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Between roughly $1 and $10 RPM for most long-form channels, and a small fraction of that for Shorts. The spread is real: measured across around 300 channels, education came out highest at about $10.22 RPM, while finance — the niche most often described as the most lucrative — sat eighth at about $2.01.

Because most of them take an advertiser CPM and multiply it by 55%. That assumes an ad on every single view, which never happens — the measured median share of monetised playbacks is around 53%. We start from RPM measured on real channels, which already accounts for the views that carry no ad.

CPM is what an advertiser pays per 1,000 ad impressions, before YouTube takes its 45% share. RPM is what lands in your account per 1,000 video views, after the split and after counting the views that showed no ad at all. RPM is the only one that describes your income.

More than the niche. On a single channel, US viewers have been measured earning about 12.4 times what Indian viewers earn per view on long-form, and around 41 times on Shorts. Two channels making identical content in the same language can differ by an order of magnitude on geography alone.

They are paid from a shared pool rather than per-video ad revenue. Shorts RPM typically lands between $0.01 and $0.07 — one to two orders of magnitude below long-form. Shorts are a discovery mechanism, not an income stream.

No. This models ad revenue only. For most established creators, brand deals, memberships, affiliate links and product sales together bring in more than AdSense does — a channel earning $2,000 a month from ads may well earn several times that overall.

Season is the biggest single factor: advertiser budgets peak in December and collapse in January, routinely moving RPM by 30-50% for the same channel and the same content. Format, video length, ad placements and how much of your audience uses ad blockers all move it too.