How Much “Housing Crash” YouTubers Really Make

I have been earning YouTube ad revenue ever since April of 2020, and all of my content is real estate related. Therefore, I have a very unique perspective regarding how much people who make real estate content on YouTube, how much they actually make. First of all, though, before I share how much YouTubers make making housing crash videos, I just want to say this as well. The purpose of this video is not to get views. Frankly, this video is probably going to flop because it's not like the typical videos I make on my channel regarding real estate related topics and housing market videos nationwide, of course, in California here as well. Second of all, this video is not calling anyone out. I'm just going to provide some transparency regarding how much people are making on YouTube, especially regarding real estate content that is more negative news on the platform. I want to share exactly how much I'm actually earning on YouTube to get an idea about approximately how much other people on YouTube make as well. First, I want to provide some context if you guys aren't familiar with how people who post videos on YouTube, how it actually works. As a YouTube creator, I've been on YouTube since October of 2019. The ads you're seeing on the video, you might saw a video before you started watching this video, or you might saw an ad before watching this video, is that YouTube places ads in the video, so they get the advertisers. I'm not aware of any of the advertisers that post ads on my channel, but YouTube takes about 45% of the ad revenue, and they give about 55% to the person who posted the video. So there's a 55 to 45% split on ad revenue that's generated from the channel. And this is exactly how YouTube makes money, right? The advertisers, and this is how YouTubers also make money as well, based on the ad revenue they pay. And as a YouTube creator, I'm paid by the number of views. So therefore, if I make a video that gets a lot of views, I will earn more ad revenue as well. Also, the pay rate varies by the niche of your videos and of course, your channel as well. So real estate related content and finance related content tend to pay a higher pay rate for ad revenue compared to prank videos due to different demographics. On top of that, for English speaking countries, the ad revenue rates tend to be a lot higher compared to other non-English speaking countries. In addition, YouTube pays a lot more for long form videos of eight minutes or longer, for example, compared to shorts. Shorts, which are less than three minutes long, I don't post shorts on the channel, pay a lot less. They're paying basically pennies on the dollar compared to a video that's at least eight minutes longer. I should say that YouTube pays more than twice as high for a video that's at least eight minutes long compared to a video that's less than eight minutes long. The reason for this is that YouTube or the creator can put what's called mid-roll ads in the video. In other words, instead of just having an ad at the beginning of the video and the end of the video, they can place ads in the middle. And therefore, the creator and YouTube gets paid a lot more because more ads are shown to the viewer. All right, let's talk about housing crash videos because those really kind of like dominate the videos on YouTube, similar to mainstream media, for example. So for example, bad news on YouTube or in the mainstream media tends to get more views. And therefore, when there's more views, there's more ad revenue that's generated. And therefore, the person or the company that posted an article or a video, that's more negative news, tends to get a lot more views and therefore more money. And this is just simply because people are wired to protect themselves. And they're really curious about any negative news out there. I also will say that I did my fair share of negative content back in 2022, especially. Back then, we saw, of course, mortgage rates spiking from 3% to 7%. Inventories piled up as well, which caused home prices to decrease from the year prior that for the first time about 12 years. So that was the last time we had a real estate correction. And some markets, frankly, across the United States or some markets nationwide are still have home prices down from the peak of 2022. And because there was all this volatility going on the market, I was making videos very often, actually made 374 videos in 2022. And because of that and also the views, YouTube actually paid me very, very well. But my big aha moment was in 2023. I recognized that home values or home prices still increase that year, despite all the volatility that occurred. And therefore, my content has more or less kind of changed ever since then. More neutral videos that I made back in 2022, for example. All right, so let's have a look at my analytics. So YouTube provides analytics. If you make videos, they provide a lot of demographics regarding your viewers, where they live, how old they are, et cetera. So most of my viewers live in the United States and also it's real estate content. So my ad revenue tends to be a lot higher compared to prank channels. So here's my analytics and I'm looking at 2024. Last year, this is last year, I made about $30,000 in ad revenue. That's money that YouTube actually sent me after they took their cut of 45%. The most I made that year was in the month of May, I made about $3,900 for that month. Now, the reason why I'm sharing this is that of course, YouTube pays pretty well, right? But it varies depending on the frequency of your videos and the type of content you make. More recently, I've been posting maybe once every week, once every other week, because I'm focusing on my other YouTube channel, which is Sacramento Home Goals. So anyways, but I still wanna post on this channel, just kind of hard to find time being a real estate agent and having two channels. So here's what I really wanna focus on here. This is RPM. This is the rate that YouTube paid me in 2024 per thousand views. So my RPM was $11 and 64 cents. So therefore, I got paid on average $11 and 64 cents for every 1,000 views I received in 2024. The reason why this is so important is that I can take this rate and look at the views that other people are making on YouTube regarding real estate content and get a fairly good estimation regarding how much they're actually earning. And if I change this to 2023, for example, we can see the ad revenue and the rates really didn't change a whole lot, $11 and 52 cents. In 2023, I made about $76,000 just in ad revenue, which is a part of the revenue that comes from YouTube. Some of it also comes from real estate clients who want to buy and sell houses in the Sacramento region, right? So let's have a look at Scott Walters, who is my brother from another mother. Actually never have met him before, but I actually posted a poll on my YouTube channel. And one of the creators you guys wanna see was Scott Walters. So you can see here videos in the last 30 days, I've made two in the last 30 days. Yeah, gosh, I don't have a time anymore to make daily uploads like I did in years past, but I'm doing my best. So I only made two videos. He made 68 videos and he's making a lot of shorts. So I think he makes about one short per day. And let's just look at his content here, which is right here. So he posted a video yesterday and then six days before that. So he makes a video every two or three days-ish, right? So over the past 30 days, his views are 120,000, doing a fantastic job getting views, but 68 videos. So the one thing that's really hard to kind of figure out how much creators make if they do post shorts is that shorts again pay pennies on the dollar compared to a long form video that's over eight minutes, for example. So taking 120,000, I don't know how much views of that comes from shorts or not. So this is a very rough estimate. 