How much do faceless YouTube channels make? It comes down to views times RPM (what you're paid per 1,000 views). Subscribers aren't in the formula. Mine: a 5.6 million view video made about $8,000 at a $1.43 RPM, a 23.8 million view video made about $111,000, one of my channels has done $30K a month for over a year, and my best month across channels was $70,000.
- The same views pay very differently. My 5.6 million view video made about $8,000 at a $1.43 RPM. A video with less than half the views made almost $3,000 more at an RPM of four dollars and 12 cents.
- Quick math for any channel: take the monthly long-form views, divide by 1,000, multiply by $5. Shorts views are worth about 10 cents per 1,000, so I ignore them.
- At a $5 RPM, $1K a month is about 200,000 views, $3K is about 500,000, and $10K a month takes 1 to 2 million views at a $5 to $10 RPM.
- Longer videos pay more. Our 10 to 20 minute videos made $5 to $8 per 1,000 views. Our 30 minute and longer videos made $12.88 and $15.
- A channel that's making $30K a month a year in is spending real money to do it: about $200 a script, $50 a voiceover, $200 an edit and $20 a thumbnail, with multiple people in every role.
- Brand deals add $15 to $30 per 1,000 views on top of ad revenue, which is how a channel like RealLifeLore gets to over 200 grand a month.
- What Have My Own Faceless Videos and Channels Made?
- How Do You Calculate What Any Faceless Channel Makes?
- How Much Do Faceless Channels Make at Each Level?
- Why Do the Same Views Pay So Differently?
- What's the Cheapest Way to Make a Channel Pay More per View?
- What Does It Cost to Make That Money?
- What Are FCA Students Making?
- Do Faceless Channels Make Money Beyond AdSense?
- How Long Does It Take a Faceless Channel to Make Money?
- Video chapters
- FAQ
What Have My Own Faceless Videos and Channels Made?
Everyone says you can make money on YouTube. Almost nobody shows the numbers. So I'll start with mine, from videos where I've opened the analytics on camera (the first three back in 2021, the last one in 2026).
| What it was | Views | What it made | RPM |
|---|---|---|---|
| A video on a brand new channel, the one that hit 2 million views in 8 days | About 5.6 million | About $8,000 | About $1.43 per 1,000 |
| A video on a channel my team was growing, posted October 2020, blew up after about 100 days | A little less than half of that | Almost $3,000 more than the 5.6 million view video | Four dollars and 12 cents per 1,000 |
| A video posted in 2018 that went huge | About 23.8 million | About $111,000 | Not shown |
| My geography facts channel, 30 minute and longer videos | 100,000 view floor per video | $30K a month for over a year, $33,990 in one August | $12.88 and $15 per 1,000 |
The full walkthrough of the first three is in how much YouTube pays for 5 million views. The lesson is in the first two rows.
That 5.6 million view video was in a niche with a bad ad rate, about $1.43 per 1,000 views. It was hard to come up with topics, hard to make the videos, and it didn't pay well. That's why I quit progressing on that channel. The second video had less than half the views and made more money, because the ad rate was four dollars and 12 cents. And a year after we posted it, that video was still producing about $1,000 a month on its own.
The best month I've ever had across my faceless channels was $70,000. Everything I say about channels bigger than that is pattern recognition from watching them, not my own bank account.
How Do You Calculate What Any Faceless Channel Makes?
The term you need is RPM. Revenue per mille, and mille is Latin for a thousand. It's what you get paid for every 1,000 views. You'll also hear CPM, which is the advertiser's side of the same number (the difference is explained in YouTube CPM rates by niche). As a YouTuber, care about RPM.
The fast way I check a channel:
- Look the channel up on ViewStats (the Chrome extension puts a button right on the channel page). I look at the last three months to get an average.
- Take the long-form views, divide by 1,000, multiply by $5.
- Ignore the Shorts views. Shorts pay about 10 cents per 1,000 views, so 2,000 Shorts views over three months is about $200. Not worth the math.
