How Much YouTube Paid Me In 2020 (With 90,000 Subscribers)

In this video I'll walk through how my channel performed in 2020. This will include an overview of views and other stats, money, strategies, and what videos blew up and my thoughts around why. I'll include a table of contents with shortcut timestamps in the description if there's a particular area you want to jump to. The primary purpose of doing this isn't to brag about my channel's performance, but rather to share my journey with the hope of helping others.

Timestamps:
Introduction: 0:00
Channel Background: 0:30
2020 Views and Overall Reach: 1:58
2020 Watch Time: 3:53
2020 Subscribers: 4:41
2020 Channel Revenue: 5:25
Conclusion: 8:38

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Video Transcript:
So let's get into 2020, starting with stats associated with views and overall reach.

In 2020 I added 233 videos to my channel, bringing the total number of videos I've published to roughly 900. At a high-level the channel saw 29.6 million views and 650,000 hours of watch time in 2020, both of which were significant improvements over 2019, as you can see in the graphic on the screen. As you can see in this chart my channel was cooling off in the start of 2020, but then experienced massive spikes in March and May. At the risk of getting this video demonetized I'll just call the driver for the spike that occurred in March as a global crisis I think we can all understand. With everyone staying inside more people consumed content on YouTube. But the jump in May was much more interesting. This is solely attributable to a video I did about how to delete a subscribed calendar on your iPhone or iPad, a video that I created in February of 2020. Based on comments on this video it looks like malicious individuals were tricking people into clicking a link that added a calendar to their Apple device that then presented ads in the form of a calendar reminder. But they must have had some good in their hearts because they gave them a link to my video that showed them how to remove it. Over a six-month stretch this video saw nearly 15,000 views a day, and you can see the corresponding rise and dip in my yearly chart as well. Outside of that I published a few videos helping parents do things in Fortnite like cancel a Fortnite Crew subscription or add a VBucks gift card that did well, and I also took advantage of Sony's overhaul of its interface in the new PlayStation 5 that showed PS5 gamers how to navigate it that have done very well.

Watch time also got a bump from the global crisis and malicious individuals in 2020, seeing a roughly 30% year-over-year increase from 425,000 hours to 650,000 hours. If you remove these events, however, I believe watch time in 2019 and 2020 would have been fairly comparable. The other metric that piggybacks off of views and watch time is the average view duration associated with each video, which did continue its long, slow downward trend to 1:19 in 2020 from 1:23 in 2019. For context, the average view duration on my channel was 1:28 in 2018. While this is a little discouraging, I'm not going to reach too much into it, yet.

Subscribers also grew nicely in 2020, increasing by roughly 67% year over year by 50,000 and finishing at around 90,000 in total. As you can see, in normal times since 2019 my channel generally picks up an average of 80 new subscribers per day. But, again, this was momentarily accelerated over that 8-month stretch in 2020 by the global crisis and the malicious individuals who pumped my video about how to remove a subscribed iPhone or iPad calendar. As you can see this also regressed to the recent mean of netting roughly 80 new subs per day in the latter part of the year, and I've continued to see that into 2021.

Now let's get into what people are probably the most curious about: the money. For historical context, the channel pulled in revenue of $14,665 in 2018 and $63,638 in 2019. In 2020, that number more than doubled to $130,342. As you can see my CPM increased to $8 last year, and went up slightly in 2020. RPM would have stayed the same but increased in 2020 as a result of channel memberships. It's worth noting that revenue didn't drop off as steeply in October as the increased traffic resulting from the global crisis and bad actors driving traffic to that single video subsided. It largely held steady, and has even continued to do so even in 2021, which is encouraging. I think this is largely attributable to the way the global crisis experienced in 2020 has accelerated the shift in moving ads from traditional legacy media platforms like TV, radio, magazines and newspapers to online platforms like YouTube and Facebook. To be clear this shift was already underway, but the global crisis accelerated it, and I think that can be seen on a small scale in my 2020 revenue story.