YouTube monetization - how to make money off your views

The amount of money that you make on YouTube definitely varies, but typically most people say they're getting somewhere around $2 per thousand views on average. It depends on a number of factors such as where those views are coming from (ie. which countries), who they're coming from (ie. age and sex), what your content is about, and what else you've got going on with your channel in terms of the videos, views, subscribers, etc.

Many YouTubers earn revenue from selling merchandise, music on iTunes when relevant, affiliate promotions, and brand deals (ie. sponsorship and product placement). The majority of the bigger content creators on YouTube don't make most of their income from Adsense because they can often get a sponsor to pay MUCH higher CPM's ($ per 1000 views) or even a good flat rate amount for promotion/endorsement in a video.

The ad income will vary drastically based on who is viewing your content and if you can have your inventory direct sold or if you're using google to fill it and if you have an MCN taking a cut, etc. But let's break it down:

ADS
Let’s assume you're part of an MCN, and you're getting a $5 CPM (probably likely). YouTube takes 45% off the top, and then you have to give a percentage to your MCN (let's say 25%). Here's how that would break out:
$5.00 CPM
$5.00 CPM x 55% to channel (after 45% goes to YouTube) = $2.75
45% of views are monetized ~ $1.24 (odds are most of your views won't have ads)
25% goes to MCN ~ $1.15
Total to creator ~ $1.15 per thousand views

OTHER REVENUE OPPORTUNITIES
I literally just did a blog post about this, you can read that here (http://brendangahan.com/?p=343). But, long story short, YouTube can be a great platform to cultivate an audience, and from there you can channel the audience to any number of revenue opportunities (Merch, etc). Hope that helps.

I've monetized my own YouTube channel by offering online courses.

With a very small channel I've seen some quick revenues.

My stats:
- 12 videos
- 150,000 views approx.
- 2100 subscribers

Revenue:
- on YouTube = $0
- from online courses sold through YouTube - $10k+ per month

If you're interested I put together a series of blog posts about how to do this here:
http://blog.thinkific.com/?s=youtube