressions, the overwhelming majority of traffic on the video was organic: people just stumbled onto it like they would any other YouTube video.
YouTube videos get a certain amount of organic traffic. Remember the example above, where I said that I was willing to pay $45 for 900 people to view the trailer for our game? Most of the people who watched the trailer did so without me needing to buy any ads. The trailer ended up getting over 50,000 views of organic traffic:
Think about what this means: if one person watching this video is truly worth $0.05 (and presumably I thought it was, if I was buying ads at a rate to make exactly that happen), then the ~50,000 organic views this video got (just from appearing in the YouTube recommendation algorithm) represent $2,500 worth of free advertising!
Of course, that traffic was not truly “free.” YouTube hungers for engaging content that will retain users’ attention, and our director spent several weeks to make a trailer that would be “good content.” (I think it’s a good trailer purely as an aesthetic judgment — watch the trailer and see for yourself — but YouTube thinks it’s “good content” based on metrics like click-through and viewer retention.)
We could have gotten almost as many views even if I’d never spent any money on ads! And, indeed, many marketers do skip that step and just rely entirely on organic reach.
The term of art for this is “content marketing.” Rather than spending money to force people to see your ad, you can make something that people will click on of their own volition. If you make good content that people like (as measured by YouTube metrics like “click-through rate” and “viewer retention”), YouTube will show it to more people.
Content marketers clean up. YouTubers, not so much
While our indie game studio had a YouTube channel, none of the people who worked on the game trailer did so as a “YouTuber.” We were game developers, cutting together a marketing asset for a product that we were selling for $20. We were effectively “content marketers.”
Let’s consider a counterfactual, where we weren’t promoting a game we had worked on, and instead were just “YouTubers” who were “making a YouTube video” and monetizing it through AdSense as a YouTuber would, getting a CPM of $2-5.
That 50,000 organic views would be rewarded by YouTube with around $100–$250 in ad revenue. That’s not nothing, but it’s nowhere near the “$2,500 worth of advertising” that the video got in practice. Approaching YouTube as “content marketers” who are trying to promote a video game, our ROI is an order of magnitude higher than it would be if we were just “YouTubers” trying to monetize through AdSense.
In other words, the economics of YouTube are bad for people who just want to make a living from AdSense, and good for “content marketers” who are trying to get you to buy something. The consequences of this should be fairly obvious:
If you’re good at content, it pays more to be a content marketer. This is why MrBeast sells chocolate bars, Logan Paul sells energy drinks, and Mark Rober sells an educational toy subscription box.
YouTubers as freelance content marketers
That’s all well and good for people who have the resources to launch a million-dollar business, but what of the smaller YouTubers who don’t have MrBeast levels of clout and have no interest in running a chocolate empire? Can they still reap the same benefits?
Let’s backpedal and examine the question of why YouTube is so much more profitable for content marketers than it is for advertisers.
As we stated before, the sales funnel is leaky. Remember, the typical ad view rate on YouTube is only around 5-10%, and that in turn affects how much advertisers are willing to bid for ads.
Content marketing cuts out that leaky layer of the sales funnel by putting the ‘ad’ directly into the content itself.
A YouTuber might achieve this directly by saying at the beginning or end of their video, like “buy my merch!” or “preorder my new book!”
However, not every YouTuber has a product to sell, and so they will instead sell other people’s products in the content of their video, whether it’s saying “you need a VPN and I know where you can pay for one,” or “subscribe to this meal kit delivery service.”
These sorts of content-embedded ad reads won’t reach everyone: YouTubers have retention graphs that will show things like “as soon as I started talking about the sponsor, a bunch of people started mashing the ‘skip ahead 10 seconds’ button until the regular video content resumed, so only 60-70% of the people who watched the video stuck around for the ad read.”
60-70% might not be 100%, but it’s still really dang good, especially compared to the 5-10% rate that most ad impressions have for converting into ad views. It’s practically an an entire order of magnitude better, which is what you might expect when cutting out a layer of the sales funnel where you typically lose 90% of viewers.
And, of course, there’s the intangible value of having the host of the show you are watching be the one to do the ad read. Part of that is present in the retention rate: the reason that 60% of users stuck around to hear that VPN ad is that it’s being spoken by a familiar voice that sounds like the content they showed up for. MrBeast fans are more likely to trust words spoken by MrBeast than they are to trust words from a random commercial actor.
