How to Increase Your RPMs on YouTube
Devin walks through how to boost your YouTube RPM, covering ad placement, video length, keyword optimization, and audience demographics. He breaks down the specific tactics creators use to maximize earnings per thousand views.
Okay, so this one training alone, honestly, has made a lot of money for a lot of people, probably in the hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars just by teaching this kind of one concept right here. And it's extremely valuable. This is extremely valuable for if you already have some momentum, you're already getting some views, you know, you're already making some money, you're making already like 2, 3, 5 grand a month, or maybe you're already making 10, 20 grand a month and you want to make more. This is like a really quick way to make a ton of money faster if you already have some momentum. And then this is good to keep in mind if you're kind of completely getting started. So by following this guy that I'm making right here, I've seen people increase their RPMs 30 to 50% up to 3.4X. It depends on kind of situation they're facing. Prioritize. The one thing I will say keep in mind is to. I'll put this right here. Keep in mind is to prioritize. Like, now I'm going to teach you how to increase your rpm, but that's like, less important, to be honest, than is increasing your RPM is significantly less important than being able to be in an opportunity to be able to get more views. Because if you're capped out at like, you know, getting 5,000 views a month, it doesn't matter if you have a $20 RPM, to be honest with you, you're making whatever the math comes out to. A hundred dollars a month versus if you're able to get a million views a month, or even, let's say, 10 million views a month. With the $2 RPM, you're making far more money. A $2 RPM with 10 million views a month, yeah, it's a low RPM, but you're making 20 grand a month at least. So I always. I see people kind of get this wrong as they focus on the RPM increasing over the actual opportunity in the first place and then just focusing on making more. More money and more cash flow. So one big advice I have for you guys is definitely focus on the cash flow over increasing rpm, because the most important thing, obviously, is how much money you're making a month, more so than just making more money off the views that you're getting. Unless you're getting a lot of views, and then now it's time to. To capitalize. So do keep that in mind. A lot of it depends on the niche, but we can always increase RPMs in just about any niche. So if you're doing Meditation videos. That's super low engagement. It's gonna be really hard to make more money with those videos. Like I wouldn't see you making more than $2 RPMs unless you can make it way more interactive, which is kind of hard when it's meditative content. So if you're doing music, anything like that, it's really difficult to get really good RPMs. So it is a little bit niche dependent, but sometimes there is like a niche that you can kind of just like if, if you're already a channel, you're getting like 2 million views a month. Sometimes I've seen where people just focus on one subsector of their content that makes the most amount of money in their niche that can. And then they just make all their videos about these specific topics, then it's able to make them a lot more money. So this is really good. If you're like have kind of a broader niche and then you're kind of doing a few different subjects and then one of them's, you know, bringing in way more revenue, you can just focus all your energy and efforts on that. And this will make you way more competitive in the marketplace, allowing you to profit when others operate at a loss doing what you're doing. So if you can get your RPM from $4 to just $6 per thousand views, then what that allows is you're making 50% more money than everybody else. So let's say you get 100,000 views a video on average. That gets you from $400 a video like that you're making per video to $600 per video that you're making. And if it's costing you $200,000 or $200 to make a video, by increasing your RPMs from $400 a video to $600 a video, you literally just doubled your, your profit that you are making from your channel. So it gives you way more opportunity. You can produce way more videos. You can even increase the cost of like your per video, your production that you have. You can pay your team more, you can do way more, and it's gonna be hard for other people to compete with you, which is, you know, huge competitive advantage. So understanding RPMs and why they matter. So what RPM is, is revenue per mil. It's how RPM is calculated is basically mil stands for thousand. I think it's Latin for a thousand. And so if you have a $5 RPM, that means you're getting $5 per thousand views. So if you get a million view video, you divide a million by a thousand. So It's a thousand times five. That means you made $5,000 on a million view video. So I am pretty quick with like doing the math. People are always like Devin, how do you know how much channels are making really quickly it's because. And then now there's like sites like View Stats that are pretty effective. Social Blade honestly sucks for looking at RPMs. It hasn't taken into account inflation and you can't even look at like whether or not shorts views are long format views. So View Stats is way better for that. But yeah, you just divide it by a thousand the amount of views you're getting on a video or per month and then you multiply it by the RPM and then impact of RPM on YouTube earnings. So honestly I've the tactics I'm gonna show you guys inside of here. It's, it's helps me take students from $4rpms like 8, $10 even like 15rpms if you guys do everything that's inside of here. I remember I had one of my channels, it was typically around a 6rpm and then just doing one of the things in this