How Much YouTube Paid Me in July 2023 (Full AdSense Breakdown)

Social Blade said I made $1,900 in July 2023. The actual number was $9,018.73. That gap is not a rounding error. It is a reason to never trust a third-party estimate again when real AdSense data is sitting right there. In this post I am pulling back the curtain on every single dollar YouTube paid me in July 2023: the views, the watch hours, the RPM differences by video, the near-zero Shorts payout, and the content strategy that made it all happen with fewer than 100,000 subscribers.

If you are building a YouTube channel right now and wondering whether the effort is worth it, or whether your niche even pays, this breakdown will give you a real-world reference point. My channel covers making money online. Your results will differ. But the variables that drive your revenue (niche, audience location, RPM by topic) work the same way regardless of what you cover. Read this all the way through and you will know exactly which of those variables to optimize first.

What You’ll Walk Out With

The exact July 2023 AdSense payout on my channel ($9,018.73) vs. what Social Blade estimated ($1,900)
How 464,000 views and a $19.62 RPM translate into real dollars
Why two videos with the same view count can earn $8 vs. $64 per 1,000 views
The brutal truth about YouTube Shorts revenue ($0.07 per 1,000 views)
The two content formats that drove my top-performing videos that month
The exact research process I use to find video ideas already pulling traffic
Why 6-month-old videos drove most of my July views, and what that means for your channel
How to figure out which type of content is the right fit for your skills using finder.platformproof.com

What Social Blade Got Dead Wrong

A lot of people treat Social Blade like it is an official number. It is not. Social Blade estimates earnings using a generic low CPM applied across your total views. It does not know your niche, it does not know where your audience lives, and it does not account for any premium RPMs your specific content might attract. For my channel in July 2023, Social Blade estimated $1,900 per month and roughly $22,000 per year. The real July number alone was $9,018.73. That is almost five times the monthly estimate.

This matters because newer creators often look at Social Blade numbers for bigger channels to decide whether their own niche is worth pursuing. Those estimates are consistently low, sometimes by a factor of three, four, or five. If Social Blade is the reason you think YouTube does not pay well in your category, run the actual math on the RPMs your content would attract before you write off the platform.

The July 2023 Numbers at a Glance

Here is what the YouTube Studio dashboard showed for July 1 through July 31, 2023:

Total views: 464,000 (457,000 from long-form content, about 5,000 from Shorts)
Watch hours: approximately 28,000 to 29,000
New subscribers: 9,600
Overall RPM: $19.62 per 1,000 views
Total AdSense earnings: $9,018.73
YouTube Premium revenue: $78.22
Super Chats from live streams: $3.26

At the time I had just crossed 100,000 subscribers on the channel. Getting to 464,000 views in a single month felt significant, but what surprised me more was seeing just how concentrated the revenue was inside that number. A handful of videos with high RPMs contributed a disproportionate share of the total payout, while other videos had many more views but brought in far less money. That dynamic is where most YouTube advice misses the point entirely.

Also worth noting on the watch hours: there was a time not long before this when I was struggling to earn 1,000 watch hours in six months. Getting nearly 29,000 in one month did not happen because I cracked some algorithm secret. It happened because the content compounded over time and because I kept posting consistently even when individual videos were not breaking out.

Breaking Down RPM: Why Your Niche Matters More Than Your View Count

RPM stands for Revenue Per Mille, which is the actual dollar amount YouTube deposits into your account per 1,000 views. It is not the same as CPM. CPM is what advertisers pay the platform per 1,000 ad impressions. RPM is what you actually receive after YouTube takes its cut and after accounting for views that did not show an ad. Your RPM will always be lower than your CPM. When you see a number in Studio and it does not match what you expected, that gap is the explanation.

In July 2023 my videos ranged from an $8 RPM on the low end to $64.25 on the high end. The high-RPM outlier was a video about the Target affiliate program. That one paid $64.25 per 1,000 views. One of my “I tried it” series videos paid around $8 per 1,000 views. The “Stupid Simple Way to Start Affiliate Marketing” video came in around $30. I had at least one video hit $50. That is an 8x spread between my lowest and highest earners, even though they were all on the same channel in the same niche in the same month.

The variables that drive those differences are the advertisers behind each topic and the location of the viewers watching. A video on affiliate programs for a major retailer attracts advertisers with bigger budgets who are paying to reach people likely to spend money on products. A video targeting a broad, general audience may pull viewers from countries where advertisers pay far less per thousand impressions. Both videos can have 10,000 views. One might earn $640. The other might earn $80.

This is why I said in the video that if your goal is to make money on YouTube, you should treat it like a business and make business decisions. When you see a video like the Target affiliate program one paid $64.25 RPM, the logical move is to make another video in that same territory. The channel and the topic have already proven the advertiser demand is there. Ignoring that data and just making whatever topic feels interesting is leaving real money on the table.

