How to Increase Your YouTube RPM: Every Tactic From My RPM Training

To increase your YouTube RPM, make videos at least 8 minutes long so mid-roll ads can run, build hour-long compilations from videos you already have, put higher RPM keywords into the script while cutting the low RPM ones, and make the content for a specific Western viewer. Following this, I've seen people raise their RPM 30 to 50%, and one of my channels went from around $6 to $16 on some videos. Do it after you have views. Cash flow comes first, then RPM.

Get Views and Cash Flow First, Then Work on RPM

This training is most valuable if you already have some momentum. You're getting views and making two, three, five grand a month, or you're already at 10 or 20 grand a month and you want more. If you're completely getting started, it's good to keep in mind for later.

By following it, I've seen people increase their RPMs 30 to 50%, and up to 3 to 4x, depending on the situation.

Before any of the tactics, keep this in mind. Increasing your RPM is significantly less important than being in a position to get more views.

I see people get this wrong. They focus on raising RPM over the opportunity in the first place. Once you're getting a lot of views, it's time to capitalize.

Some of this is niche dependent. We can increase RPMs in just about any niche, but if you're doing meditation videos, that's super low engagement and it's going to be really hard. I wouldn't see you making more than $2 RPMs unless you can make it way more interactive, which is hard with meditative content. Music is the same.

If you already have a channel getting something like 2 million views a month across a broader niche, there's a faster move. I've seen people focus on the one sub-sector of their content that makes the most money and make all of their videos about those topics.

Why a Higher RPM Is a Competitive Advantage

A higher RPM lets you profit when others are operating at a loss doing the same thing.

Say you get your RPM from $4 to just $6 per thousand views. You're making 50% more money than everybody else. Here's what that does on a video that gets 100,000 views and costs $200 to make:

Going from $400 a video to $600 a video, you literally just doubled your profit.

That gives you way more room. You can produce more videos and pay your team more, and it gets hard for other people to compete with you.

What RPM Means and How to Calculate It

RPM is revenue per mille. Mille stands for thousand (I think it's Latin). So a $5 RPM means you're getting $5 per thousand views.

On a million view video, you divide a million by a thousand, then multiply by the RPM. A thousand times 5 means you made $5,000 on that video.

People always ask how I know how much channels are making so quickly. That's the math.

There are also sites for this now. When I recorded this, I found ViewStats way better than Social Blade for looking at RPMs, because Social Blade couldn't tell you whether views were Shorts views or long-form views. For the full method, read how to calculate faceless YouTube channel earnings.

The tactics below have helped me take students from $4 RPMs to $8, $10, even $15 RPMs. On one of my own channels, which was typically around a $6 RPM, doing just one of these things got us $16 RPMs on some of our videos.

What Decides Your RPM

The topic YouTube labels your channel with

YouTube advertising, like most ad platforms, runs on interest-based targeting. The money you make is based on what YouTube or Google labels your channel as, the topic and the interest.

I run a ton of ads for some of my businesses, and we do a lot of keyword targeting. If we go after "make money online" versus something like "YouTube," those two have completely different costs, because one has more competition. The more competitive a keyword is to bid on, the more you pay.

Compare that to something like bongos or selling drum kits. There are a lot fewer competitors bidding on that (and a smaller pool of videos too). So the better the topics your channel gets labeled with, the more money you make.

Audience demographics

You want to know high RPM countries versus low RPM countries. Typically, if someone is in a niche that should be at $4 to $8 RPMs and they're getting $2, we go look at the demographics tab of a video, and it shows the majority of the traffic is coming from India or Nigeria.

Advertisers pay a lot less for those views. American companies can't really sell to viewers there, so it's local or global companies buying that traffic, and they pay less. US, UK and Australian views are worth significantly more because there's more marketing aimed at them and the customers are worth more to advertisers.

Market sophistication

Market sophistication matters a lot. If you make content about doctors or for doctors, those viewers have higher incomes and higher salaries. There are far fewer of them, but you'll get way higher RPMs on medical content than on a video about the cash registers at McDonald's.

Culture ties into this too. A lot of the time, the reason a channel is pulling mostly low RPM traffic is that the content isn't very Western in its references, so it lands with audiences advertisers pay less to reach.

