YouTube Money Calculator

What is YouTube CPM?

YouTube CPM is the amount advertisers pay per 1,000 ad views on your videos — before YouTube takes its share. It's a cost to the advertiser, not the money that lands in your pocket. What you actually keep is your slice of that: creators earn 55% of ad revenue, and YouTube keeps 45%.

That's the single biggest thing to understand about creator earnings — a high CPM looks great, but your take-home is a little over half of it, and only on the views that actually showed an ad.

CPM vs RPM — the number that matters

Creators mix these up constantly, so it's worth being clear:

• CPM — what advertisers pay per 1,000 ad views, before YouTube's cut.
• RPM — what you earn per 1,000 total views, after the 45% cut and after counting views that showed no ad.

Because of those two deductions, your RPM is always lower than your CPM — often roughly half or less. RPM is the honest measure of what your channel earns. For the full breakdown of how these relate, see CPM vs RPM explained, and the eCPM calculator for the publisher side.

How YouTube earnings are calculated

To estimate your earnings, take the views that showed ads, divide by 1,000, multiply by your CPM, then multiply by your 55% share:

Earnings = (Monetised views ÷ 1,000) × CPM × 55%

The calculator above does this for you and also shows the implied RPM — your earnings per 1,000 views — so you can see the gap between the advertiser's CPM and your real take-home. The share is editable in case your split differs.

A worked example

Say a video earns 200,000 monetised views at a $10 CPM, and you keep the standard 55%:

$1,100 = 200,000 ÷ 1,000 × $10 × 55%

So the $10 CPM turns into about $1,100 in your pocket — an RPM of $5.50 per 1,000 monetised views. Spread across your total views (including the ones with no ad), your reported RPM would be lower still.

What's a good YouTube CPM?

There's no universal number — YouTube CPM swings enormously with a few things, so a single benchmark would mislead more than help:

• Topic — finance, tech, business and how-to channels command far higher CPMs than entertainment or gaming, because advertisers pay more to reach those viewers.
• Audience country — views from the US, UK, Australia and Canada are worth much more than many other regions.
• Time of year — CPMs climb toward the end of the year as advertisers compete for the holiday season, then drop in January.
• Video length & ad load — longer videos can carry more ads, lifting the effective rate.

So judge your CPM against your own history in YouTube Studio and the same month last year, not someone else's very different channel.

How to raise your CPM and RPM

• Lean into higher-value topics where it fits your channel — even occasional finance, tech or how-to videos pull up your average.
• Make advertiser-friendly content — videos that stay within YouTube's guidelines keep full ads running rather than limited ones.
• Grow watch time and longer videos so more ad slots can run per view.
• Know your audience mix — a bigger share of high-CPM countries lifts your rate on its own.

And remember CPM is only part of the picture: your total earnings are views × RPM, so growing your audience often matters more than squeezing the rate.

What this estimate leaves out

This calculator covers ad revenue only — the money from ads shown on your videos. Most channels earn from more than that, and none of it is in the CPM figure: YouTube Premium payouts (a share of subscription fees when Premium members watch), channel memberships, Super Chat and Super Thanks, and — usually the biggest of all — brand sponsorships you arrange yourself. Treat the result as your ad earnings, then add those other streams on top for the full picture.

Related tools for creators

• eCPM calculator — your effective earnings per 1,000 ad views across everything you monetise.
• CPM calculator — the plain cost-per-1,000 maths behind the advertiser's side.
• CPM vs RPM explained — why your RPM is lower than your CPM, in full.