Calculating earnings from YouTube video views is, as ever, a real piece-of-string affair. Much depends on the length of the videos and the nature of the ads run against them, for example: there’s no one ‘royalty rate’ to use in wider calculations. What there are, though, are averages – and now a tool launched by a company called Sellfy, whose business is based on helping writers, filmmakers, musicians and other creators sell physical and digital products from their own store. It has launched a tool – yes, it’s intended to promote its own platform – which aims to give rough estimates for how much you can earn from a YouTube channel – AND how much extra revenue there might be in using that channel to sell merchandise.
We tried it, naturally: according to Sellfy’s tool, a channel with 1m monthly YouTube views could earn anywhere between $250 and $4,000 from ads (we said it was rough!) and a further $4,100 – $21,460 from selling products. Note: for musicians, this doesn’t mean ‘slap ads for your merch all over your music videos and you’ll be RICH!’ – YouTubers who are vlogging (i.e. talking directly to their audience) can promote their merch links in a much more direct way than static ads on a music video.
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