New YouTube RPM Metric Is Perfect For Creators

Historically, using YouTube’s metrics to determine the success of your music has been something of headache for artists and creators. Thankfully, a new RPM (revenue per thousand) feature makes analyzing your returns a little easier.

Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0

When it comes to sorting through the metrics that YouTube provides creators, it’s always required some extra math to determine if you’re really making money or not. The platform made CPM available (cost per thousand impressions), but that really didn’t tell you much except provide a general idea of what it cost an advertiser to place an ad on your video. Now YouTube has included a new RPM (revenue per thousand) metric that should make it much easier to see how the money is being generated.

2 Steps Forward

There are actually 2 reasons why this is a big step forward.

The first is that RPM measures the revenue that a creator is generating from not only the ads that run on videos, but from other sources on YouTube as well. This includes areas like channel subscriptions (if you charge for them), donations made via Super Chat, live streaming, and YouTube Premium views. In other words, it’s the total of all the revenue generated on the platform divided by the number of views. Not only that, it’s after YouTube deducts its fee, which means that you know exactly how much each view is generating.

Second, it also shows you how much you would have made on videos that are not monetized. In other words, it’s an incentive to a creator to monetize every video when he or she finds that there’s money being left on the table.

CPM is still a useful metric though. It indicates just how much an advertiser is paying for an ad. That means that the higher the CPM, the more money you’ll make.

Mid-Roll Ads

In other YouTube monetization news, the platform will now include mid-roll ads for videos that are 8 minutes or more in length. Previously a video had to be at least 10 minutes long before a mid-roll video would be inserted.