video made it so we were getting like 16 rpms on some, some of our videos. So this can be like a huge profit, like a huge way to generate just extra money on what you're already doing. So this is a very good additive feature. So key factors influencing RPMs. So the main thing is about to understand about how YouTube ads or YouTube advertising works in most ad platforms is it's based on interest based targeting. So the money that you're making is based off of what YouTube or Google labels your channel as the topic and the interest based thing that it is that they're doing. Like me, I run a ton of ads. I spend a good amount of money on ads every single month for some of my businesses and we do a lot of keyword targeting. And so if we go for make money online versus something like YouTube, those two things have two completely different costs because there's more competition on one, more saturation. And the more competitive a keyword is to bid on, the more you're going to pay money. Because how it works is the marketer who can pay the most for a customer wins. And so those it's pretty maximized versus if I did bongos or something like that and selling drum kits it's like there's a lot less competition on something like that, a lot, a lot less competitors. Now there is also a smaller view like pool of videos that are out there. And so the better the Topics which we're going to go into here in a little bit. The better the topics that your channel is getting labeled with, the more you're going to make money. So just for this, one thing alone is going to make you way more money. So and then the other thing is audience demographics. You want to know high RPM countries versus low RPM countries. Typically if someone's in a niche that should be four to eight dollar rpms and then they were getting two dollars, two dollar rpms, two dollars per thousand views. We go look at the demographics tab of a video and it shows that majority of the traffic is coming from India or Nigeria. So you always want to look at the demographics that your audience is coming from. And there are demographics where just the viewers are worth significantly less. Like Americans really can't sell stuff to India or Nigerians, but Nigerian companies can or global companies can, but they're gonna pay a lot less for those views versus US. Uk, Australian views are worth significantly more because there's just way more marketing, their customers are worth way more, etc. Etc. So and then the other thing you want to know is market sophistication. So if you're kind of going for like market sophistication is kind of more the intelligence of your customers, higher intelligent people are typically worth more money. So if you're making content about doctors or for doctors, those people have higher incomes and higher salaries but obviously there's far less of them. But you're going to get way higher RPMs by making content that is more medical or more doc like about doctors than if you're making videos about, let's say what is like a lower thing right now, Cash registers that work at McDonald's or something like that. Right. So the market sophistication matters a lot. And then also the culture that you're making things for typically like we'll go into this in a minute but why you're getting a lot of these Indian and Nigerian viewers is because you just, your content's not very western culture. It's just kind of lower sophisticated market. And by having lower market sophistication will attract those types of viewers. And then strategies make more content more appealing for higher RPM niches audiences, we're going to jump into that. So some practical strategies to increase your RPMs. So the first thing is ad placement. I'll be honest, I use all the default settings whenever it comes to YouTube I just do the automatic mid roll placements. But one thing you can do is you can place ads every minute for higher, for higher ad display. So some of my friends, what they'll do is they'll play an ad every single minute or some of my students. And YouTube doesn't play an ad every minute. It just plays whatever the most amount of ads they can before the viewer leaves essentially. And so what this will do is give you high, high probability that ads are playing. So this works really well for younger audiences like Fortnite content or anime content. I've seen. You know, it's a great strategy to do it for because they're like, they're typically not going to pay for YouTube Premium or like, honestly if it does bother them, they could just pay for YouTube Premium and then they get zero ads in the first place. So you can always just crank up the ads. People are so used to advertising these days, it's crazy. So you could just maximize the amount of ads that are being played. I like to be a little bit looser on it. I'm not always trying to maximize revenue on the things that I do. I try to optimize more for viewer satisfaction. So if you care, if you don't care about viewer satisfaction and your audience isn't really going to have high viewer satisfaction or is less relevant, then you can play more ads. And most people aren't going to really, really notice that you have more ads on your videos. They're just like, damn, YouTube plays a lot of ads in general. Then the other one is if you have longer videos you can play more ads. Like down here I always advise eight minute plus videos because that is where you can start doing mid roll ads. It used to be 10 minutes, then they switch it to eight minutes. I think like four years ago or so, five years ago. And so as long as it's longer than eight, you can play mid roll ads. If you have less than an eight minute video, I think you can only play an ad at the intro when they first click on the video. But then you can't do any mid roll or end of video ads or anything like that. So I always recommend doing eight minutes or longer. If you see your competitors doing