It’s not 100% upside: when you embed the ad read into the content itself, you lose the ability to target users. For example, suppose you are an advertiser who specifically wants to target males ages 35-44. AdSense allows you to specifically target that demographic, but when you pay a YouTuber to read your ad copy, you get the totality of their audience, which might include people that are outside your target demographic (for example, their audience might include a bunch of 13-year-olds who do not have the money to spend money on the product you are selling.)
Still, taking all of this into account, it’s often the case that a YouTuber who typically makes $1,000 per video through AdSense can charge closer to $10,000 for a sponsored ad read: they’re lending the advertiser their face and voice, and they’re cutting out a layer of the sales funnel.
Of course, markets prices exist in an equilibrium mutually determined by buyers and sellers, and so the host who is used to getting $1,000 in AdSense revenue per video might not realize their worth and happily snap at the opportunity to get paid $5,000 or even $2,000 for a sponsored video. (Sponsors, for their part, are happy to capitalize on YouTubers’ ignorance and get those ad reads at a heavily discounted rate. If you are a YouTuber who is in this position, I would advise you to follow the immortal advice of Patrick McKenzie: charge more. Feel free to negotiate any offer in your inbox.)
If “regular YouTubing” sucks so much, why bother?
I mentioned before that a talent ad read can have a retention rate that’s around an order of magnitude higher than a pre-roll ad (50-75% instead of 5-10%).
Put another way, a YouTuber who gets around $1,000 in AdSense revenue per video for preroll ads would not be out of line to charge closer to $10,000 for an sponsored ad read in their own voice.
You might look at two nearly-identical videos with nearly-identical numbers on the same channel and assume, “these videos are probably making similar amounts of money.” But if one of those videos has an ad read, and the other is relying on preroll ads for monetization, one could be making x10 as much money as the other.
And this leads to an obvious question: “if some of these videos are making $10k, and some of these videos are making $1k, and, both involve roughly similar amounts of effort, why even bother making the $1k video? Why not just only make the $10k videos?”
There are a lot of good answers to this question. For one thing, regular content helps you maintain a relationship with your audience: you might want to end your videos by saying “subscribe for new videos every Wednesday!” (and actually keep that promise). Also, part of the reason that sponsors are willing to pay you $10k for an ad read is that you have a channel that regularly gets a certain number of views per video, and if you “fell off,” the sponsors might stop offering you that money.
There’s also the fact that many YouTube channels are literally run like businesses who pay for workers to make the videos, and if your editor is a salaried employee who is going to show up to the office every day to collect a paycheck, you might as well give her some work to do every day, even if that work monetizes at a lower rate.
Even if she’s not a salaried employee, paying your editor regularly to work on videos lets you maintain a working relationship with her. If your editor is used to getting an email from you every Sunday evening that says “here’s the deliverable I need from you this week,” it’s just like any other workweek. If you only give your editor work once every 3-6 months, the response you get might be, “Uh, I’m a bit busy right now with work from my usual clients, but I can get to you in a few weeks,” which might not be what you want to hear when you have a time-sensitive job for a sponsored video. (Tip for contractors: set your rates accordingly.)
So, there are plenty of YouTubers who mostly make a living through AdSense, and occasionally get a pleasant revenue spike when they get a sponsor who is willing to pay them for an ad read.
But. The question “why not only make the $10k video, and not the $1k video?” is a reasonable one, and some YouTubers have a different response: upon realizing that sponsored ad reads pay ~an order of magnitude more than AdSense videos, they make the reasonable decision that “this is all I’m going to do.”
The YouTubers who don’t have time for AdSense
Xyla Foxlin is an engineering YouTuber (and fellow CWRU alum) who is clearly getting more mileage out of her mechanical engineering education than I am:
Xyla’s videos involve things like building rockets, flying airplanes, and fabricating custom hardware, which makes her videos considerably higher effort than many of the videos that I work on.
If you watch videos from Xyla’s videos, and pay attention to the corner of the screen when you load up one of their videos, you’ll notice that they all have something in common:
I don’t know anything about her process or video budgets apart from what I can infer from watching her videos, but if I had to recklessly speculate, I don’t think it’s possible to run a channel the way Xyla does while relying on AdSense money.
