how many subscribers to make youtube money?

Most YouTube Partner’s are very hush hush when it comes to how much money they make. And really, it’s their job (when they’re popular enough) and who really goes around saying how much they make publicly? But every now and then one of them shares a little info on the subject and I’ve figured out a very general idea of the kind of money there is to be made.

I watched one girl on BlogTV who had about 20,000 YouTube subscribers and when asked about how much money she makes from YouTube she said that it’s enough for a second part-time job, but she also was working as a waitress part-time to make a decent living. Another YouTuber with about 40,000 subscribers was talking on his BlogTV show about how he was about to go travelling around North America with some other YouTubers and when someone asked him what he did for a living he said doing videos online was his only job and how he made his living.

So that right there can give you a general idea of how many subscribers you’d likely need before you could consider money coming from YouTube as a realistic “income” of some sort. Then you get on to the bigger YouTubers with subscribers in the six figures, all of whom pretty much never say anything about how much they make except that it’s their only job. One of them gave a really good hint though by starting an account with all of his YouTube Partner proceeds going to charity – Kev Juma started the Jumbafund channel and one month reported earning just over $1700, and I believe he had about 175,000 subscribers at the time. Now the channel is up to almost 300,000 subscribers (and his personal channel has over 680,000 subscribers).

Now, at $1700 a month that would be just over $20,000 a year if the views were consistent, so seems like there is something different going on with the YouTuber who claims to make a living with only 40,000 subscribers. But perhaps he’s including a few other online sources such as BlogTV, his own blog, sponsorship, etc.

But that at least gives a pretty good idea of how you realistically need to get into the tens of thousands of subscribers to start to actually earn anything decent. It is of course based on viewers more than subscribers, but there’s usually a direct correlation between the two.