five minute videos, honestly just bump it up to eight minute videos and you're way more competitive than, than they are then. I have seen that like an hour long or two hour long videos will increase rpm. So as I was telling you guys earlier, we took one of our channels from 6, $7 to $16 and what we started doing is we just started making compilations of some of our videos because one of our channels has like 600 videos on it. So we would just take some of the different series that we've done over time or some of the different keywords and then we would just make a compilation of the videos. We'd pay the editor like $30 to just slap them all together and then we would just upload the video as kind of like more of a compilation. I've been seeing this, a lot of big channels doing this like infographics show and they'll just like take some of the different topics they've covered or some of the different series. Even like Alex from Aussie does this. Obviously he does, you know, a little bit of different audio like reason for making money and stuff. But you know, hour or two hour long videos, you can even do six hour long videos. As long as people are watching it, it just, it jacks up the RPMs because you can just play way more ads. People are spending way more time on the platform. If you just think about it this way, if people are spending more time on the platform, they're gonna make, you're gonna make more money. They're gonna have, there's gonna be a higher surface area for ads to be shown. So. And then also YouTube will pay you more of their cut of like the YouTube premium revenue that they make because their viewers are spending more time with you on their videos. So longer videos are always a huge plus. And then even like I see some channels, they get into a niche and Instead of making eight 10 minute videos, they make five 30 minute, 60 minute long videos. And by just making longer videos, your RPMs are going to go way higher. And typically if you can get like, like I've seen with like a lot of production teams, you can get let's say a video that's at 10 minutes for $100. But to make a 20 minute video, you probably pay them $160, $180. So the cost per minute starts to diminish the longer a video is. But your RPMs start to increase at double from a 10 minute to a 20 minute video typically. So if you just, if you make longer videos, you're going to get more RPM, like higher RPMs, maybe not, maybe not double, but you'll get like another, you know, an equal amount of boosts, if not a little bit more in RPMs that you're going to make. So if you can just pay your team to do longer videos, typically that is helpful if you're validating a niche or a concept and you're not making money already. Just focus on making the videos like that matches for your budget. And then when you're making ten grand a month from your channel, then use this strategy to bump your channel revenue up. Let's get you to like $30,000 a month. So that brings over to keyword optimization. So this is a strategy that's like, longer videos is always like an obvious strategy, but keyword optimization. So what I found is YouTube based the ads that are being played on your videos based off of what's inside of this script of your video, the things that are being talked about and the things that are being shown on screen. And so if you adjust the things to diminish, like decrease the amount of low RPM keywords that are in your video, like I found with some of these, some of these videos that are more about crime, if you have the word murder or kill or steal in your videos, it decreases the rpm. But if you talk about crime, if you use the word crime, that increases the rpm because criminal attorneys can advertise on your videos. So you want to decrease the amount of low RPM keywords and then increase the amount of high RPM keywords. I'll talk about at the end of this video how to, you know, I'll give some examples and I'll give you guys some tools on how to dictate this. But honestly, what I'll do sometimes is I'll just throw my chat. My script into ChatGPT and then I will ask it, what are the low RPM keywords? How many times were used, were they used? And then over the high RPM keywords, how many times were they used? And so I decreased the amount of low RPM keywords. If not, just eliminate all of them. And then I increase the volume of high RPM keywords. Now, the trick with this is you need to make sure that it aligns with the content and it's not making the content weird. Like you're just jacking everybody's. You know, you're just obviously trying to increase RPMs, but if you kind of subtly do it throughout the script, this is a genius strategy. I've seen people increase their RPMs 30 to 50% by just doing this one thing alone. So what's said inside the script is huge. The words that you mention are huge. And what ads are being able to play it on your videos. Obviously swearing and stuff like that kind of plays into this as well. So be conscious of it. Some advertisers don't want any sort of swearing in their videos. So it's a good kind of basic practice to not have swearing at all in your content. But if you do Any sort of swearing in their videos. So it's a good kind of basic practice to not have swearing at all in your content, but if you do have it, try to limit it and then try to really bleep out the F words. If they say like or something like that, it's not as big of a deal. So now that brings over to demographics. I kind of talked touched on this earlier, but to kind of touch on this again real quick is use the YouTube demographic tab, look at it for your channel, and then look at it for the video specifically. And you'll see there's a huge difference of videos that have like higher low RPM demographics than other ones. So like obviously age matters and then the country that they're from, and then also what are like the interests of that audience that's