YouTube Shorts Pays Almost Nothing Right Now

My Shorts got about 5,000 views in July 2023 and paid $0.07 per 1,000 views. That works out to roughly $0.35 total from Shorts that month. Compare that to my long-form RPM of $19.62 and the math is not encouraging for anyone building their income strategy around Shorts volume.

That does not mean Shorts are useless. They can build subscriber count, they can funnel people to longer videos, and they can surface your channel to audiences who would never find it through regular search. But if your reason for making Shorts is to collect AdSense income, the numbers as of mid-2023 simply do not support that. You would need millions of Shorts views to match what a few hundred thousand long-form views earn. Use Shorts as a discovery tool, not a revenue tool, until the payout structure changes.

The Content That Actually Drove My July Revenue

Four of the top five performing videos in July were from my “I tried it” series. These are videos where I personally test a side hustle or money-making method that other creators are promoting, then show the real results. The format works for a simple reason: people searching for information about a method want honest feedback, not a sales pitch. When a video title signals that someone actually ran the experiment, it pulls in viewers who are on the fence about whether the method is real.

The other content type that consistently performed for me that month was what I call the negative keyword format. Instead of titling a video “How to Make Money with X,” you title it “The Truth About X” or “Why Gurus Are Lying to You About X.” This worked well partly because those titles stand out in a sea of optimistic thumbnails, and partly because skeptical buyers are high-value viewers. Someone who has been burned before by bad advice and is doing research before trying something new is exactly the person advertisers want to reach. Their attention is worth more per impression.

The top single video that month, the one with 75,000 views in July alone, was uploaded December 26 of the previous year. It was more than six months old when it generated that traffic. That is the part of YouTube most new creators do not understand. A video you post today is not a single event that either goes viral or dies. It is an asset that can sit quietly for months and then catch traction when the algorithm serves it to the right audience. The majority of my top July videos were over six months old.

How I Find Video Ideas That Already Have Traffic

I use two methods consistently to find topics before making a video. Neither requires a paid tool. Both work in any niche.

Method one: YouTube search with date filter. I type my niche keyword into YouTube search (in my case something like “make money” or “affiliate marketing”), then use the filters to limit results to the past month, and sort by view count. This shows me what topics are pulling the most views right now in my space. If a video on a specific sub-topic has 30,000 views in the last 30 days, there is proven demand for that topic at this moment in time.

Method two: channel monitoring. I keep a list of channels in my niche inside a Google Sheet. Every week or two I visit those channels and look at which videos have performed well in the past two weeks. If a video from someone like Ryan Hildreth has hit 33,000 views in a short window, I note the topic. My goal is not to copy the video. It is to either test the method myself and show real results, or to react to the method and add my own perspective. I am piggybacking on demand that already exists rather than trying to create demand from scratch.

The specific example I mentioned in the video: Ryan Hildreth had a video titled something like “Earn $300 Per Day Watching YouTube Videos” that was sitting at 33,000 views. I flagged that as a video to test and cover on my own channel. I also mentioned a Success With Sam video that had pulled 13,000 views and was worth watching. Both of these came from a systematic scan of channels I already had on a list. There was no guesswork about whether the topic had an audience. The view counts told me it did.

The thumbnail approach that goes with this: once I find a video that performed well, I download the thumbnail, use it inside my own larger thumbnail as a reference point, and make it clear to potential viewers that my video is testing or responding to the popular one. This creates a visual signal that my video is about the same topic while making it clear it offers something different: the actual test results, or a more honest perspective.

Not sure which type of content fits your skills and situation?

The Platform Proof Finder matches working adults to the right online income method based on what they already know and how they work. Try it at finder.platformproof.com.

Full Revenue Breakdown: Where Every Dollar Came From

For those who want the complete picture of how $9,018.73 was made up, here is how each revenue source broke down:

Long-form video AdSense: The bulk of the total, at an RPM of $19.62 across approximately 457,000 views. Individual video RPMs ranged from $8 (lower-performing “I tried it” content) up to $64.25 (Target affiliate program).
YouTube Shorts: Approximately 5,000 views at $0.07 per 1,000 views. Essentially nothing, a fraction of a dollar for the month.
Live stream AdSense: A higher RPM than long-form at $25.83 per 1,000 views, but a smaller total view count, so the contribution was modest.
YouTube Premium: $78.22. Premium subscribers do not see ads, but YouTube pays creators a share of their subscription fee based on how much time those subscribers spent watching your content.
Super Chats: $3.26. A couple of viewers sent Super Chats during live streams.

Total from all YouTube sources: $9,018.73. This does not include affiliate marketing commissions or digital product sales, both of which were separate income streams that month. The $9,018 is purely what YouTube itself deposited.