- If the videos are 30 to 40 minutes long instead of 10 to 15, multiply by 1.5 to 2 instead, so more like $8 to $10 per 1,000.
- If they have a sponsor in the video, add $15 to $30 per 1,000 views on top.
Notice what's not in that list: the subscriber count. RealLifeLore had 7 million subscribers when I ran the numbers, and that figure never enters the math. What gets paid is the views the long-form videos pulled in the last 90 days.
I ran this on RealLifeLore in the calculator video. 40 million long-form views in three months, divided by 1,000, times $5 is about $200,000 on the conservative side. Their videos run half an hour to 40 minutes, so I'd put them at an $8 to $10 RPM, which is $320,000 to $400,000 in 90 days from ads alone. They also run sponsors (Ground News and Nebula when I looked), so add $15 per 1,000 and the same 40 million views come out to about $920,000 in 90 days. I'd bet I'm off by $100,000 or $200,000, but they're averaging over 200 grand a month for sure.
VidIQ works for a quick look too. The same channel showed about 20 million views in the last 28 days, so $100,000 by quick math, or more like $140,000 given the video length.
The worked example, the tools I use and the calculator I built are in how to calculate faceless YouTube channel earnings. Pick a channel from your home feed and run the numbers before you start anything.
How Much Do Faceless Channels Make at Each Level?
There's a different bottleneck at every income level. This is the rough math I draw out for people, assuming a $5 RPM at the bottom of the ladder.
| Monthly income | Views a month | What the channel usually looks like |
|---|---|---|
| $1K | About 200,000 | One lucky viral video, no repeatable system, often a niche with a low ceiling |
| $3K | About 500,000 | Doing scripts, voiceover and editing yourself. Two to four videos a month |
| $10K | 1 to 2 million at a $5 to $10 RPM | Fully outsourced, but paying $100 to $200 a video, so the team is the limit |
| $30K | A 100,000 view floor on almost every video | Multiple people in every role, about three formats, a channel manager |
| $50K | Same floor, at least five formats | Brand, returning viewers, an idea machine, $8K to $20K a month on production |
| $100K | A million views per video, at least five a month | Fern, RealLifeLore, Kurzgesagt level: hooks nailed, ideas worth a million views |
| $300K | Several videos a day | Infographics Show output with a 30 to 40 person team |
| $1M | Around 10 million views a video | Veritasium and Cocomelon tier. Private equity, multiple platforms, $50K or more per video |
Three things from that table that matter if you're deciding whether to start.
First, $1K a month is not a small channel. It's 200,000 views a month, which seems like a lot but isn't enough to break through. The gap between $1K and $10K is mostly one video that goes properly viral. Ten moonshot videos, one hits, and that one video is often the whole $10K a month.
Second, $3K a month is where the day job usually still exists. It's nice side income, but it's not enough to make this the full-time thing, and the person is doing every job themselves, so they put out two to four videos a month. What it takes to get past that, to be quite frank, is to go all in. The $10K level is where the question changes from how do I make this my job to how do I build this into a business.
Third, the top of the ladder is rare.
Making more than $100,000 a month from a channel is extremely challenging, which is why a lot of the guys who do faceless YouTube end up selling a course. The upside at that level is that a branded channel doing $100K a month for years has real equity. My estimate is it can sell to private equity for $3 to $5 million on the conservative side.
I break down every level, and what to fix at each, in the levels of a faceless YouTube channel.
Why Do the Same Views Pay So Differently?
The niche sets the ad rate before you upload anything, and then the video length and the audience move it. These are my own channels' numbers, so you can see how wide the spread is on one person's portfolio:
| Channel | What it paid per 1,000 views |
|---|---|
| The channel behind the 5.6 million view video (I quit it) | About $1.43 |
| The channel behind the second video in the table above | Four dollars and 12 cents |
| Geopolitics (I have channels in it) | About $5 on average, more when the videos are longer |
| My geography facts channel at 10 to 20 minutes a video | $5 to $8 |
| The same channel once we went to 30 minutes and longer | $12.88 on one video, $15 on another |
Audience matters too. We found US geography facts did really well partly because Americans watching means a higher RPM than an international audience. So we did every single US state.
