YouTube RPM by Niche: What the 2026 Numbers Really Say

Finance channels earn $40 per 1,000 views, gaming earns $3, and kids content earns almost nothing. You have probably seen some version of that ranking, usually with no date and no method. YouTube itself publishes no RPM figures by niche. This guide separates what YouTube’s help pages say about how RPM works from what third-party publishers report, lines those reports up with their sources, and ends with a checklist for testing your own channel.

This is not licensed financial or tax advice. YouTube income is self-employment income for most US creators; the IRS Self-Employed Individuals Tax Center explains what that means for filing.

RPM and CPM, in YouTube’s own words

YouTube’s help center defines RPM as how much you earned per 1,000 video views. It is not an ad rate. The money counted in it includes ad revenue, a cut of YouTube Premium subscriptions, memberships, and the Super Chat and Super Stickers features.

CPM is the other side of the auction. YouTube describes it as what an advertiser pays for 1,000 ad impressions, and it reports a second version, playback-based CPM, which is the advertiser’s cost per 1,000 playbacks where an ad showed.

The help center gives two reasons RPM sits below CPM. RPM is counted after YouTube’s revenue share. And RPM divides by every view, including the ones that never served an ad.

That second reason explains most of the confusion in niche rankings. Two channels with identical CPMs can report very different RPMs if one of them has a large share of views that carry no ad.

The official mechanics in one table

Every row below comes from a YouTube Help page or the YouTube Official Blog, checked on September 28, 2026. None of it is an estimate.

A worked example with made-up round numbers shows how these rows combine. Say a long video’s watch-page ads produce $1,000 in net revenue in a month. At 55%, the creator’s share is $550. If the video had 200,000 views that month, the ad part of its RPM is $2.75, whether 30% or 90% of those views actually showed an ad.

Note the word “net.” YouTube pays its share on net revenue, not on the CPM you see, so multiplying CPM by 0.55 will not reproduce your RPM exactly.

Why YouTube has no RPM-by-niche table

Ad prices are set in an auction, and YouTube lists three things that move them: the time of year, the countries your viewers come from, and the ad formats on offer. A niche is a proxy for who is watching. It is not a price.

That is why the same topic can pay very differently on two channels. A history channel watched mostly in the United States and one watched mostly in regions with lower ad demand share a label and little else.

My view, after growing a YouTube channel past 130,000 subscribers as a one-person operation: the niche you are in sets a rough band, and almost everything you can change on a Tuesday afternoon lives inside that band. Format, length, audience and upload timing were always the levers I could actually pull. Switching topics to chase a number from someone else’s table never looked like a good trade to me.

What third parties report, side by side

The table below is a public data digest. Every figure is copied from a third-party publisher’s page as it read on September 28, 2026. These are self-reported or estimated numbers. Neither Solo Ops Lab nor YouTube has verified them, and none should be treated as a fact about what your channel will earn.

Read the finance column top to bottom. The one source that describes a dataset reports a median of about $2, from fewer than ten channels. The others run from $5 at the low end to $40 and up. Those are not small disagreements about the same thing. They are different measurements: medians against ranges, all views against selected audiences, a client sample against forum posts.

Two patterns do hold across every source that lists them. Gaming never ranks near the top. Kids content sits at or near the bottom everywhere, and that one has an official explanation: YouTube turns off personalized advertising on content set as made for kids, along with features such as memberships and Super Chat.

If you use one row of this table for anything, use it as a question, not a target. Ask how the publisher measured it before you plan around it.

Shorts: a different pool, and a 2027 threshold

Shorts do not earn the way long videos do. Each month, YouTube adds up the revenue from ads that run between Shorts in the feed. Part of that goes to music licensing when a Short uses music; a Short with no music sends all of its associated revenue into the Creator Pool. The pool is then divided among monetizing creators by their share of engaged views in each country, and each creator keeps 45% of what they are allocated.

Two consequences follow for anyone reading niche tables. Shorts RPM is calculated per 1,000 engaged views rather than all views, so it is a separate number. And a channel that posts both formats will see a blended RPM that says little about either one.

The bigger change is dated. In an announcement on August 10, 2026, YouTube said that from February 1, 2027, creators need 10 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days to be eligible for ads and subscription revenue sharing on Shorts. Channels under that line stay in the Partner Program and keep earning on long-form, and Shorts revenue sharing resumes automatically once they cross 10 million again.

New applicants face a higher bar from the same date: 8,000 qualified watch hours in the last 365 days, or 20 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days. YouTube says the change will not affect creators already in the program. Today’s help page still lists the current routes of 1,000 subscribers with 4,000 watch hours or 10 million Shorts views.

For a small channel that has been counting on Shorts for part of its RPM, that line matters more than any niche table. If your Shorts are well under 10 million views per quarter, plan on long-form carrying the ad income from February.

Seven checks before you blame your niche

Run this checklist in YouTube Studio before deciding your topic is the problem. Each item points to something YouTube says moves revenue.

1. Geography. Compare RPM for your top three viewer countries against last quarter. YouTube says a shift toward lower-CPM regions lowers CPM.
2. Month. Compare the same months year over year, not October against January. Advertisers bid higher before holidays.
3. Format mix. Split Shorts and long-form before reading any RPM. They are counted on different denominators.
4. Length and ad slots. Check which videos are 8 minutes or longer and whether their mid-roll slots are marked as unlikely to serve.
5. Suitability. Filter for limited-ads videos. On those, brands that only run on safer content will not advertise.
6. Audience setting. Confirm which videos are set as made for kids; personalized ads are off on them.
7. Revenue mix. Look at revenue by source. Memberships and Supers raise RPM without any change in ad demand.

If six of the seven are unchanged and RPM still dropped, then look at topic. My bet is that one of the first three will have moved.

What reaches your bank account is not RPM either

RPM is measured before taxes. YouTube asks every Partner Program creator, wherever they live, to submit US tax information. Without it, an individual account can have 24% of total worldwide earnings withheld, and a business account outside the US defaults to 30% of US earnings. Our guide on how creators pay taxes covers the filing side.

If you also run a website, the ad math there is separate from YouTube’s. The comparison of AdSense, Mediavine and Raptive covers who pays what on the web side, and the risk of running a new site on the same AdSense account as your channel.

Not in the Partner Program yet? The niche question comes after the audience question; start with the first 1,000 subscribers.

This week, open YouTube Studio, set the date range to the last 90 days, and write down RPM separately for long-form and for Shorts, for your top three countries. That six-number grid tells you more about your niche’s pay than any table on the internet, including the one above.