One more thing worth making explicit: this was earned with fewer than 100,000 subscribers. The channel had just reached that milestone around this time. Before that, I was under 100K. The common belief that you need a large following to earn meaningful money on YouTube is wrong. A small but highly targeted audience in a niche with strong advertiser demand can outperform a general channel with 10 times the subscribers. Subscriber count is a vanity metric. RPM and niche are the revenue metrics.

Honest Drawbacks Worth Knowing Before You Count on YouTube Income

It took real time to get to 464,000 monthly views. I struggled to earn 1,000 watch hours in six months when I started. The growth was not linear. There were months where nothing seemed to be working and subscriber growth was maybe 20 people per day. The July numbers existed because of videos that were posted months or even years earlier and slowly compounded. Anyone planning to rely on YouTube AdSense income within their first three months is going to have a hard time.

Revenue also fluctuates month to month. CPMs tend to be higher in the fourth quarter when advertisers are pushing holiday spending, and lower in January and February when ad budgets reset. A month where you earn $9,000 does not mean the next month will match it. Building affiliate income and digital product income alongside AdSense is what smooths that out.

Finally, niche matters enormously. If your content attracts viewers from countries where advertisers pay lower CPMs, your RPM could be $2 to $4 even if your view count is identical to mine. That is not a reason to avoid those topics if you care about them. It is just a reason to go in with accurate expectations about what the AdSense alone will pay out.

Find Your X

The right online income method is not the same for everyone. What worked for my channel in July 2023 (a make-money-online niche, the “I tried it” testing format, affiliate marketing tutorials) works because it fits how I operate and what I already know. If you are trying to reverse-engineer someone else’s path without accounting for your own skills and constraints, you will waste a lot of time. The Platform Proof Finder is a free tool that matches you to the right starting point based on what you already bring to the table. Check it out at finder.platformproof.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much did YouTube pay you in July 2023?

YouTube paid me $9,018.73 in July 2023 from AdSense on my channel. This came from approximately 464,000 total views across long-form videos, Shorts, and live streams. This figure does not include affiliate commissions or digital product sales made during the same month.

What was your RPM in July 2023?

My overall RPM for July 2023 was $19.62 per 1,000 views on long-form content. Individual videos ranged from $8 at the low end to $64.25 on a Target affiliate program video. Live stream content came in at $25.83 RPM, and Shorts paid just $0.07 per 1,000 views.

Was this with more or less than 100,000 subscribers?

Just at or just under 100,000 subscribers. The channel reached that milestone around this time. The point I made in the video is that subscriber count does not determine AdSense income. Niche, RPM, and watch time do. You do not need a massive following to earn meaningful revenue if your content attracts high-value advertisers.

Why is Social Blade so far off from real earnings?

Social Blade estimates earnings using a single low CPM estimate applied to your total view count. It does not account for your niche, the countries your viewers are watching from, whether your content attracts premium advertisers, or the difference between CPM and RPM. For my channel, Social Blade estimated $1,900 for the month. The actual number was $9,018.73, nearly five times higher. Treat Social Blade as a rough floor estimate, not a real figure.

What content type performed best on your channel in July 2023?

The “I tried it” series performed best. Four out of my top five videos that month were tests of money-making methods other creators had promoted. The second-best performing format was what I call negative keyword content, using titles that call out misinformation or expose what gurus are not telling you. Both formats attract viewers who are already in research mode and likely to click on ads related to the topic.

How do you find video ideas worth covering?

I use two methods. First, YouTube search filtered to the past month and sorted by view count. This shows which topics are pulling traffic right now. Second, I keep a list of channels in my niche in a spreadsheet and check them every week or two to find videos that have done well in the last two weeks. When a video from a competitor has 30,000+ views in a short window, I either test the method myself or react to it with my own perspective.

Are YouTube Shorts worth making for income?

As of mid-2023, Shorts AdSense paid $0.07 per 1,000 views on my channel. That is not a meaningful income source. Shorts can be useful for growing subscribers and funneling viewers to longer content, but if you are making Shorts specifically to collect AdSense, the math does not support that strategy at that payout level. Use Shorts for discovery, not as your main revenue driver.

Do old videos keep making money on YouTube?

Yes. My single highest-viewed video in July 2023 was uploaded December 26 of the prior year, more than six months before that traffic spike. Most of my top July videos were over six months old. YouTube can resurface any video at any time if the algorithm determines it matches what a viewer is looking for. This is why consistency over a long window matters more than any single viral moment. Every video you post is an asset, not a one-time event.

Sources

YouTube Studio AdSense dashboard, July 1 to 31, 2023 (screen recorded in the video)
Social Blade estimate for the same channel and period, shown on screen for comparison
YouTube analytics: RPM breakdown by individual video, July 2023
YouTube Shorts revenue data, July 2023 (shown in Studio analytics)

Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.