She’s not like a movie reviewer who can talk into a camera every week and be content with a video only making a few hundred dollars, nor is she Minecraft YouTuber who can post several gameplay videos per week. Her videos have substantial production budgets, and while she posts regularly, her videos come at a rate of 1-2 per month.
For a channel like Xyla’s, the higher revenue that comes from sponsored ad reads is not a “nice bonus;” it is essential for her continue making videos with this level of production quality. (Anyone who enjoys her videos should be glad that she is continuing to get a steady stream of sponsors who are willing to pay her to keep making these videos.)
I’ve come to see videos from YouTubers like Xyla Foxlin and other engineering YouTubers like Mark Rober as practically existing in a different medium from the “movie review” and “gameplay” channels you find on YouTube. Even though they live on the same platform and you view them through the same interface, making videos about riding in hot air balloons and blowing stuff up is at least an order of magnitude more expensive, and it needs to be financed on a different business model.
That being said, while Xyla Foxlin and Mark Rober exist in the same “content genre,” they exist at different scales. Xyla’s channel gets around 500,000 views per month; Mark Rober’s channel gets around 500 million views per month.
And that gives Mark a different set of problems. Both of them have the business model of making “expensive, high-effort” videos that are financed by sponsored ad reads rather than pre-roll AdSense. Xyla, for her part, seems to have enough sponsors to keep up with her schedule. But Mark Rober effectively has 1000 times as much “sponsored ad read inventory” to move.
The inevitable brandification of YouTubers
I just said that Mark Rober’s videos are like Xyla’s, in the sense that they’re expensive and thus require sponsorships, rather than just getting by on AdSense preroll ads.
So why don’t Mark Rober’s videos have the “includes paid promotion” in the corner every time you load them up? Considering the budget that Mark Rober is working with, wouldn’t we expect him to be promoting a brand that expects to make money from his audience by offering them goods and/or services in exchange for cash?
Well, check the description, and this is what you find:
What’s going on here? Why no disclosure? Well, there’s no third-party that is offering Mark a “paid promotion.” He’s selling the products directly himself. Mark is the founder of CrunchLabs, which offers a STEM toy subscription box service.
Mark Rober is, of course, far from the only YouTuber to launch his own product line, and as things that you can buy for your 11-year-old go, the CrunchLabs Build Box is probably more edifying than MrBeast’s Feastable chocolate bars and Logan Paul’s Prime energy drink.
But, fundamentally, these products all exist for the same reason: MrBeast has to be a chocolate bar company, because to the extent that he is an attention merchant, he has too much inventory to sell. His channel gets 100 million views per day. He can sell some of his “attention inventory” to the occasional mega-sized VPN company or Doordash-sized delivery app that can pay the hefty cost associated with sponsoring his video, but it really behooves him to have one “sponsor” that can be an attention sink for the times when he has more “ad inventory” than he knows what to do it.
I’m not sure if MrBeast’s own accounting would describe it in these terms, but the way I see it, there is a real sense in which Feastables is the “sponsor of last resort.” If nobody else can afford to sponsor a MrBeast video, and he has more attention than he can sell to advertisers, at least MrBeast’s own chocolate company can absorb all that attention.
For some, attention is its own reward
MrBeast is, descriptively, a man who cares about money. I don’t think he intrinsically cares about chocolate, but “chocolate bar” is a popular genre of product that he can sell to the wide audience of people that operates his videos. (Given who his audience is, it makes more sense for him to sell chocolate bars than to sell B2B SaaS, although he does that too.) Selling branded chocolate bars is a method for him to take attention and turn it sales that put dollars into his pocket.
I don’t think this is a particularly underhanded thing to do. As I stated at the top of this post, I have myself participated in the ad and “content marketing” ecosystem because I had a product that I was selling, and I wanted attention for it so that I could increase the sales of the video game I had made. MrBeast is approaching things from the opposite direction: he starts with the attention, and then figures out a way to turn that into product sales.
But inherent in both MrBeast’s and my ventures is this premise that the ultimate goal is to turn attention into product sales, which result in dollars deposited into our bank accounts. What if attention were its own reward? (Or, what if you were trying to turn that attention into something a bit more abstract than “dollars?”)
What if the thing you are asking of your audience isn’t “I want you to buy my product,” but something more like, “I want you to think more like me, and I want you to be more positively disposed toward the ideas that I think are good?”
