MBA1687 How Much Money Can You Make on YouTube? + Free Ride Friday
2 Feb 2026 · 12 min
Podcast episode from the $100 MBA hosted by Omar Zenholm explaining how creators can earn on YouTube. Covers platform scale (2B monthly logged-in users, 500+ hours uploaded per minute, 81% of 15–25 y.o. on YouTube, $5.5B US ad revenue in 2020), ad revenue estimates (~$3–$5 per 1,000 views), YouTube monetization requirements (1,000 subscribers; 4,000 watch hours in past 12 months), alternate monetization tactics (selling products/services, building email lists, vlogging), and examples (Podia, ProfitWell, Noah Kagan, Brian Dean). Includes multiple commercial ad reads and a weekly giveaway segment (Free Ride Friday).
Chapters
You've made it on time for the McDonald's breakfast menu. You think to yourself, finally, I could start my day with my perfect breakfast. But what if breakfast could be even more perfect with the hot honey sausage egg biscuit it finally is. This won't last forever, so go to McDonald's and get it while you can. Ba da ba ba ba.
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Hey, today is Free Ride Friday, so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free Ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away easy course, our 500 doll course on how to build your own online course in 30 days. Again, that's $500 over at EasyCourse co. Or you can just win it for free. Just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. It's our way to say thank you for showing us love on Apple Podcast. All right, let's jump into today's episode. Hey. Welcome to the $100mb, the inspiration and the information you need to build an amazing business every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the hundred dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net and in today's episode you will learn how much money can you make on YouTube? Do you know that YouTube has become the number one media channel that is consumed worldwide more than social media, more than TV news, more than the newspaper. And many content creators are jumping on YouTube to earn money through ad revenue. But is this viable? How much money can you really make on YouTube? How many views you need to have? How many subscribers you need to have to actually make a living as a YouTuber? Also, is there any other way you can make money on YouTube without a huge audience? Can you use the largest media platform to your advantage to grow your business? That's what we get into in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. YouTube is a media monster. It's such a huge platform and such a great search engine for information, entertainment, education. It's a real live monopoly. Nothing comes close to YouTube. Yes, there's Vimeo, but Vimeo's really not there as a source of media. People maybe post videos and it's very niche in the film industry or in the arts, but nobody comes close. And believe it or not, it's still very early days in YouTube. You still can get into YouTube and really grow. I still find it astonishing that YouTube is still free, meaning you can start a YouTube channel, you can publish to the platform, you can store videos, you can accept comments. All this is free. And yes, their business model relies on content that other people create. But YouTube can easily charge a very small annual fee just to store all these videos, for crying out loud. But it's still open for everybody for free, which is a great opportunity. There's over 2 billion logged in users every single month on YouTube. And this statistic is huge. 81% of 15 to 25 year olds are on YouTube. This means the existing and future generation in the next five to 10 years that are spending money are on this platform. Over 500 hours of video get uploaded to YouTube every single minute. And as a business, YouTube is not going anywhere. In the US alone, they made $5.5 billion in ad revenue in just 2020. So what are your options when it comes to earning an income on YouTube? Well, the obvious option is to become a creator, being a YouTuber, where you publish content on your YouTube channel and YouTube places ads on your video. When people watch those ads, you get a bit of money. Now, how much money? You might be surprised about this figure, but I did a bit of research Based on other YouTubers I've read, forums, Reddit, and on average, for every thousand video views, you can earn between 3 and 5 dollars. Why the range? Well, it depends on how popular your channel is, how in demand your videos are, retention rates, all that kind of stuff. It also depends on the length of the video, how many ads are on that video, all that kind of stuff. But this is just a general barometer for you. So if a video gets, let's say, 10,000 views, you're probably going to make around $40 on that video. So just off that rough number, you might be thinking, wow, that's not that much money. That means if a video got a million views, which is absolutely incredible, very hard to do, that video would earn between 4 to $5,000 in ad revenue. Now you can see why YouTubers try to publish as many videos as possible. They try to get you to subscribe so you can watch those videos, get reminded to watch those videos. They do a lot of SEO. They want to get people searching and finding their videos and watching those videos even if they are not subscribers, because their ad revenue dollars count on the fact that people click on their videos, watch the videos, watch their ads. Now, in order for you to even monetize your channel, YouTube requires you to have 1000 subscribers to your channel. This is a new rule that they placed maybe a few years ago. When I started on YouTube, this wasn't there. You also have to have at least 4,000 watched hours in the last 12 months. So you can't just have a bunch of subscribers and no views. To give you another rough estimate, I know Noah Kagan recently launched a video on YouTube talking about how much money they earn on ads and what kind of ads run on his channel. They earn between 3 to $4,000 a month and they have 100,000 subscribers. Just around 100,000 subscribers. It takes a lot of work. Noah's been working on his YouTube chann for years, publishing great, great videos on a regular basis. Highly produced, well edited, very engaging. If you're looking to make money on YouTube as a YouTuber solely on ad revenue, this has got to be your main game. This has got to be your dedicated craft where you're trying your best to produce amazing content, great videos, great editing, and those who make a healthy income, six figures, seven figures on YouTube, they're really catering to a large, large audience. They're trying to match a huge audience. And often they're in niches that are in comedy, entertainment, sports, tech, things that will appeal to the masses. Now, if your business is not one of those niches, don't worry. That's not the only way you can make money on YouTube. Ad revenue is only one way, and it's actually not the one way I would recommend. Video is a great way to build relationships. It's a good way to start the relationship, to educate people, to give them content. I would say second to blogging. Videos are incredibly powerful and it's becoming more and more a SEO powerhouse. So when people search for certain things, videos will come up. So see YouTube as a way for you to get in front of your audience and give them great