Mariia Loboda

For years, Twitch was a dead end for advertisers. The audience was there, of course, but that audience had seen every variation of forced integration and learned to tune it out in real time. Gamers trust streamers. They don’t trust banners, sponsor reads, or anything that interrupts the game.

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.