You could call this a description of a certain variety of activism, and it’s a pretty common use case for YouTube: for example, there are a lot of political activists on YouTube. And though a certain amount of political content creation is driven by a profit motive, there’s a very real sense in which the primary motivation for a lot of political video makers is “I want tell the world how I see things, and I’m doing this in the hope that the people who watch my videos will think more like me and see the world the same way that I do.” (They might do this with the explicit goal of trying to generate votes for a specific political candidate, or ballot proposition, or some other specific political goal, but this level of specificity is not necessary.)
And — I’m not sure if this part goes without saying, so I’ll say it — whenever you have a specific goal like “I would like this specific candidate to receive more votes,” or “I would like atmospheric CO2 levels to be lower,” or “I would like people to eat less meat,” there will be people who think that this goal is important enough to spend money on it, and if they think this goal can be best-achieved by persuading people, they will spend money on persuasion, and that requires that you have their attention, which you can buy through mediums like TV, and radio, and YouTube ads.
Selling people on an idea that “you should eat less meat” is not so different from trying to sell them on an idea like “you should buy my game”: you might conceivably accomplish it by buying attention in the form of ad views, and then using that attention to deliver a message that communicates why people should do the thing you want them to do.
A story about one of my clients
The channel Species | Documenting AGI was started with the goal of raising awareness about the risks of artificial superintelligence (including existential risks to humanity). They seem to have been pretty successful in this endeavor:
If you are someone who wants to “raise awareness about the risks of artificial superintelligence,” the fact that this video has 2.7 million views is a massive W. How much should we “value” this W, in economic terms?
I’m not sure I know the proper rate to value it, but I do know that when I was trying to sell people on the idea that “you should spend $20 on my new video game,” I was willing to spend $0.05 per view. (And this was under a model where I was paying average CPMs and getting twice the average CTR, meaning that the modal ad view on the platform costs closer to $0.10)
If you think that spreading this message is exactly as valuable as “my video game is cool and you should buy it,” then the economic value or “impact” of this video currently stands at around $135,000. If you think that this message is of “average importance,” relative to the message that the typical advertiser on YouTube has to share, then it’s closer to $270,000. And if you think that getting people to hear this message is more valuable than “what the average YouTube advertiser has to say,” then you might be willing to spend substantially more.
But wait! The value proposition on this video gets even better, because remember that when I was buying video views for 5 cents each, I was only buying around a minute of viewer attention. A 37-minute video is capturing substantially more audience attention, and have them spending significantly more time dwelling on whatever ideas are contained in that video. (How much of a multiplier do you think we should give it based on that?)
Not every video can be a “banger,” but since April, the channel has uploaded 6 videos with an average view count of 770k views, and if you only value those views at $0.05-0.10 (which I think is a pretty low estimate), each video is generating between $38,000 and $77,000 worth of attention for the ideas they are promoting (which, I feel obliged to note, is substantially more than the amount that they’re spending per video.)
This is pretty good ROI. In fact, the ROI is so high that their current mindset is something along the lines of “we need to be cranking out these videos as fast as we can,” which I presume is a big part of why they are paying me now to write scripts for them.
(If you are someone who wants to “raise awareness about the risks of artificial superintelligence,” and you are in possession of a large number of dollars and you are looking for ways to turn that money into “raised awareness,” I would recommend that you get in touch with them. If you want to raise awareness for some other cause, you can also get in touch with me.)
How much capital do you need to do this?
There’s an aphorism about building assets for internet communication (like mailing lists, or blogs) that goes something like “the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.” The implication of this advice is that incumbents have a huge advantage: in a competitive ecosystem like YouTube, someone starting a brand new YouTube channel in 2025 is at a huge disadvantage compared to someone who has been on the platform for 10+ years building up a base of millions of subscribers, and if you try to enter the fray now, you are likely to be overlooked.
This may have been descriptively true in the pre-TikTok era, but it is no longer true now. You may be keenly aware of this if you are one of the many power users who YouTube uses to test the clickability of new uploads from channels you’ve never heard of.
YouTube wants to promote “good content,” because “good content” is good at retaining users, who then watch more ads. But they don’t want to get caught in a circular loop where you need to start with success to be eligible for success. So, when I open up the YouTube app every morning, amid the “good content,” I also see stuff that I would generously describe as “low effort”:
This video has 72 views (and a thumbnail that reads as “low effort” and “aesthetically unappealing.”) One might ask, “Why is YouTube putting this probably-mediocre video on my feed? Why doesn’t YouTube just serve me the reliably good content from big channels instead?”
