RPM is what YouTube pays you per 1,000 views, and the niche sets it before you upload anything. Finance, business, real estate and legal content sit at the top at roughly $15 to $35, history and health in the middle at $6 to $15, and entertainment, gaming, music and meditation at the bottom at $1 to $4. On my own channels I've seen $1.43 per 1,000 on a channel I quit, about $5 in geopolitics, $5 to $8 on 10 to 20 minute geography videos, $12.88 and $15 once those went past 30 minutes, and around $20 on a specific business channel. Most of my students land between $6 and $15. Don't pick a niche on RPM alone, though. A $20 RPM with a five grand a month ceiling loses to a $5 RPM with millions of views.
- The spread is huge. The same 1,000 views pay $1.43 in one niche and $15 to $20 in another, and the niche decides most of that.
- My own channels: $1.43 on the one I quit, four dollars and 12 cents on the next, about $5 in geopolitics, $12.88 and $15 on long geography videos, and about $20 on a business channel versus about $8 on a mindset channel with similar content.
- The lowest RPM I've ever seen is about $4 and the highest around $20. Some people get $30 to $50, but it usually comes down as you scale. Most of the students I work with are between $6 and $15.
- Meditation, music, comedy, gaming, drama and broad Reddit style channels pay the least. I wouldn't see meditation making more than a $2 RPM.
- Views beat RPM. 5,000 views a month at $20 is about $100 a month. 10 million views at $2 is at least 20 grand.
- Inside any niche, length moves RPM more than anything else. Our 10 to 20 minute videos paid $5 to $8. Our 30 minute and longer videos paid $12.88 and $15.
- RPM vs CPM: Which Number to Watch
- RPM Rankings by Niche
- What My Own Channels Get Per 1,000 Views
- Why the Same Views Pay Differently by Niche
- The Niches With the Lowest RPM
- Don't Pick a Niche on RPM Alone
- RPM Tiers vs My Niche Tier List
- How Video Length Changes RPM Inside a Niche
- What Actually Moves Your RPM
- Video chapters
- FAQ
RPM vs CPM: Which Number to Watch
RPM is revenue per mille. Mille stands for thousand (I think it's Latin). A $5 RPM means you're getting $5 per thousand views.
CPM is the other side of the same number. It's what advertisers pay YouTube for 1,000 ad impressions. RPM is what YouTube pays you per 1,000 views after its 45% cut, and it's typically 40 to 55 percent of CPM. If your niche has a $20 CPM, you're earning roughly $8 to $11 RPM.
As a YouTuber, care about RPM. Always look at RPM in your YouTube Analytics, not CPM. Every number on this page is RPM.
Views divided by 1,000, times the RPM. A million view video at a $5 RPM is a thousand times five, so $5,000.
RPM Rankings by Niche
These are the ranges this page has always used, grouped the way I think about them. They're ranges, not promises. My own numbers (next section) show how far a single channel can sit from the middle of its tier.
| Tier | Niche | RPM range | What's going on |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1: $15 to $35 | Real estate investing | $18 to $35 | High-value audience, premium sponsors |
| 1 | Finance and investing | $15 to $30 | Consistent year-round |
| 1 | Legal and attorney content | $15 to $28 | Very high advertiser bids |
| 1 | Insurance and financial planning | $14 to $25 | Small niche, high bids |
| 1 | B2B software and SaaS | $12 to $22 | Good for tech-focused channels |
| 2: $8 to $15 | Health and medicine | $8 to $18 | Broad audience, strong advertiser interest |
| 2 | Business and entrepreneurship | $8 to $16 | High-intent audience |
| 2 | Technology reviews | $8 to $15 | Affiliate upside on top of ads |
| 2 | Travel (aspirational) | $8 to $18 | Credit cards, hotels, booking platforms |
| 2 | Career and education | $8 to $14 | Job platform ads pay well |
| 2 | Nutrition and diet | $8 to $14 | Supplement brands pay premium CPMs |
| 3: $4 to $9 | History and documentary | $5 to $12 | Great watch time offsets the lower rate |
| 3 | Self-improvement and motivation | $5 to $10 | High sub rates, good for sponsors |
| 3 | True crime | $4 to $8 | Huge volume compensates |
| 3 | Science explainers | $5 to $9 | International traffic can pull it down |
| 3 | Pet content | $5 to $10 | Pet food and supply brands advertise heavily |
| 3 | Conspiracy and alternative history | $3 to $7 | View volumes can be massive |
| 4: $1 to $4 | Gaming | A dollar fifty to $4 | Needs massive view counts |
| 4 | Entertainment and memes | $1 to $3 | Hard to monetize sustainably |
| 4 | Music compilations | $1 to $2 | Often demonetized for copyright |
| 4 | Kids content | $1 to $3 | YouTube restricts most ad formats |
Two things to read into that table.
