The honest answer is that “per 1,000 views” is close to meaningless without the niche attached. UK RPM ranges from about £1 to over £20 depending on subject, and that spread is bigger than almost any other variable you can control.
RPM and CPM are not the same number
CPM is what advertisers pay per 1,000 ad impressions. RPM is what lands in your account per 1,000 video views, after YouTube’s 45% cut and after accounting for views that carried no ad at all.
RPM is always lower and it is the one that matters. A spectacular CPM is the figure before YouTube’s share and before unmonetised views.
UK RPM by niche
| Niche | Typical UK RPM |
|---|---|
| Finance, investing, insurance | £8 – £22 |
| B2B software and tech | £6 – £15 |
| Legal and professional services | £6 – £14 |
| Property and home improvement | £4 – £9 |
| Health and fitness | £3 – £7 |
| Education and how-to | £2.50 – £6 |
| Food and cooking | £2 – £5 |
| Gaming | £1.50 – £4 |
| Entertainment, vlogs, reactions | £1 – £3 |
| Kids content | £0.50 – £2 |
Two channels with a million views a month can be £1,000/month and £15,000/month businesses. The view counts are identical. Only the subject differs.
CPM and RPM, worked through
The two figures get used interchangeably and they are not the same, which is why quoted earnings so often look wrong.
Take a video with 100,000 views in a niche with a £12 CPM:
- Not every view carries an ad. Say 60% are monetized – 60,000 monetized views.
- 60,000 ÷ 1,000 × £12 = £720 gross ad revenue.
- YouTube keeps 45%. You receive £396.
- Your RPM is £396 ÷ 100 = £3.96, against a £12 CPM.
The headline CPM was three times your actual RPM. When someone quotes a channel earning “£12 per thousand views”, ask which figure they mean – and always value a channel on RPM, because that is the money that arrives.
Seasonality moves this by half
Advertiser budgets are not flat across the year, and a channel valued on one month can be badly mispriced.
| Period | Against annual average |
|---|---|
| Q4, especially December | +30% to +50% |
| January | -20% to -30% |
| Q2–Q3 | Roughly average |
A seller quoting December earnings is showing you the best month of the year. Ask for trailing twelve months, and if they offer a single month, ask which one and why.
Audience geography changes everything
RPM follows where your viewers are, not where you are. A UK creator with a largely Indian or Brazilian audience earns at those markets’ rates, which are a fraction of UK or US rates.
Rough ordering, highest first: United States, Australia, Norway, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, then Western Europe, then most of Asia and South America.
This matters enormously when buying. Two channels with identical view counts and identical niches can differ threefold on RPM purely on audience geography, and it is a single screen in YouTube Analytics. Ask for it.
Shorts pay differently, and much less
Shorts revenue comes from a pooled fund, divided by view share after music licensing is deducted. UK Shorts RPM typically lands between £0.04 and £0.15 per 1,000 views.
That is not a typo. Shorts pay roughly one to two percent of what long-form finance content pays per view. If the back catalogue leans on licensed commercial music, licensing takes another bite before you see anything.
Seasonality is real
Advertiser budgets move through the year. Q4 routinely runs 30 to 50% above the annual average. January is the low, often 20 to 30% below, because budgets have reset.
If you are valuing a channel on a single month, check which month it was. A December figure flatters; January understates.
What you would actually earn, at three scales
Putting RPM and volume together, in a mid-tier UK niche at roughly £4 RPM:
| Monthly views | At £2 RPM | At £4 RPM | At £10 RPM |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50,000 | £100 | £200 | £500 |
| 250,000 | £500 | £1,000 | £2,500 |
| 1,000,000 | £2,000 | £4,000 | £10,000 |
Read across a row rather than down a column. The same audience is worth five times more in finance than in entertainment, and choosing the niche is a decision you make once, at the start, that outweighs years of optimising everything else.
Ad revenue is rarely the whole picture
Channels earning well from YouTube usually have AdSense as their smallest line:
- Affiliate links. A single well-matched product in a review can out-earn the ad revenue on the same video several times over.
- Sponsorships. Priced per view, typically well above AdSense RPM, and negotiated directly.
- Your own product. The highest margin available, and the reason many channels exist at all.
- Memberships and Super Thanks. Small for most channels, meaningful for communities.
When valuing a channel, ask what proportion of income is AdSense. A channel at 90% AdSense is exposed to a single revenue source it does not control. One at 40% is a business.
What this means when buying
Ask for RPM before views. A channel with 200,000 monthly views in personal finance is worth substantially more than one with 800,000 in entertainment, and the view count alone will actively mislead you.
Ask for trailing 12-month RPM, the split between Shorts and long-form, traffic sources, and audience geography.
Our monetized YouTube channels list niche and monetization type up front for exactly this reason, and we screen-share analytics before purchase. If a seller will not show you RPM, assume the number is bad.