120,000 divided into 1,000 because again, we get paid by the 1,000 per 1,000 views is 120 multiplied that by, let's just say 11, about $1,300 over the past 30 days. Now looking at ReVenture, for example, he does a really good job to really capture attention and therefore getting attention gets you views, right? So he's getting, he's basically crushing it, right? I don't know how many subscribers he has. Yeah, 671,000 subscribers. Absolutely insane. I believe it's mostly real estate content. I know a lot of you guys who follow my channel also follow his. I see maybe a couple of videos of his, but he is crushing it, right? $1.54 million. So looking at that, 1.4 right there, divide into 1,000, boom, 1,500, multiply that by 11. So on the high end, he's earning, he did earn about $17,000 in the past 30 days. However, though, looking at shorts though, because let's look at videos, videos, he posted 37. I posted two videos. I mean, he's doing, he's cranking out the content like crazy, right? Looking at shorts, his shorts get a very good amount of views as well. So I don't know how often he posts, but a short video of 13,000 views is going to be way below that $11 rate that I shared. So on the high end, he's probably earning about $17,000 if all those views came from long form videos. But again, he has a lot of shorts here. I don't know how often he posts, but if those shorts, a lot of those views are coming from shorts, then he's likely earning a lot less than that figure. Now, just looking at his long form videos, the last one he posted was just five hours ago, already 21,000 views, insane. Eight days ago, 168,000 views. So based on that video right there, which is a long form video, it's 19 minutes long, 168,000 views, multiply that by 11. That video alone, he's probably earning around $1,800 just for that 20 minute video. He is absolutely crushing it earning ad revenue. So there's a couple of other things I want to mention on this video. Again, I'm not calling out anyone. I'm just providing some transparency regarding mainstream media and YouTube and how it all works because I think a lot of people watch videos. They have no idea how people actually earn a living from that. So one thing I actually noticed when I was looking at housing crash, I was actually searching on YouTube for housing crash videos. I found a lot of faceless channels that were kind of like doom and gloom, right? The market's crashing, housing market's worse than 2008, but there's no indication regarding who is actually making these videos. On top of that, there's no one in the video other than B-roll and a lot of voiceovers you can make with AI. So just be careful regarding what you see out there. I don't know who this person is who's making these videos. But they're absolutely crushing it though. 12,000 subscribers and 50 videos and they're getting a lot of views. So I would imagine that there probably is a lot of maybe corporations, companies, individuals making videos, potentially using that with AI to create all these videos in order to get the most views and therefore ad revenue as well. Again, I don't know who is making these videos, but there's a lot out there that are faceless videos that someone could probably replicate and earn ad revenue from. Lastly, I want to share Sachs Realty. So Todd has a channel. He's been posting videos on YouTube for years now. I was a guest on his channel several years ago. He was a gracious host. And one thing I want to mention regarding his channel, and this is really important to kind of get an idea about people who are really focused on negativity. They're going to get the most views and therefore the most revenue. And he actually has been doing a really good job. I saw recently here. Let's go back here. So what realtors aren't telling homebuyers. First time homebuyer tips to avoid being house poor. And then the most important home buying advice you'll ever hear. Right. All really good videos and home inspection tips, all really good videos if you're looking to buy a house. But look at the views compared to the negative, more negative news videos he does. Home inspection tips, 3600 views, 5100 views for homebuyer tips. So he's probably earning around like 30 to about $50 per video there. However, he jumped to six days ago. It says the housing crash. Nobody's expecting 48000 views. And so this is really hard for someone who is trying to earn a living. Right. I think he's a real estate agent in the somewhere on the East Coast, for example. But he probably sells houses. He probably does YouTube on the side. So I want to say here is that the people who make videos on YouTube, if you're making videos that really help people a lot, like homebuyer advice, you know, tips for home inspection tips, you know, overall tips for homebuyers. Those videos tend to get a low level of views, but housing crash type videos get a lot of views. And so it's really hard as a creator if you're spending all the time and money in creating a video that could take hours to make, then you're almost incentivized to make more negative news videos because you're actually earn a living from those videos due to the ad revenue. But as a real estate agent making videos like these that help buyers, especially in your neck of the woods, they reach out to you, you help them buy or sell a home. Obviously, you can earn a lot more money than ad revenue. But I want to say this because it is really easy to get kind of like caught off guard here regarding, OK, gosh, I can make a video, spend all this time on making a video regarding homebuyer advice, maybe something good that happened in the market, like home prices increase and your ad revenue is very, very minimal. If you change that and make a video about the housing market's going to crash, then your ad revenue is a lot, lot higher. So this was kind of like the dilemma that I had over the past several years when I was spending a lot of time on YouTube. Is that if I made a video based on a new report that showed that, you know, the market was bouncing back, home sales rose greatly, home prices increased greatly as well. It was almost not worth it to make a video like that, even though it was the truth, because the ad revenue from that video would be minimal. On top of that, people would unsubscribe because they want to hear about something going on with the market that is actually negative. It's definitely the gripe I have regarding YouTube in general. So I hope this video was helpful. I know you guys actually asked for this video. I spent actually days, honestly, trying to figure out how do I actually provide some information regarding how much people earn on YouTube. But hopefully you guys appreciate the transparency here. I've actually had never shared publicly how much I earn on ad revenue on this YouTube channel. With that said, I hope you guys got some value out of today's video. Have an amazing day and we'll see you in the next video.