First, the tier 1 niches are the ones everyone picks because "it's a high RPM." They're also extremely competitive markets. More on that below.
Second, tier 3 is where a lot of faceless money actually gets made. History, true crime and science get the views, and the videos can run long.
What My Own Channels Get Per 1,000 Views
I've opened the analytics on camera a few times. These are the real RPMs, not ranges.
| Channel or video | RPM | Where it sits |
|---|---|---|
| The channel behind my 5.6 million view video (I quit it) | About $1.43 | Bottom of tier 4 |
| The channel my team grew next, the one that beat it with less than half the views | Four dollars and 12 cents | Tier 3 |
| My geopolitics channels | About $5 on average, more when the videos are longer | Tier 3 |
| My geography facts channel, 10 to 20 minute videos | $5 to $8 | Tier 3 |
| The same geography channel, 30 minute and longer videos | $12.88 on one video, $15 on another | Tier 2 |
| A channel that did 8 million views and $90,000 in 90 days | About $10.50 over 90 days, about $12 over the last 30 | Tier 2 |
| My specific business channel | Around $20, or at least $16 to $18 | Tier 1 |
| My business mindset channel (similar content, broader) | Around $8 | Tier 2 |
That first row is why I quit the channel. It was hard to come up with topics, hard to make the videos, and the ad rate was about $1.43 per thousand views, which is pretty bad.
The last two rows are the most useful pair on the page. Two of my channels cover kind of similar content. The specific business channel gets around a $20 RPM, or at least $16 to $18. The business mindset one gets around $8. Same general topic, more than double the rate, and the difference is specificity and who the videos are for.
For the range you can expect: the lowest ad rate I've ever seen is about $4 on the low end, and on the high end about $20. Some people get $30 to $50 RPMs, but it usually goes down as you scale up a little bit. Most of the students I work with are between $6 and $20, and $6 to $15 is pretty realistic. Some are hitting $20. It's not too often.
Why the Same Views Pay Differently by Niche
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.
The marketer who can pay the most for a customer wins. Compare that to bongos or selling drum kits. There are far 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.
Two more things set the rate inside a niche:
- Who's watching. US, UK, Canada and Australia traffic earns 3 to 5x more than developing-market traffic, because there's more marketing aimed at those viewers and the customers are worth more to advertisers. If someone is in a niche that should be at $4 to $8 and they're getting $2, we look at the demographics tab and the majority of the traffic is coming from India or Nigeria.
- Market sophistication. If you make content about doctors or for doctors, those viewers have higher incomes. 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. A 35 to 55 year old viewer is worth more to advertisers than a 16-year-old, which is part of why finance skews high.
All the tactics for moving those two are in how to increase your YouTube RPM. This page is about picking the niche in the first place.
The Niches With the Lowest RPM
I'd stay away from niches that are not high RPM niches if money is the point: music, comedy, gaming, drama, maybe Reddit style channels. Things like this where they're very broad and aren't niched down. Your ad rates are going to be extremely low.
Meditation is the one I get asked about most, because people want the easiest content to make and it looks easy. It's super low engagement and it's going to be really hard to make more money with those videos. I wouldn't see you making more than a $2 RPM unless you can make it way more interactive, which is hard with meditative content. Music is the same. Do you really want to listen to ads while you're meditating?