The answer, descriptively, is that YouTube puts probably-mediocre videos on my feed for the same reason that probably-guilty people get a day in court: the platform doesn’t know whether a video is good or mediocre or bad until it’s “put that video on trial” by showing it to users (who provide their attention to YouTube for free every day).
Most of the time, these videos from small or unknown channels do exactly what you’d expect, but putting these videos on trial gives the cream an opportunity to rise to the top, which is why you do not need to be an “established YouTuber” or have “a lot of subscribers” to have a very successful video.
YouTube, notably, only started doing this a few years ago (likely in response to increased competitive pressure from TikTok). And that is why I don’t think the best time to start a YouTube channel is 10 years ago. The best time to start a YouTube channel is now.
A story about 80,000 hours
Earlier this year, 80,000 Hours launched a new YouTube channel called “AI In Context.” So far, they’ve uploaded two videos. And they’ve done pretty well:
80,000 Hours’ video summarizing AI 2027 has been very, very successful. This did not happen by accident: they made good content, YouTube likes serving good content to its users (because this causes them to spend more time on the site), and YouTube rewarded their efforts.
Their efforts were considerable. If you want to quantify it in economic terms, Chana Messinger reports (and has generously allowed me to share) that this video cost $50,723.10 (“with some allowance for errors and conversions from GBP”); estimated staff time on the video summed to ~$75,200, for a total of $126,000. If you watch the video, you can see where the money went: there are a lot of camera segments (as opposed to the videos that I work on, which are mostly VO, or “talking into a camera” on a single set), and they have multiple sets, including one where Aric Floyd sits with a map with props:
It is high effort, it is “good content,” and in the ~1 month that the video has been up so far, ~3.3 million people have turned out to watch it and learn about AI 2027. (This is, notably, above their expectations: according to Chana, “I think it's fair to say we would have been excited, for a first video, if it got 100k views.”
$126k is a pretty substantial video budget, but if I’m following the same napkin math from above, this video has gotten $330k worth of “attention” so far. (And while I’m not sure what numbers 80k Hours is using internally, there’s a good chance that my napkin math here is actually massive underestimate, given that they would have been “excited” to have spent $50k on a video that did 3.3% as well as this one did.)
The “YouTube generation”
I was a teenager in the mid 00’s, and a substantial part of my worldview as a teenager was downstream of the blogs that I read circa 2005. I also know people ~10 years younger than me who profess that the blogs they read in 2015 informed a substantial part of their worldview.
I’m not sure how many teenagers today are reading blogs, but I’d wager it’s substantially less than the 90% who regularly use YouTube. Descriptively, there are many people who are already being “raised on YouTube,” and the curriculum is decided by the people who upload (and package their content in an appealing and palatable way). If you think you have a message that you think should inform people’s worldview, like “animal suffering is really bad” or “there are several things we could be doing to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels” or “their are decisions that policymakers can make to meaningfully change the risk of human extinction in this century,” perhaps it would behoove you to ensure that your ideas are part that conversation.2
This isn’t perfectly accurate as of 2025, but the 2025 ad rates are pretty consistent with what you might expect if you took the 2020 snapshot and extrapolated based on inflation.
That being said, these numbers describe a pretty narrow vertical. Other verticals, like fashion and cars, pay considerably more: for reasons that should be fairly obvious and intuitive, the fact that YouTube’s ad inventory is sold by auction means that it costs more to put an ad in front of 40-year-olds who watch luxury watch videos than it does to put an ad in front of 13-year-olds who watch Minecraft videos.)
One way you can do that is by reaching out to people who already know a thing or two about the YouTube ecosystem, like me (if you’d prefer 1:1 correspondence over a public comment, feel free to email kuiperdesu@gmail.com). This is an open invitation: if you’re interested in the ideas I’ve presented here, there is a good chance that I am interested in talking with you about them.
Great post!
A graphic or table I'd love to see is some sort of spectrum of monetization, from AdSense -> paid ad reads -> highly-integrated paid ad reads -> brandification + cross-promotion -> 80k hours-esque megaphone vibe.
Also wondering if you had to give a single name to the quantity that's changing across this spectrum, what is it?
Is it attention per impression? LTV per impression?