ALL Articles - page 6

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.

There is no shortage of podcast growth advice. Most of it is the same recycled loop: hooks, hacks, posting cadence, "build your community," "10x your downloads." Useful in small doses. Hollow as a strategy.

Cannes Lions has been the advertising industry's north star for seven decades, long before the creator economy even existed. In 2024, Cannes finally made room for creators. It wasn't much: a rooftop slot on the Palais, easy to miss, and marketers still ran the agenda. This year that changed. The conversations that used to happen about creators started happening with them, and their side events were everywhere.

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.

June came in hot, and not just because of the heatwaves. YouTube dropped a bunch of new changes and expanded the existing tools beyond the borders of the US. Here’s everything you need to know.

Most YouTube creators who try memberships earn very little from them because they set them up incorrectly and promote them just once. But the channels we watch earn 30–80% of their total revenue from memberships. What makes it happen is designing perks around what your specific audience wants, mentioning memberships in every video naturally, pricing your tiers around what your superfans are willing to pay, and 12 more tactics. All are in this YouTube Membership guide.

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.

The most effective ways to build YouTube community engagement are replying to comments with follow-up questions, running poll series on your Posts tab, pinning viewer comments that spark debate, hosting live Q&As, and spotlighting subscribers weekly. AIR channels that post on the Community Tab report 15–25% higher video engagement rates.