value. And in exchange, they're going to check you out, check out your work, subscribe to your newsletters, understand what you offer, and take you up on it. A lot of companies have started YouTube channels solely on the fact that YouTube is so powerful and they can get in front of their audience very easily. There's one caveat though. You're in the video business in YouTube, you're basically becoming a media company. And in any kind of investment you're going to make in content marketing, you need to be consistent, you need to be committed. This means consistently producing great videos, great content, and it's a lot of work to create a video. So whatever it is, whether you decide to create a video every two weeks or every month, you got to stick to it. It's a lot of work and my recommendation is to get somebody dedicated to, to this on your team or you dedicate yourself if this is something you enjoy doing. Now, I don't recommend that because you need to run a business. Hiring one person to run your YouTube channel is the bare minimum in my estimation. You should really have somebody and they could be the talent too. They could be the person in front of the camera, but they're the person that has to be responsible for producing these videos on a consistent basis. Very much like podcasting, your YouTube subscribers are looking forward to the next release. They are expecting the next piece of content from you and you got to fulfill those expectations. And YouTube will reward you for that consistency, for the constant effort to adding to their great content on the platform. And yes, you can also monetize and make some money on the side based on your views. But in this strategy, your main goal here is to build a relationship with the larger audience that's on YouTube, with people that are searching for certain terms, getting them to get to your website, get on your email list and continue growing that relationship there so they can become a customer. If you want to check out some examples of companies that have done this really well, check out Profitwell. Patrick Campbell and his team has done an incredible job with their YouTube channel. Check out Podia's YouTube channel. I mentioned Noah Kagan, he's done a great job with his YouTube channel. Brian Dean from Backlinko, also a business that sells SEO courses, advice, coaching and he's built an incredible SEO based channel on YouTube. I'm going to go a little deeper on one of these examples. Podia, they started their YouTube channel or they started publishing videos on their YouTube channel about two years ago and they've been really consistent, publishing new videos regularly. They have nearly a million views in total now after two years and a little over 10,000 subscribers. So not bad. That's really, really good. For two years. They didn't overachieve and they didn't underachieve. I Think they've done a great job actually. And I share this example just because to show you what's possible in a short amount of time. Two years is not a long time to build a channel with tons of videos on a media platform, gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.
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On time for the McDonald's breakfast menu. You think to yourself, finally, I could start my day with my perfect breakfast. But what if breakfast could be even more perfect with the hot honey sausage egg biscuit? It finally is. This won't last forever, so go to McDonald's and get it while you can. Ba da ba ba ba.
Guys, to wrap up today's lesson, we mentioned monetizing through ads with YouTube. We talked about selling your products and services with YouTube. Is there any other way you can improve your business, improve your brand with YouTube? Well, there's one more and it's vlogging. If your personal brand, your personal name is tied with your business, you can build more brand affinity, more brand awareness by doing a regular vlog, whether it's a daily vlog, a weekly vlog, walking people through your regular life, how you do things, how you run your business, how you make the decisions you make. Some people even use logging as a journal of some sort, a way to document the journey. And this is sort of a long term investment into kind of building your brand, building your awareness and exploring entrepreneurship in public. Sharing how you created a certain product or actually sharing it while it's happening, while you're building a marketing campaign, while you're building that actual product. A couple of good examples of this of course is Casey Neistat, who was a daily vlogger for a very long time. Check out his channel. Nathan Barry from Convertkit has a vlog as well. This might be a low pressure way and it's also a lot less production to do a vlog. You can actually just record off your phone a selfie type of video and it's just like a daily entry or weekly entry or how often you feel comfortable. YouTube is actually built with vlogging in mind. They actually have a publisher's app on your phone that you can actually record videos and just publish straight to YouTube right from your phone so you can vlog from anywhere in the world. See vlogging as blogging, but with video. And this is more like what you would do on a personal site. Well, there you have it guys. YouTube is still ripe with opportunity. It's still early days. I do recommend you jumping on YouTube and starting a channel. At the very least, it will encourage you to start putting that channel together, publishing some videos, and start having a game plan. It's not without its challenges or flaws, but it's definitely a huge audience to tap into. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. Today is Free Ride Friday, so we got to give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is Robin cd. Robin CD says Getting my real MBA but not giving up this one. I'm a successful entrepreneur who's currently enrolled in an executive MBA program at a top business school. I found Omar's podcast in the months leading to joining my NBA joining the program so I can get prepared. Even though I'm five months into getting my real MBA, I'm not giving up the $100 MBA. Great podcast. Very informative. Inspirational. Highly recommend. Thank you Robin for that great review. Your mission is to email me at omar100-mba net so we can hook you up or with the lifetime membership to Ezcor so you can get your free ride. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday to see if you want. It's that easy. Thanks so much for being a part of this podcast. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Opportunities are everywhere. YouTube is a huge one, but it requires you to make a decision and to commit to be consistent. Good fortune is not rewarded to dabblers. It's rewarded to those who commit masters. People that are looking to master something. So understand that if you're gonna go into something, you need to at least give it a good shot. Give it 12 months, give it all you got and then evaluate. I want to wish everybody a happy holiday. Enjoy some downtime with friends and family. All right, take.
They put hot honey sauce on the snack wrap. McDonald's outdid themselves again. The classic snack wrap we all know and love paired with the sweet heat of hot honey sauce. Just what we needed to make it even more perfect. You know the drill, so go to McDonald's and try it today.
