How Much YouTube Actually Paid Me For My 120,000+ Viewed Video

The ad revenue is the least of the income.

Image created by author in Canva of lots of author’s “Thumbnail Faces” against a backdrop of the YouTube analytics page

I’ve posted videos on YouTube since May 2019. I cringe to watch those early ones now, but they were the start of something important: my YouTube career.

Shelby Church, tech and lifestyle content creator, interviewed me about a year after I started my YouTube channel. Then, thanks to a quirk in the algorithm, the many (many) people who watched her video…were recommended my video.

Screenshot from the comments of my video

My video went viral, earning over 100,000 views, launching my YouTube Partner monetization, bringing me thousands of new subscribers, and showing me what was really possible with YouTube.

Screenshot of the analytics for this video.

Here’s how much it made me.

How Much My YouTube Video With 100k+ Views Made Me

Let’s talk ad revenue first.

My account wasn’t monetized on YouTube when the video went viral at first. I was…