Outdoors with Erik Now Earns as Much on MSN as on YouTube

A cleanup video tells you everything in the first frame and the last one. What the yard looked like, what it looks like now, and nothing in between that asks you to know the family or the town. Outdoors with Erik is 376 of those, and 499,000 YouTube subscribers who have already seen most of them. Between January and June 2026 that finished library paid the channel $41,779.06 on MSN. Nothing was filmed for it.

Erik's AdSense runs $5,000 to $10,000 a month. MSN averaged $6,963 across the six. The channel now has two income lines of roughly the same size, and the second one came out of work that was done and paid for years ago.

The Ceiling on a Channel That Has to Drive There

Erik's channel is built on going places. He clears overgrown yards, takes down trees and mows lots that have not been mowed in years, mostly for elderly homeowners and veterans who cannot do it themselves. The work happens on real properties in real towns, and it takes a day or more each time.

That shape puts a hard limit on output. A tutorial channel can film six videos in an afternoon. Erik's next video needs a property, an owner who says yes, a drive and a day of physical labour. 376 videos represents an enormous amount of work, and by YouTube standards it is still a small library.

So the constraint was never audience size. Half a million subscribers is a healthy channel and AdSense reflected that at $5,000 to $10,000 a month. The constraint was that earning more meant doing more, in a way most creators solve by uploading more often and Erik cannot.

What Six Months on MSN Paid

MSN out-earned nothing on YouTube and replaced nothing. It ran alongside, on the same 376 videos, and in three of the six months it paid more than the middle of the channel's AdSense range.

_{Outdoors with Erik on the MSN dashboard — monthly interactions, net revenue and creator share, January to June 2026}

• Total to the channel over six months: $41,779.06. January through June 2026, counted after AIR’s share came out.
• Monthly average: $6,963. Which sits inside the channel’s own AdSense range rather than underneath it.
• Best month, March 2026: $11,481.41. On 224.8 million interactions, the highest volume of the six.
• Interactions across the period: about 820 million. From a catalogue of 376 videos, which works out at 2.2 million per video.
• Effect on YouTube: none. AdSense, uploads, ownership and the filming schedule all stayed where they were.

The Rate Climbed While the Volume Swung

Month to month the figures look erratic, and month to month they are. March paid $11,481 and April paid $1,452. Those are consecutive months, from the same library, with nothing changed in between.

The gap is volume. Microsoft served Erik's videos 224.8 million times in March and 24.6 million times in April, and the payouts tracked that almost exactly.

_{Monthly creator earnings, January to June 2026 — $8.3K, $6.3K, $11.5K, $1.5K, $10.9K, $3.4K}

Underneath the swings, the rate Microsoft paid moved in one direction only. 

Net revenue per thousand interactions went from 7.2 cents in January to 10.4 cents in June, up about 45% across the period. The two weakest payout months, April and June, ran at the two highest rates of the six.

The practical read is that these two numbers answer to different people. 

• Volume belongs to Microsoft's feed and shifts with seasonality, competition inside the vertical and whatever the feed is prioritising that week. 
• The rate reflects what the audience around a video is worth to advertisers, and on this channel it improved steadily while the volume was doing whatever it liked.

13,500 Followers From an Audience the Channel Never Had

The videos were unchanged, but the people watching them were not the channel's usual crowd.

• Followers on MSN: 13,500. Counted separately from the 499,000 on YouTube, and picked up without a single new upload.
• Views in May 2026: 1,326,297. The strongest month of the six, from a library that was already finished.
• Interactions across the period: about 820 million. Roughly 2.2 million for every video on the channel.

 

_{The Outdoors with Erik channel page on msn.com — 13.5K followers, with the library running in Microsoft's feed}

What Makes a Cleanup Video Travel

MSN rewards some libraries far more than others, and it is worth being specific about why this one landed, because that is what tells you whether your own would behave the same way.

• Home and property is one of the strongest verticals on MSN. Home improvement and DIY archives are among the best performers we distribute, and the feed treats it the same way.
• A US channel against a US readership. Erik’s audience is American and MSN’s skews American, older and higher-income. Advertisers bid up that reader, which is what the rate on this account reflects.
• Nothing to catch up on. A viewer needs no history with the channel, the town or the homeowner to follow the video.
• Nothing that expires. An overgrown lot cleared in 2022 is the same video in 2026. Nothing in the library needs updating to stay useful, so the whole library stays eligible indefinitely.

How the Channel Got On

After the paperwork, none of this asked anything of Erik. One form, one signature, and the rest sat with our team and Microsoft's.

• Applied through air.io. A short form on channel details, monetization status and content type. Fifteen minutes or so.
• Signed one non-exclusive contract, January 20, 2025. No fee to join and nothing on the YouTube side had to change. The revenue share applies to MSN earnings and nothing else.
• Microsoft review. A check on content standards, rights and quality across the channel and its library. On a channel that films real properties and the people who live on them, that review matters more than usual.
• Distribution began. Our team selected, sequenced and scheduled the existing 376 videos across MSN.com, Bing and the Microsoft Start feed. Nothing was re-cut, re-edited or re-uploaded.

What MSN Is, and Why a Creator Cannot Just Sign Up

Microsoft runs a content network across four places most people pass through without thinking about it: msn.com, Bing results, the Start feed built into Windows, and the new-tab page in Edge. Around 1.29 billion unique users a month move through them.

Creators do not upload to MSN – videos are placed into those feeds, Microsoft sells the advertising against them, and the revenue comes back through AIR. 

The recommendation logic works on different inputs from YouTube's. It draws on what someone reads, the topic clusters they keep returning to and what they have been clicking across the platform, rather than on watch history and subscriptions. A yard cleanup can land in front of somebody who opened a browser to check the weather.

There is no public door into any of it. Microsoft works through a short list of accredited partners who handle the agreement, the onboarding and the payments, and AIR Media-Tech holds one of the few slots worldwide.

The Channels This Works For

Across AIR's creator network, the strongest MSN results cluster around a few things:

• Content with an outcome a stranger can see. Cleanups, restorations, builds, repairs, rescues, makeovers. Formats where the video explains itself to a viewer who arrived with no context at all.
• A monetized channel from roughly 10,000 subscribers upward. Below that, Microsoft’s quality review is hard to clear. There is no ceiling, though on a very large channel MSN is a smaller slice of what is already coming in.
• English, Spanish or Portuguese audiences. The US, UK, Canada and Australia are the strongest markets at the moment, then Brazil, Spain and Latin America more widely.
• A library that already exists. MSN distributes what has been made. More of it helps, but this case is what a 376-video catalogue can do, so depth is not the gate people assume it is.
• Original footage. Compilations, reaction videos and re-uploads do not clear Microsoft moderation. Erik films his own work, which is the cleanest version of this there is.

If Your Videos Are Stories Rather Than References

Erik changed nothing to earn this. He did not film for MSN, re-edit for MSN or take a single day off the road. The videos MSN distributed were the ones already sitting on the channel.

What travels from this case is that the archive argument is not the only one. Channels with deep libraries do well on MSN because the feed has more to match against. This channel did well on a shallow one, because each video carries further and the feed rewarded that instead.