Mariia Loboda

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.

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.

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.