Say you're in the music niche and a video gets five million views at 50 cents per thousand. You made about twenty-five hundred dollars. Now say you have a space channel at an $8 RPM and the same five million views. You made forty thousand dollars. Same views.
You can always go and do the lower RPM niches. I wouldn't recommend it unless you're doing it purely for fun or you have a business behind it: a personal brand, or products you can sell. If you have a meditation channel, have something like a monthly meditation group to sell.
Religion is a related case. Advertising revenue of 5 to 10 grand a month is pretty typical there, and if you do Hinduism you'll have more viewers from India and a lower RPM. To make real money with religion, fitness or health, you probably have to sell products.
Don't Pick a Niche on RPM Alone
I see a lot of people pick their niche based on RPM entirely. In my mind, that's a terrible idea.
Increasing your RPM is significantly less important than being in a position to get more views.
| Views a month | RPM | What the channel makes |
|---|---|---|
| 5,000 | $20 | About $100 a month |
| 10 million | $2 | 20 grand a month at least |
A channel might be able to get a $20 RPM, but the revenue ceiling there is like 5 grand a month, because there's just not that large of an audience for it. There just aren't that many watch viewers compared to something like the NBA.
People pick luxury, finance, business and real estate because of the RPM. Those are extremely competitive markets. Pick based on what's getting views. Then we work on cash flow, and then RPM.
The way I check a niche's ceiling is to look up a channel in it on ViewStats. Take the long-form views, divide by 1,000, multiply by the RPM you think the niche gets. Bright Side, for example, does kind of everything and anything type of content, so I know they're getting probably $2 to $3 RPMs, sometimes maybe $4, averaging about $3. On their views that's probably about 200,000 a month. The full method is in how to calculate faceless YouTube channel earnings.
RPM Tiers vs My Niche Tier List
RPM is one axis. How hard the niche is for a beginner is the other. I ranked every niche I've come across from S to F in my faceless YouTube niches tier list, and the two lists disagree in useful ways.
| Niche | RPM tier on this page | My tier-list grade | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business | 2 ($8 to $16) | C | Lots of competition, people have a high standard of what they watch |
| Tech | 2 ($8 to $15) | C | Sophisticated audience, hard to crack |
| Health and fitness | 2 ($8 to $18) | A | Always trends, very stable, viewers just want the answer |
| Travel | 2 ($8 to $18) | A | One of the easier ones to get into |
| History | 3 ($5 to $12) | A | Takes work to make it exciting, but I love it |
| True crime | 3 ($4 to $8) | B, possibly C | A lot of money, but heavy subject matter and guidelines |
| Science and space | 3 ($5 to $9) | C | Some channels make a ton, but they work really hard |
| Pets and animals | 3 ($5 to $10) | C | Too big an audience to find an angle. I've never had success with it |
| Gaming | 4 (a dollar fifty to $4) | A | So many games, so much to talk about |
| Music and meditation | 4 ($1 to $2) | F | Too many people doing it, ad rates aren't good |
Basketball is my only S tier niche and it isn't in the RPM table at all. The amount of people I've helped make $10,000 a month with basketball with the most brain dead video ideas is insane. Nobody picks basketball for the RPM. It gets views, and views are what pay.
The common trend is that the more sophisticated audiences, the smarter viewers, are the hardest to crack into. They're also the ones advertisers pay the most to reach. So the high RPM tiers and the beginner friendly tiers mostly don't overlap. Basketball, celebrity, history, travel and the B tier niches can all make 50 grand a month. Fitness and health probably need products on top.
How Video Length Changes RPM Inside a Niche
Once the niche is set, length is the biggest lever on RPM, and it's the one I can show you from my own channel.
| Video length | What we get per 1,000 views |
|---|---|
| 10 to 20 minutes | $5 to $8 |
| 30 minutes and up | $12.88 on one video, $15 on another |
At first you'll probably make 10 to 20 minute videos, and our oldest uploads were around 10 minutes. Once videos were getting views, we made them longer. Now 30 minutes is the bare minimum for us and we go to 45. We didn't do this for a few years.
Why it works:
- Mid-rolls start at 8 minutes. Under 8 minutes I think you can only play an ad at the intro. If your competitors make 5 minute videos, bump yours to 8 and you're way more competitive than they are.