Niche by niche, with the tiers and the lowest-paying categories, is in YouTube RPM by niche. The short version: pick a niche where another channel is already making the amount you want, and verify it before you start.
What's the Cheapest Way to Make a Channel Pay More per View?
Making the videos longer. Order of operations matters here. When you start you'll probably make 10 to 20 minute videos, and our oldest uploads were around 10 minutes. Once videos are getting views, go long.
| Video length | What we see per 1,000 views |
|---|---|
| 10 to 20 minutes | Around $5 to $8 |
| 30 minutes and up | $12.88 on one video, $15 on another |
Now 30 minutes is the bare minimum for us and we go to 45. The other reason is that most of our views come from television. TV is the top device type on a lot of our videos, so we build the content for a TV audience.
We didn't do this for a few years. We only started more recently. Once you're seeing results, increase the length. Don't do it at the beginning, because long videos take too long to make when you're new. When a channel is stuck at $10K a month, length is one of the three things I diagnose (the other two are volume and quality).
What Does It Cost to Make That Money?
The income numbers above are gross ad revenue. A channel at $30K a month is paying a team to get there. On my channel that does $30K a month:
| Role | What we pay per video | How many we have |
|---|---|---|
| Scriptwriter | About $200 on average (some $80, some $300 to $400) | Usually three |
| Voice actor | Around $50 | One, maybe a backup |
| Video editor | About $200 (some $400 to $500) | Four or five |
| Thumbnail designer | Around $20, with multiple variations | Two or three |
And production spend grows with the level. Channels stuck at $10K a month are often spending under $2K a month. I'd move to $3,000 to $5,000 a month to get to $30K. At $50K a month I can comfortably spend $8K to $12K, and I'm now pushing $15K to $20K when I want to scale. The $300K to $500K a month channels probably have $50K to $80K a month in payroll.
Can you skip the team and use AI for scripts, voiceovers and editing? You can. I have students who are the smartest AI guys you'll meet, and they struggle to get to $30K a month that way. $5,000 to $10,000 a month with AI doing most of the work is pretty realistic. $30K a month needs people. The whole seven-step process is in how to make $30K a month with a faceless YouTube channel.
What Are FCA Students Making?
These are results from our community, as reported to us. Not typical, but not outliers either:
- Vaishnavi B., $10,000 a month at 50K subs, 7 months in (finance niche)
- Luke, $12,000 a month covering NBA and sports content
- Michael, $25,000 a month across multiple channels
- Sonny, $13,000 a month from a history-focused channel
- Michelle, monetized in 30 days, $21K in the first 3 months
One client I've mentioned on camera is making $9,000 to $10,000 a month off his channel within the first few months of working with us. He's annoyed, because his corporate job pays $20,000 a month. A lot of people would be head over heels at that number. The difference is usually the ceiling the person believes in, which is why I tell beginners to build for $10K to $30K a month from day one. It takes the same amount of work as building a $1K a month channel.
More of them are on the success stories page.
Do Faceless Channels Make Money Beyond AdSense?
Yes, and on the big channels the second stream is brand deals. Every number in the tables above is ad revenue. When a channel mentions a sponsor inside the video, they're getting paid anywhere from $15 to $30 per 1,000 views on top of ads. On a channel with a $5 ad RPM, the sponsor can be worth more than the ads.
40 million views in 90 days at an $8 RPM is $320,000 from ads. Add a $15 per 1,000 sponsor rate and the same views are worth about $920,000. Brand deals can be worth more than the ad revenue on a channel that people watch to the end.
The million-a-month channels I described in the levels table run on ad revenue and brand deals, and some of them sell products on top of that. The reason so many faceless YouTubers end up selling a course is the one I gave above: getting a channel past 100 grand a month is extremely challenging.
How Long Does It Take a Faceless Channel to Make Money?
