About chances for monetization of a YouTube channel

September 5, 2025 - Reading time: 5 minutes

According to YouTube Stats, there are 114 million active YouTube channels in 2025. About 321,000 channels have surpassed the 100,000 subscribers, according to statistical data. Only 10% of those can be monetized with more than 100$ per day (ask ChatGPT for this number - it will pull a few reliable sources). The chances of success for channels with fewer than 100,000 subscribers and earning more than $100 per day are quite small and can be ignored. So, the probability of a newly created YouTube channel earning more than $100 per day is just 0.00028 (or 0.028%) [1]. This figure is significantly lower than the probability of being killed in a U.S. city [2].

$100 per day is a small amount of income by Western standards, and it's even less meaningful when shared among several creators working on a single channel. To achieve $300 per day, the already tiny success rate of 0.028% would need to decrease significantly.

You might say that it depends on the 'niche' and the 'quality' of the videos. That’s true — but the same applies to any new business. A lot depends on how good you are at what you do. The difference is that for most new businesses, the average chance of success is many orders of magnitude higher than the odds of an average YouTube channel earning $100 per day in 2025 — which isn’t even a meaningful income for a typical U.S. household. When you start a new business, a probability for success is 10% on average. This is a well studied and well known number.

This basically says everything you need to know about the success rate of an average YouTube channel. Just do a simple test: create a channel and upload a few good videos. Most likely, you'll only get around 5-10 views. And full stop. This tiny "kick" is not enough to algorithms to make any decision about the quality of the video..

Based on just 5-10 views, how do you think YouTube will promote your video to a wider audience, especially if so few people are even clicking on it and there is no a fair metric for so small click statistics? And do you believe those viewers are real people?

The problem isn’t about the video being “good” or “bad” quality of thumbnails of the uploaded videos, as often you can hear. The issue lies in the small initial “push” to a video when it's posted, which puts it in front of an audience before the community has any real chance to decide whether it’s good or bad. With such tiny number initial views, pure luck and the strange behaviors of YouTube’s complex algorithm are more likely causes of success than any consistent or predictable factors. Keep in mind that much of the success depends on YouTube’s employees, - many of whom are outsourced to third-party companies in India. Hash tags are not as affective as they are used to be, and are largely ignored. 

This doesn’t mean you should stop posting videos on YouTube, especially if it’s a hobby you enjoy. Think of it as a way to share your work with friends rather than as a source of income. Just don’t expect to make money from it.

Beside the main profit from running Ads, YouTube earns money from "dreamers" - people who create channels, see little to no activity, and end up paying for ads from YouTube studio. Then, YouTube staff send an army of bot-subscribers, which completely ruins the channel, since the watch time remains very low and there's still no engagement on any new videos from "subscribers". My recent estimate gives about 4% of views coming from "subscribers" We've got from Ads. Why did they subscribe then? Correct - they are not real. Now you must close the channel.

Normally, this would be considered a fraudulent activity. If you buy potatoes in a store and they are all rotten from inside, damaging your health, you would hold the company accountable. Not on YouTube. Bot subscribers that you purchase with your own money, and which harm your channel, are considered completely acceptable.

After losing money, most of these creators never return. This is a damaging "tax" on low income people, who dared to have a dream.

by T.Markom (editor, jport@jwork.org). This article is based on the discussion on Reddit.

References

[1] Based on the current statistics, this calculations look like this: 321,000 / 114,000,000 / 10 =0.00028.

[2] Based on the known statistical data, the homicide rate in an average  US city is  50 murders/100k residents = 0.0005.