Ad Placement and Video Length

Ad placement

I'll be honest, I use all the default settings on YouTube. I just do the automatic mid-roll placements.

One thing you can do is place an ad every minute. Some of my friends and students do that. YouTube doesn't actually play an ad every minute. It plays the most ads it can before the viewer leaves, so this gives you a high probability that ads are playing.

It works really well for younger audiences, like Fortnite content or anime content. They're typically not paying for YouTube Premium, and if the ads bother them, they can pay for Premium and get zero ads.

I like to be a little looser on it. I'm not always trying to maximize revenue, and I care more about viewer satisfaction. If that's less relevant for your audience, you can play more ads, and viewers mostly won't notice. They just think YouTube plays a lot of ads in general.

The 8 minute rule

I always advise 8 minute plus videos, because that's where you can start doing mid-roll ads. It used to be 10 minutes, and then they switched it to 8.

If you have less than an 8 minute video, I think you can only play an ad at the intro when they first click, with no mid-roll ads.

Hour-long compilations

This is the one that took one of our channels from around $6 or $7 to $16.

That channel has like 600 videos on it. So we took some of the different series we'd done over time, or some of the different keywords, and made compilations. We'd pay the editor like $30 to slap them all together, and we'd upload it as more of a compilation video.

I've been seeing a lot of big channels do this, like The Infographics Show. They take some of the topics or series they've covered and put them together.

Hour-long or two-hour videos (you can even do six-hour videos) jack up the RPM as long as people are watching. Think about it this way. If people are spending more time on the platform, there's a higher surface area for ads to be shown. YouTube also pays you more of its cut of the YouTube Premium revenue, because those viewers are spending more time with you.

Longer videos cost less per minute

I also see channels get into a niche and, instead of making 8 to 10 minute videos, they make 30 or 60 minute videos. Just by making longer videos, your RPMs go way higher.

What I've seen with a lot of production teams:

The cost per minute starts to diminish the longer a video is, while the RPM goes up. Maybe not double from a 10 minute to a 20 minute video, but you get a real boost.

If you're still validating a niche or a concept and you're not making money yet, just make the videos that match your budget. When you're making 10 grand a month from the channel, use this strategy to bump the revenue up.

Put Higher RPM Keywords in the Script

Longer videos are the obvious strategy. This one is less obvious.

What I've found is YouTube bases the ads that play on your videos off of what's inside the script, the things being talked about and the things being shown on screen. So you decrease the amount of low RPM keywords in your video and increase the amount of high RPM keywords.

Here's what I found on some videos that are more about crime. If you have the word murder, or kill, or steal in your videos, it decreases the RPM. If you use the word crime, that increases the RPM, because criminal attorneys can advertise on your videos.

How I do it:

1. Throw the script into ChatGPT.
2. Ask it what the low RPM keywords are and how many times they were used.
3. Ask it what the high RPM keywords are and how many times they were used.
4. Decrease the low RPM keywords (if not eliminate all of them) and increase the volume of high RPM keywords.

The trick is making sure it lines up with the content and doesn't make it weird. If you subtly do it throughout the script, this is a genius strategy. I've seen people increase their RPMs 30 to 50% by doing this one thing alone.

Swearing plays into this as well. Some advertisers don't want any swearing in the videos they run on, so it's a good basic practice to not have swearing in your content. If you do have it, limit it, and really bleep out the F-words.

Examples of high and low RPM keywords

Specific locations matter. Ibiza is going to have a way different RPM than Ghana. So try to build videos around specific locations, touch on them, or even just work the keywords in.

Adding a little extra specificity helps a lot. Instead of saying "Red Bull hired an attorney to help them write their contracts," you could say "Red Bull hired a marketing attorney out of Dallas, Texas to write up their marketing contracts." The same goes for specific job titles.

You don't have to make a channel around watches to get luxury RPMs. There just aren't that many watch viewers compared to something like the NBA. You can put this stuff into the language of your content instead.

Audience matters the same way. Kids playing Fortnite probably don't have as much money as people watching a documentary about how Reddit was founded.

I have two channels that cover kind of similar content. The one that's a more specific business channel gets around a $20 RPM, I think, or at least $16 to $18. The other one is more mindset and business mindset, and it gets around an $8 RPM.

