AIR Data Findings

Many creators have wondered whether the grass is greener in another niche. We ran the numbers to find out. Education & Science is the highest-paying YouTube niche in 2026, with a median RPM of $10.22 – more than four times the all-niche median of about $2.30 and roughly thirty times what Kids content earns. The figures come from the real YouTube Analytics of 300 channels AIR Media-Tech works with, every monetized month from May 2025 to May 2026, ranked across all 13 niches by what they pay per view.

Ask a room full of YouTubers what a view is worth, and you will hear numbers pulled from a hundred different blog posts, most of them guesses. So instead of guessing, we pulled the real YouTube Analytics of 300 channels that AIR Media-Tech works with, every monetized month from May 2025 to May 2026, and measured what a view is worth. Across those 300 channels, the median RPM came out to about $2.30 per 1,000 views – roughly $2,300 for every million, after YouTube takes its 45% cut.

YouTube Shorts pays between $0.02 and $1.48 RPM, depending on your niche, roughly 3–14% of what long-form earns per 1,000 views. These figures come from YouTube Analytics API data across 274 channels, full-year medians.

Online, the question about how much YouTube Shorts pays comes up constantly. We pulled data directly from the YouTube Analytics API across 274 channels that mix in Shorts and saw that YouTube Shorts RPM is 3–14% of long-form RPM in almost every niche, meaning most channels need between 11,000 and 34,000 Shorts views to earn what 1,000 long-form views generate.

Channels with fewer than 50 videos get more views on new uploads than channels with 1,000+ in 8 out of 11 niches. In education, the gap is 18x. In gaming and science, it's above 11x. The mechanism is the accumulation of dead content that causes the algorithm to narrow the audience pool. The good news is that dead content is fixable. We measured this across 20,000 channels, 11 niches, and four channel-size tiers. Here's what the data shows and how to act on it.

The advice for the perfect YouTube titles always comes down to this: use numbers, keep it short, ask a question, add a power word. The problem is that most of this advice comes from people who looked at a handful of viral videos and wrote down what they had in common. We did something a little different. We analyzed titles across 18,000 English-language YouTube channels and measured which title patterns correlate with higher engagement rates and views across 11 niches and four channel size tiers.

Posting more on YouTube mostly helps, but only if the content satisfies viewers. And "more" means something different depending on your niche. For gaming channels, more means 20–40 videos a month. For travel channels, more means 2-4 per month. And posting above the niche benchmark almost always hurts. The channels in our dataset that over-posted had 55% fewer subscribers than channels that posted at the optimal rate.

If you’ve ever typed into a search bar “how long should my YouTube videos be,” then you’ve already read the same “it depends on the niche” over and over again. We have good news for you here! After analyzing 4,538,463 videos across 18,080 English-language channels, we can tell you exactly the length that drives engagement in each niche, with the numbers to back it up.

In most niches, channels that combine YouTube Shorts with long-form content have more subscribers than channels that post long-form only. We learned that from AIR's 18,000-channel dataset across 11 niches and four channel-size segments.