watching your videos. You can also look at that these days, so be pretty conscious of that. And then a lot of this, to be honest, like this is kind of just good advice. This a general practice that I would add to this I don't think I added, is look at the data yourself too. If you're an established channel, you're already making ten grand a month. Just look at the videos that are making more money. Any of the videos that are making more money and just have a higher RPM look at it, break it down, like, analyze the script, watch the video, look at the topic that it's about. Look at the demographic that's watching the video. Look at how you script the video. Is it made for a higher sophisticated audience or is it made for a lower sophisticated audience? You know, is it like, is it more jargony? Is it more nuanced? Is it just more Western culture? Is it kind of, you know, you want to evaluate those videos and then just kind of watch those videos and then build your videos based off those videos that have higher RPMs. Because if you figure out how to get higher RPMs, you don't have to get as many views to make as much money, or you're making even more money with the amount of views that you're getting. So here's some examples of high RPM keywords and some low RPM keywords. So some examples would be like travel, luxury travel, specific locations. Like, if you talk about a country like Ibiza, it's going to have a way different RPM than Ghana, Africa. So you want, you want to like, try to make your videos around specific locations or try to make sure to touch on these points or even just throw in some of the keywords. Law and legal lawyers, specific legal Practices? Yeah, like criminal attorneys, patent laws. So just kind of like instead of just saying like you know, Red Bull hired an attorney to help them write their contracts. Instead you could say Red Bull hired a marketing attorney out of Dallas, Texas to write up their marketing contracts or something like that or like their patent contracts or whatever. But just being adding a little bit of some extra specific is going to increase the RPMs a lot. So if you have any opportunities to do that, definitely do that. Inside the videos I see people try. Oh, one other thing I wanted to add in this video that I didn't mention is I see a lot of people if they're picking their niche for their channel based off RPM entirely my mind that's a terrible idea. I think bet pick your niche and your content strategy and your channel idea around what's making money, not RPM and then focus on jacking up your RPMs when you get to get, getting results. I just want to add that because I always see that a lot people pick like luxury and finance and business and these niches and real estate because they're like oh, it's a higher rpm but they're like extremely competitive markets or not that many people are making that much money with it or getting that many views. And so pick your things based off of what's getting views, optimize for views and then we can optimize for cash flow and rpm. So specific niches like on like I have some channel, I've. I have two channels, I kind of COVID similar content. The more specificity of like a business channel that I have, that one gets like $20 rpms I think or at least like 16, 18 and then my other one where it's a little bit more mindset and business mindset that only gets like an $8 per minute. And so you'll see that that's like a huge thing. So medical, doctors, specific medical practices, obviously luxury, high end products. So like I said, you can incorporate this stuff into just the language of your content and you'll increase the RPMs. You don't necessarily have to make a channel around watches. Like honestly watch channels are not the best idea unless you're doing it for a personal brand. There's just watch it. There's just not that many watch viewers compared to like the NBA or something like that. So low RPM keywords, general art, entertainment, pop culture, broader lifestyle content, focus on low budget stuff or kind of doing it yourself or. Yeah, like if you're making videos about Fortnite, obviously it's like kids playing Fortnite probably don't have as much money as people watching a documentary about how Reddit was founded. Right. Those are two completely different audiences. So other things, okay, so personalizing content for higher rpm. So a lot of this, like I, again, I will mention this, a lot of people I've seen, they get a huge Indian audience or Nigerian audience as an example. Not that I have any against the Nigerian or Indians, but there's a lot of them on social media. And I see people who try to like, find tactics or tricks to like, get it. So people from those countries can't watch their videos, which I think is the wrong approach. I think they are. They have their place and they add social proof to your content and that's actually kind of a good thing. So what you want to focus on instead is just making your content more resonating with Western audiences. So using us examples, using US case studies, using like, I think, is it on here? I think I wrote this down at one point. Just having things that are like using experts that people in the US would know. Like if you're talking about Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Joe Rogan, that's way more relatable by adding that little bit of extra specificity or quoting those types of people and just adding more Western culture stuff. People from, I do see people from countries like India that make YouTube videos and try to do faces YouTube. They kind of struggle with it because they don't understand Western culture. Or let's say that you hire a script writer out of India and they don't really understand Western culture. So you want to make sure that the video, like if you are Western culture, you want to make sure the video is engaging for you. If not, go watch a bunch of American