Don't pick your niche on RPM

I see a lot of people pick their niche based on RPM entirely. In my mind, that's a terrible idea.

People pick luxury, finance, business and real estate because "it's a high RPM." But those are extremely competitive markets, or not that many people are making much money or getting many views in them. Pick based on what's getting views. Then we work on cash flow and RPM. I break down the ranges in YouTube RPM by niche.

Study Your Own Highest RPM Videos

Use YouTube's demographics tab. Look at it for your channel, and then look at it for specific videos. You'll see a huge difference between videos. Age matters, the country matters, and you can also see the interests of the audience watching.

If you're an established channel already making 10 grand a month, look at the data yourself too. Find the videos that have a higher RPM and break them down:

• Analyze the script and watch the video
• Look at the topic it's about
• Look at the demographic that's watching
• Look at how it was scripted (is there more jargon, more nuance, more Western culture)

Then build your next videos based off the ones with higher RPMs. If you figure out how to get higher RPMs, you don't have to get as many views to make as much money.

Make the Content for One Specific Western Viewer

I've seen a lot of people end up with most of their audience in India or Nigeria. Then they look for tactics or tricks so people from those countries can't watch their videos. I think that's the wrong approach. Those viewers have their place, and they add social proof to your content, which is actually a good thing.

What you want to focus on instead is making your content resonate more with Western audiences:

• Use US examples and US case studies
• Quote experts people in the US would know (if you're talking about Neil deGrasse Tyson or Joe Rogan, that's way more relatable)
• Add more Western culture references in general

If Western culture isn't yours, or your scriptwriter doesn't really understand it, go watch a bunch of American movies and shows, watch the obvious American creators, and make your content more like theirs.

Get ridiculously specific with your viewer avatar

You want to make your videos for your target demo. That's why I talk so much about defining your viewer avatar and making your videos around that one person.

When I get down to viewer avatars, I get really nitty-gritty. They live at 123 Main Street in Kansas. They go shopping every Friday. They hang out with the girls on Sunday. They buy lip gloss once a month and get their hair done every three months. They eat fast food once a week, but they like to cook at home. They own a $300,000 house. They work as a CPA with a $60,000 a year salary. They read these types of books and watch these shows.

Then I make my content for that person. When you do that, your content lines up with a group of people who are just like that person, which is millions of people. That makes RPMs go way up, and it makes it way easier to make viral videos.

Engagement, Trends and the Tools I Use

Keep testing. Look at the YouTube analytics, refine, try different approaches and analyze the results. Apply the scientific method to this.

A few additional tips:

• Get viewers doing something. Add a few more CTAs, like asking them to comment what they think, so they're not just passively watching.
• Think about how they watch. Are they sitting at the computer with all their focus on your content, or are they watching while cooking dinner or listening on a run? More engaged viewers are going to click on ads more, which makes them more valuable to advertisers, and you get paid more per thousand views.
• Catch trends. If there are trends happening right now, that's usually pretty good for RPMs, especially if you're catching the forefront of a marketplace.

For tools, honestly, I don't use any personally. I just give ChatGPT a script and ask it what the higher RPM keywords and the lower RPM keywords are. The trick with ChatGPT is to talk to it like it's a normal person.

The others I know of, which I haven't used myself: vidIQ and TubeBuddy have a keyword research feature (some of my students use it), Google Ads has a Keyword Planner, and there's a tool called Semrush.

Go for cash flow first. Once you get to a good cash flow, go after RPM. I have a shorter written guide on the same topic here: how to increase YouTube RPM.

Video Chapters

• 0:00Who this training is for
• 0:30Views and cash flow before RPM
• 3:06Why a higher RPM is a competitive advantage
• 4:08What RPM means and how to calculate it
• 5:43Key factors: topics, demographics, market sophistication
• 8:49Ad placement strategies
• 10:25The 8 minute rule for mid-roll ads
• 10:56Hour-long compilations
• 13:34Keyword changes in the script
• 16:10Study your own highest RPM videos
• 17:11High and low RPM keyword examples
• 20:14Making content for Western audiences
• 22:20Getting specific with your viewer avatar
• 25:57Tools and resources

FAQ