AIR Data Findings

There is no single best time to post on YouTube, and our data shows why the stock answer, “post Tuesday at 2 PM,” is close to useless. Across 31,852 videos, the gap between the best and worst day of the week is only 21% once you pool the whole platform. Your niche is where the real difference lives.

“Post more often” and “post every day” are the most common pieces of advice in YouTube creator communities. And it does sound logical, because more videos mean more views, which means more revenue. Except that’s only half true, and it’s the less important part. We analyzed 282 channels across 13 niches using a within-channel method (comparing the same channels in months when they posted more versus months when they posted less). Here’s what the revenue-per-video data looks like.

Whether streaming is worth it depends on your niche more than on anything else you control. In our data, a crafting channel earns a median $91 for every hour it streams, while a music channel earns 35 cents. So before you copy someone else’s streaming strategy, look up what the format pays where you are. We measured it: 404 real channels across 11 niches, a full year of YouTube Analytics data, 127 of those channels earning money from live content. To put it simply – a stream view out-earns a video view in 8 of 11 niches we could measure. The idea that “streams pay less” comes from creators in the other three.

Livestreams have a reputation as YouTube’s worst-paying format, and creators skip them because “streams pay pennies.” Our data from 404 channels tells a more complicated story: in half the niches we measured, livestream RPM beats long-form RPM, and channels that stream 8+ times a month earn a median 50% of their ad revenue from live content. The catch shows up elsewhere, in what happens to your regular videos and your time. This study covers livestream RPM by niche, subscriber growth per hour streamed, the effect of streams on regular video views, and the streaming frequency where the numbers work best.

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.