content. Go watch a bunch of American movies, shows, Netflix or whatever and, and then also go watch a bunch of obvious American creators watch their content and then make your content more like theirs. That's best way to do it. If, if you guys don't understand like Western culture, go watch a lot of Western culture stuff and then make your content after being more like Western culture. So the other thing, content specificity, trying to think so specific job titles. Yeah, so just being a little bit more specific with the job titles and stuff like that and just. Yeah. So conclusion, summarizing key takeaways, Importance of targeting the right audience and optimizing content. So the thing is, is you want to make sure that you're making your videos for your target demo. So that's why like I talk about a lot like defining your Viewer avatar. And who is the person watching your videos and making your videos around that one person, not that. Like when you make your videos for one person and one person specifically, that's how you. It's way easier to make viral videos because you're making your content for a one person. When you're trying to make your content for everybody, you're. When you're trying to make something for everyone, you're making something for nobody. And so you want to be very specific for who you're making your videos about. And then what that does is it pulls in a target audience. It creates an audience of people that are similar to that person that you're making videos to, and they feel like you know them better than they know themselves and they feel relatable to it. So you want to make sure. You want to get very specific with who your viewer avatar is. Like, when I get down to viewer avatars, I get really nitty gritty. They live at this address and this in Kansas. Like, they live on 123 Main street in Kansas. They go shopping every Friday. They go hang out with the girls on Sunday. They go buy. They buy lip gloss like once a month. They go get their hair done every three months. They go to eat fast food once a week. But they like to cook at home. They shop at this grocery store. They own this. They own a $300,000 house. They work this job. They work as a CPA with a $60,000 a year salary. Like, I get ridiculously specific. They read these types of books, these types of movies, they watch these shows. They do this on the free time, these hobbies. And then what I am doing is I am making my content for that person. When you do that for a specific person, it makes it so your content aligns with a group of people that are just like that person, which is millions of people. And when you do that, it makes it so they resonate with content and people that are outside of that, like people from other countries that aren't as relative to your content. It makes it so your rpms go way up. And also it's way easier to make videos and way easier to make more viral videos. So the other thing is just, I want to emphasize this again, is try different approaches. Like, definitely look at the YouTube analytics, continuing to refine your strategies and then test different approaches, analyze the results you want to have. Like, you want to apply the scientific method to this and constantly try and test out new things. And so some additional tips also, like, if you have a little bit more CTAs in your content. Like make sure to comment down below what you guys think about this. If you guys have them doing things on screen more instead of just passively watching like, like you want to think of this like who's your viewer? Are they like sitting down at the computer, full fledged all their focuses on your content or are they watching you while they're cooking dinner? Are they listening to you while they're on a run? Are they like when are they watching this content? How are they watching your content? And then how can you get it to where they're a more engaged viewer? Because higher engaged viewers are obviously going to click on ads more. They're going to be more valuable to advertisers. You're going to get paid more per thousand views. So you want to kind of think of it, how do you make advertise, how do you make yourself more valuable to not only YouTube as a platform but also more valuable to advertisers that are paying just to, to have their videos be played on your videos. And so the other thing is if there's any trends that are hop happening right now, that's always pretty well for RPMs especially if you're kind of catching on the forefront of a marketplace and then tools and resources. So some recommended tools. Honestly I don't use any tools personally. I just ask Chat GBT all this, I just give it a script and I just ask it what are the higher RPM keywords and the word lower RPM keywords. The trick with Chat GBT is you just talk to it like it's a normal person. And then Vidiq Tubebuddy, they have a keyword research feature. I've personally never used it but I just, I know they have one. I've seen it and I've, I know some of my students use that. I don't do that personally. Google Ads has a keyword planner. I've heard about this from people. And then there's also a tool called Semrush. Again I just use Chat GPT personally for all of this and, and then just train up my team on a lot of this stuff specifically. But yeah, so if you guys do all this, you're going to make way more money off your videos. It's going to help you like increase the revenue that you're making significantly. It's going to increase your profit margins and then also help you guys make a lot more money. And if you're gonna at the beginning stages, this is all kind of good to know for the future reference when you do start making money. So. And then again optimize for cash flow over RPM at first. And then once you get to a good cash flow, then I'll optimize for rpm. So that's what I got. See you guys in the next one.
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