Your channel
Output & effort
Audience & reach
Money per view
Costs
Tax & benchmark
Where the money goes
Hourly wage vs minimum wage
Pre-tax and post-tax hourly rate compared to the local statutory minimum, the local median full-time wage, and a typical software-engineer salary.
The tipping point
Holding everything else fixed, this curve shows your after-tax hourly rate as average views per video varies. The dashed line is your local minimum wage. Where the curve crosses it is the number of views you need per video, every month, for YouTube to beat a minimum-wage job.
What moves the needle? (sensitivity)
Each bar shows how your monthly after-tax income changes if that input alone moves ±25%. Longer bar = the variable your channel is most exposed to. This is where to spend your effort.
Year-on-year, if nothing changes
Most channels don't grow linearly — back catalogue earns a long tail. This projects a steady-state catalogue with a modest tail multiplier.
How the maths works
Revenue
YouTube reports earnings as RPM — the dollars a creator keeps for every 1,000 video views, after YouTube's 45% cut and after non-monetised views are excluded. Public RPM data and creator disclosures put typical numbers around:
- Finance / business / B2B: $15 – $50
- Tech reviews / SaaS: $5 – $15
- Education, how-to: $4 – $12
- Vlogs, lifestyle: $2 – $7
- Gaming: $1 – $4
- Music, kids, "made-for-kids": $0.50 – $2
Sponsorships are modelled separately because they pay on a flat sponsor-CPM that's usually 5–20× ad RPM, but only a fraction of videos land a deal and small channels are mostly locked out below ~10k views.
Time
Production time covers scripting, recording, editing, thumbnails, titles and uploads. The "overhead hours" slider captures everything that isn't recording but eats your week: replying to comments, reading analytics, learning new editing techniques, dealing with copyright claims, taxes, contracts and pitches.
Hourly wage
Net monthly income ÷ total monthly hours. We then compare this to the statutory minimum wage of the country you pick (see source notes at the bottom of the page). For an honest comparison, the minimum-wage number is post-tax-equivalent for a single full-time worker on that wage, not the gross rate.
Tipping point
We sweep average views per video from 1,000 to 5,000,000 and recompute the hourly rate at each point, holding every other slider fixed. The crossover with minimum wage is the views-per-video your channel needs to clear a minimum-wage equivalent. Most channels never reach it.
What this model does NOT include
- Survivorship. The average successful channel did not start out average. Most channels never monetise at all — you need 1,000 subs and 4,000 watch hours just to begin earning.
- Burnout & algorithm risk. A single algorithm change can cut RPM by half overnight.
- Mental-health cost of public-facing work, harassment, parasocial pressure.
- Optionality. Once you're big you can pivot to courses, books, speaking. This is real upside but only available to the top fraction of 1%.