Earn side · what creators are paid
YouTube CPM for creators
By Oliver Wakefield-Smith · updated July 2026
The short answer
Studio shows you two numbers and creators mix them up daily. CPM is what advertisers paid per 1,000 monetized playbacks, before YouTube's cut. RPM is what you keep per 1,000 total views, after the cut and after every unmonetized view. Google publishes the split: 55% of watch-page ad revenue to you.
The 55/45 math, end to end
RPM ≈ CPM × 0.55 × monetized-view rate
Studio CPM $12.00 × 0.55 × 0.80 monetized = $5.28 RPM
Studio CPM $12.00 × 0.55 × 0.50 monetized = $3.30 RPM
The 55% share is Google's published Partner Program term for watch-page ads. CPM and monetized-view inputs are illustrative; read your own from Studio.
Same advertiser demand, radically different payouts, purely on how many of your views carried ads. That monetized share, not the headline CPM, is usually why my CPM went up but my payout stayed flat. The full waterfall is the site's flagship worked example: the YouTube flip side.
Why niche moves your number
Advertisers bid on audiences, and audiences arrive sorted by content. Finance and B2B viewers attract bids from advertisers with five-figure customer values; gaming and vlog inventory attracts consumer bids at consumer prices. Creator-reported niche RPM tables circulate widely, but the ones we checked are self-reported, unaudited and undated, so this site prints none of them. The mechanism is documented (auction demand per audience); the specific folklore numbers are not. Your Studio breakdown, filtered by geography and format, is the only niche table that is true for you.
Shorts, and other pool economics
Shorts monetization pools ad revenue and pays per-view shares from the pool, a different machine from watch-page revshare; blending the two in one mental model produces nonsense RPMs. TikTok runs its creator pay entirely on the pool model, worked at TikTok creator pay. Metric definitions: what is RPM and CPM vs RPM.