Mine took about a year to pay anything worth mentioning, and then it moved fast. My first video went up on January 1st, 2018, on camera, in my parents' basement, teaching real estate. Over about a year of videos I got to where I was making two to three grand a month. Then I found faceless channels, and within a week or two I was making about two grand a day, and then $42,000 in a single month. I've written the early months out before: month 1, nothing. Month 6, four hundred dollars. Month 12, about $3,000. Month 18, $42,000.
Two things about how the money actually shows up.
It isn't linear. The second video in my table sat there for about 100 days after we posted it in October 2020. Then it got 300,000 views in a single day, over a million in three or four days, and it was still paying about $1,000 a month a year later.
And one video can change everything. The 23.8 million view video made about $111,000 on its own.
That's the part people underestimate. A channel can sit at nothing for months and then one video moves it two levels up the table. It's also why I'd rather someone build for a $30K a month niche from the start than perfect a $1K a month one. The monetization thresholds and what they take are in how long it takes to monetize a faceless YouTube channel. If you're still choosing, start with how much a faceless YouTube channel costs to start and pick a niche where a channel is already making what you want.
Video Chapters
- 0:00The levels, and the most I've made in a month
- 0:32$1K a month: one viral video, limited niche
- 3:37$3K a month: the DIY trap
- 7:17The views math: $1K, $3K and $10K at a $5 RPM
- 10:55Volume, quality or length
- 11:55$30K a month: it becomes a business
- 14:30The 100K view floor and multiple production teams
- 19:36$50K a month: brand and $8K to $20K in production
- 26:17$100K a month: a million views per video
- 30:26$300K to $1M a month
FAQ
How much money does a faceless YouTube channel make?
It ranges from a few hundred dollars a month to over $1 million a month. Devon Canup's own numbers: a 5.6 million view video made about $8,000 at a $1.43 RPM, a 23.8 million view video made about $111,000, one of his channels has done $30K a month for over a year, and his best single month across channels was $70,000.
How many views do you need to make $1,000 a month on YouTube?
By Devon Canup's rough math, about 200,000 long-form views a month at a $5 RPM. About 500,000 views gets a channel to $3K a month, and $10K a month takes 1 to 2 million views at a $5 to $10 RPM.
How much do 50K to 100K subscriber channels actually make?
The subscriber count is not in Devon Canup's formula, because YouTube pays on views. He takes the channel's long-form views for the last three months, divides by 1,000 and multiplies by $5, then adjusts for video length and sponsors. So the question is how many views the channel pulls: about 200,000 long-form views a month at a $5 RPM is about $1,000, and 1 to 2 million is about $10K. One of his students is at $10,000 a month with 50K subs.
Can a faceless YouTube channel replace a full-time income?
In Devon Canup's levels, the $10K a month channel is the first one that is the job rather than side income. That takes 1 to 2 million views a month at a $5 to $10 RPM. At $3K a month the day job is usually still there and the creator is doing every role themselves. He has a client making $9,000 to $10,000 a month within his first few months, against a corporate salary of $20,000 a month, and Devon's own best month across his channels was $70,000.
How much does it cost to run a faceless YouTube channel that makes $30K a month?
On Devon Canup's channel at that level, a script averages about $200, a voiceover around $50, an edit about $200 and a thumbnail around $20, with three scriptwriters, four or five editors and two or three thumbnail designers. He recommends $3,000 to $5,000 a month in production to get from $10K to $30K a month.
How much do Faceless Channel Academy students make?
Results reported by FCA students on this page include $10,000 a month at 7 months in, $12,000 a month in sports, $13,000 a month in history, $25,000 a month across multiple channels, and $21K in a first 3 months. Devon notes these are not typical.
Want This Built With You?
Faceless Channel Academy is the coaching program I run for people building faceless YouTube channels: niche, formats, team, packaging, with an advisor and live calls. Book a free strategy call and we'll look at where you are and whether it's a fit.
Book a Free Strategy Call →Not ready to talk? Grab the free niche research template first.