- More time on the platform. More surface area for ads, and YouTube pays you more of its cut of the YouTube Premium revenue.
- Most of the views come from TV. TV is the top device type on a lot of our videos, and television viewers really don't want to be changing the channel.
- Cost per minute falls. A 10 minute video might cost a team $100. A 20 minute video is probably $160 to $180.
The biggest jump I've seen was compilations. One of my channels has about 600 videos on it. We took series we'd done over time, paid the editor about $30 to put them together into hour-long and two-hour videos, and that channel went from around $6 or $7 to $16 on some videos.
Don't do this at the beginning. Long videos take too long to make when you're new and still validating the niche. Make the videos that match your budget, and when you're making 10 grand a month, use length to push the revenue up.
What Actually Moves Your RPM
Short version, since the full tactics have their own page:
- Make it for a Western viewer. US examples, US case studies, experts people in the US would know. We found US geography facts did really well partly because Americans watching means a higher RPM, so we did every single US state.
- Go past 8 minutes, then past 30. Mid-rolls first, then the $12.88 to $15 range.
- Swap the words. Throw the script into ChatGPT, ask which keywords are low RPM and which are high RPM, cut the low ones and add the high ones. I've seen people raise RPM 30 to 50% from this alone.
- Stack affiliate income. Finance channels can 5x their effective RPM through affiliate partnerships alone.
Seasonal swings
Across all niches, RPM peaks in Q4 (October to December) when advertisers compete for holiday budgets. Expect 30 to 50 percent higher RPM in November and December than in Q1. Plan your content calendar and production budget around it. Q1 (January and February) is typically the lowest RPM period. Don't panic, it's normal. Keep publishing. If a trend is happening right now, that's usually good for RPMs too, especially if you're catching the forefront of a marketplace.
Follow your own data
Find your own videos with a higher RPM, break down the topic, the script and the demographic that watched, and build the next videos off those. If you figure out how to get higher RPMs, you don't have to get as many views to make as much money.
Go for cash flow first. Once you get to a good cash flow, go after RPM. How that adds up at every level, from $1K to $1M a month, is in how much faceless YouTube channels actually make.
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
- 5:43Topics, 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
- 18:12Don't pick a niche on RPM
- 20:14Making content for Western audiences
- 25:57Tools and resources
FAQ
Which YouTube niche has the highest RPM?
Finance, investing, real estate, legal and insurance content sit at the top at roughly $15 to $35 per 1,000 views. Devon Canup's own specific business channel gets around $20. He warns that these niches are extremely competitive, so he tells people to pick a niche on views and revenue first and raise RPM second.
What is a good RPM on YouTube?
Devon Canup says most of the students he works with land between $6 and $15, with some hitting $20. The lowest he has seen is about $4 and the highest around $20, with a few people at $30 to $50 that usually comes down as the channel scales.
What is the RPM for a faceless YouTube channel?
It depends on the niche and video length. Devon Canup's channels have paid $1.43 per 1,000 views in a bad niche, four dollars and 12 cents in the next, about $5 in geopolitics, $5 to $8 on 10 to 20 minute geography videos, $12.88 to $15 once those videos passed 30 minutes, and around $20 on a business channel.
Which YouTube niches have the lowest RPM?
Devon lists music, meditation, comedy, gaming, drama and broad Reddit style channels. He would not expect a meditation channel to get more than a $2 RPM. He only recommends those niches if you are doing it for fun or have products to sell behind the channel.
Why is my YouTube RPM lower than my niche should pay?
Usually demographics. Devon says if a niche should pay $4 to $8 and a channel is at $2, the demographics tab typically shows most of the traffic coming from India or Nigeria, where advertisers pay much less. Making the content for a specific Western viewer is his fix.
Does video length change RPM within a niche?
Yes. On Devon Canup's geography channel, 10 to 20 minute videos paid $5 to $8 per 1,000 views and 30 minute and longer videos paid $12.88 and $15. Hour-long compilations took another of his channels from around $6 to $16 on some videos.
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