How Much Money Does a 1K Subscriber YouTube Channel Make in 1 Month?

My first full month of monetization, with 1000 subscribers, has just recently passed. Come and take a peek! This is particularly useful for you if you are working your way towards YouTube monetization.

The first video I uploaded onto my sports card oriented YouTube channel was in October 2021. Ten months later, shortly after uploading my 125th video, I finally hit that coveted 1,000 subscriber mark and was able to get my channel monetized. I actually hit the 4,000 watch hour requirement about 3 months before that, which was another milestone in itself for me, but August 2022 is when I was finally able to become monetized. Let’s look at what all you nosy people (I’m nosy too!) want to know: How much money am I now rollin’ in?

My Channel’s Analytics

Let me show you behind the curtain a bit here and share with you a little bit about my channel’s analytics. I’ll save the actual amount I made in my first month of monetization for just a little bit later, since I think it’s useful to get some of the numbers behind the number to give you a better context of things.

As you can see here, within the last 28 days I’ve had 7,472 total views. Which is a little bit higher than previous months, but not by any significant amount. My views and subscriber count have been continuing a gradual upward momentum, so the numbers do increase month to month, but it’s been mostly a slow, constant chugging forward. I had one or two little spurts here and there through the ten months, though nothing super major, mostly just a constant slow movement. My channel has been a tortoise, not a hare.

I tend to upload a new video approximately every three days. There’s some occasions here and there where it may be different, but generally it’s an every three day thing, and it has been for most of the life of my channel.

YouTube Shorts Experiment

You can see that in the second half of the month there are a whole lot more uploads, and that is entirely because I am doing YouTube shorts now, when I had never before done that. If it seems interesting to people, I am doing an experiment of 30 days with YouTube shorts that I’ll make a video and perhaps an article about later, so check back for that. I’ve already pre-uploaded an entire month’s worth of shorts (all snippets from previously uploaded longer form videos that I thought people might enjoy, mostly from before I had much of a subscriber number yet), seeing if that does anything to my channels growth. At the time I’m writing this article, I haven’t seen them doing much yet, but perhaps there will be something to share by the end of the experiment.

“Views” and “Watch Time”

My channel has been getting more daily views more recently, but again, not by like a huge number. The nice thing there for me is there is a couple of older videos that seem to be getting an evergreen kind of interest to them, which is a big reason my daily views have been increasing.

My newly uploaded videos don’t necessarily get that many views, some do better than others of course, but a handful of older videos keep getting some views. And the number of videos getting that kind of ongoing viewership has grown from 1 to 2 to 3 to maybe 4 or 5 videos now, which has been helpful to my analytics. They don’t get a ton of views, but they get consistent views.

For my channel, the ‘watch time’ has also generally been paralleling the views. My average watch time per view has always hoovered around a similar number, like 4–5 minutes. Some ups and downs, but generally watch time overall has shown a stead, slow increase. Tortoise style once again.

Looking at my ongoing ‘subscriber count’ it’s much more random. Some days no new subscribers, some days 8. No real rhyme or reason here, just spurts. And as you can see, I got 91 subscribers in the past month, which is pretty similar to an average month for me. The first month or two of the channel had very very slow growth, but after that I’ve generally had 75 to 100 subscribers per month for most months.

Alright, before we look at the revenue, let’s look at a few other things real quick.

In the ‘content’ tab, you can see here that I’ve just recently started with YouTube Shorts, like I mentioned already. So far I seem to just get around 30–50 views per short, but again, we’ll see what happens to this experiment a bit later. I’m not good at the viral style of video making that a short seems to want, but it’s just another area to learn about over time.

Here on my ‘video’ content tab, you can see a few more metrics. 5.2% click-through rate (which is just ‘okay’). 4 minute 45 second average watch time (which is decent).

In my ‘audience’ tab here, you can see I have had about 4.2K unique viewers this month, including about 802 returning viewers. I kind of like that number. I mean being that I have just over 1K subscribers, and about 802 returning viewers seems like a pretty good number to my logical thinking. I don’t have anything to compare that to, but I like the idea that maybe 80% of my subscribers watch at least more than one video per month. Seems like a good sign to me, people wanting to come back more than once. Maybe that means they’ll keep coming back into the future.

Revenue Analytics

Alright, now to what you have all been waiting for. How much I made in my first monetized month.

You can see here the RPM and the CPM are about $6.30 and $12.50 respectively. If you don’t know what those numbers are, they basically tell you how much money is made per thousand views.

Some YouTube niches have really high numbers here, like tech and personal finance, while others have lower numbers. Seems here the sports card niche is really pretty low, at least from what I have seen and what is going on with my channel here. The RPM, by the way, represents how much I myself will make, while the CPM represents the whole amount, but then of course YouTube takes it big chunk from that.

Looking at how much I make in an average day, you can see that my first day monetized was August 10th, and I made a whopping $0.17 that day. Though I have to say, that was probably my favorite $0.17 I have ever made.

After two days that climbed up to about $2. And since that time, it tends to hoover between $1 and $2 per day. Maybe a tiny bit higher on average since I started uploading YouTube Shorts daily, but such a small difference so far really. But again, there still is a slow upward trajectory here, which is what I would hope for.

Scrolling down, you can see these five videos are my biggest money makers so far. It is interesting to note that four of these five are older uploads. The second one there is the only one I’ve uploaded during this past month. The rest there are a bit older. That first one is my only video on my channel that has over 5K views in its lifetime, and that one seems to be cementing itself in a nice evergreen status, which I’m happy about.

I can also see that three of my top five money making videos are all related to the same topic (the sports card marketplace, COMC), so perhaps I should be making more videos in that direction!

Alright, and my total revenue for my first month of monetization is…..

$45.25!!!!

That may not seem like a lot to you. But I love it!

It’s, without any question, the most work I’ve ever put in for $45. I mean, it’d be tough to calculate how many hours I’ve put into this. My hourly wage for this so far is pennies per hour. But that’s alright. While I do hope the channel will continue to grow and bring a better and better stream of income for me over time, I’m not only doing this channel for that revenue stream. I’m doing this channel because I want to do this channel. I enjoy it. I enjoy connecting with people in the sports card community with it. I enjoy capturing and sharing learning with it. It’s not just the revenue that I’m motivated by here. That’s not an absent factor altogether, but it’s just one pixel of the painting.

If you like this kind of article, I have a few experiments coming up in the near future that you may be interested in learning about. As well as uploading 30 days of YouTube shorts, I am also cross posting those daily to Instagram, Tik-Tok and Facebook, and will be making a video and writing an article sharing what happened with all of that. I had been doing very little on those platforms previously, so it should be interesting learning.