Transcription
In 2025, YouTube Shorts generate over a hundred billion views a day. And the top creators are earning tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.
Ever since Shorts ad revenue sharing launched in 2023, I have been earning thousands of dollars every single month with YouTube Shorts. So, in this video, I'm going to show you exactly how you can get a slice of this massive pie and make thousands of dollars a month with Shorts yourself.
If you ask Google how much do YouTube Shorts pay, it'll say 1 to 6 cents per thousand views. But that is quite honestly BS. Unless you're exclusively making content for India, the Philippines, or other low ad spend regions, the average RPM, how much you earn per thousand views, is actually much higher.
If you're targeting viewers from countries like the USA, Canada, UK, and Australia, well, then your average RPM will usually be anywhere from 15 to 25 or more. And that number has been increasing steadily, so it'll likely be quite higher in the future.
For example, this short of mine made over $700 from 3.5 million views because the RPM was 21 cents. And with this short that generated me over $6,000, it actually has quite a low RPM because it was uploaded a while ago and a lot of the audience came from India. But now in the last 7 days, the RPM is actually increased to 19.
Average RPM is increasing, but most people don't know that. So they dive into long-form content instead, making short-form a lot more untapped than long-form in my opinion.
Compared to YouTube long-form, we are still in the relative early days of YouTube Shorts monetization. It'll only get better from here as views go up and advertisers spend more. And as more monetization opportunities arise now, on top of ad revenue, we also have something called music deals where basically companies will pay you a percentage of what they earn from you using their music in your shorts. This can add upwards of 10 cents or even a lot more on top of your normal RPM just for simply adding certain songs to your shorts.
Now, most of the music deals that people recommend require your channel to be generating a certain number of views a month or for your channel to be monetized. But what most people don't know is that there are companies out there that will literally pay you from your first short without you even being monetized. Meaning, you can start making money right from your first post. And if you want access to one of these deals, the same one I used to generate $1,400 on this singular short without even being monetized, then join my community link down below. All the details are in there along with even more info about other monetization methods.
But in order to start making money from Shorts ad revenue, you need to reach the monetization requirements of 1,000 subscribers and 10 million valid public views in the last 90 days. And once monetized, you can make lots of money from just ad revenue alone.
Let's say for the sake of example, you have an RPM of 20. In that case, you only need 15 million views to generate $3,000. And believe me, that is quite easy to achieve. If you stack music deals on top of that, let's say it's another 10 cents, that $3,000 is now $4,500. And now, if you want $10,000 a month, you only need about 33 million views. Incredibly achievable.
So, the first step is to pick a profitable niche. Thankfully, I have other videos on my channel going over how to find niches and also plenty of videos just listing out the best niches. But basically, you want to identify a niche with the following criteria: high virality potential, meaning it can attract a large amount of viewers, millions. Channels in the niche should be able to consistently produce millions of views, and high RPM potential. It should be monetizable, meaning it's transformative, and it should ideally attract viewers from tier-one countries where advertisers spend the most.
For example, here's a channel in the US politics niche, and as we can see, it definitely has virality potential, consistently getting millions of views. And this niche attracts pretty much exclusively US-based viewers, many of whom are older in age, too. And this means it has high RPM potential. Virality combined with a high RPM equates to a highly profitable niche.
Step two, channel creation. A common issue that many people face is the zero-view jail where their shorts don't get pushed out. This can be avoided with an aged channel or a warmed-up channel. I buy channels from a site called agedytaccounts.org. They sell aged channels for just $5. And I have definitely noticed an increase in views when I use these channels. But you can also just create and warm up a channel. And you can do that by spending about 2 or 3 days just simply scrolling on the shorts feed. This tells YouTube that you are not a bot and you are indeed a real user, increasing the chances that your first few shorts actually get pushed out. And also, when you're scrolling, this is the perfect time to start tailoring your feed to show you content within your niche. Do this simply by engaging with relevant content and swiping away from irrelevant content. This will help with the next step, which is to create viral-worthy shorts.
And this consists of topic ideation, script writing, voice-over generation, and editing. Topic ideation comes down to your niche. So by this point, you should have found your competitors by scrolling on your feed. You basically just want to study their most viral shorts and make similar content. Take inspiration from them and add your own unique spin. You do not need to reinvent the wheel, but you also do not want to completely duplicate their content. Find a good balance. And there are two main types of content when it comes to the creation process: footage-dependent and script-dependent.
Footage-dependent is when the topic comes from the footage. So viral generic commentary, the largest and broadest faceless YouTube shorts niche where it's just commentary over a viral clip. That's footage-dependent because the footage is the idea and the script comes second. Script-dependent is when the script comes first and then the footage is found or created afterwards to go along with the narration. For example, the animal facts niche or the quiz niche. The script comes first. With script-dependent content, topics and scripts can usually be very easily generated with ChatGPT. But with footage-dependent, you have to spend a bit more time researching and finding clips, and it is best to write the scripts yourself and then possibly use ChatGPT afterwards to improve it.
After your script is all set, use ElevenLabs to generate a voice-over and CapCut to edit. And now when creating content, you want to maximize these two metrics to increase your chances of virality. And keep in mind, only with viral content will you get monetized quickly and earn lots of money. The percentage of viewers who stayed to watch and the average view duration, your retention. And here's a viral short of mine on a newer channel, which actually helped me just get monetized. So 81.4% stayed to watch and the average view duration was the length of the short, 20 seconds. I'm not going to say that you need to hit this analytic and this analytic and it will guarantee that you go viral. That's not how it works. But you do want these two analytics to be as high as possible. At least 75 to 80% should be staying to watch, ideally higher. I've hit 99% before, which of course led to virality. And then the average view duration should be high. If the short is under 30 seconds long, hitting and surpassing the duration of the short is best. But if it is closer to a minute or longer, an average view duration of over 45 or 50 seconds could be quite good as well. Keep all this in mind when creating your shorts. Make it so your short is deserving of those analytics with an attention-grabbing hook, an interesting topic, good storytelling, and high-quality production. This will greatly increase the chances of your shorts going viral.
Now, not all of your shorts will go viral, and that's fine, but you want as many to go viral as possible if you actually want to make money.
Step four is to post. As long as quality is maintained, you want to post more. Simple as that. More posting equals more views, which equals more cash. Post at least once a day starting out, and ramp up to two or three a day if you would like. There's plenty of successful channels out there posting upwards of 5 to 10 shorts a day with completely no issue. Just make sure to ramp up slowly. Doing it too early can increase the chances of you ending up in the zero-view jail. So, just be careful of that. And when it comes to posting time, don't overthink it that much. Just post at times when your target audience is likely to be online.
Step five is to outsource and scale. Since starting my faceless shorts journey, I have not edited a singular short. And because of this, running just one of my channels does not usually take me much more than an hour or two a month. If you are stuck spending hours a day editing content, you are greatly disadvantaged. I highly recommend hiring an editor either right from the beginning. Of course, this will be a financial risk if it's so early on. So, you can also wait until you get monetized and then you can invest into an editor. You can use Fiverr or Upwork, but I usually use this site, OnlineJobsPH. You can find very affordable services on here. So, I've left a link down below, but that's the best way to run multiple channels: hire an editor.
And I lastly want you to understand two main things that are absolutely crucial for you to succeed with shorts. For people that clicked off the video earlier or they're just going to ignore this advice, well, they're unfortunately going to fail miserably. You need consistency and volume. If you do not have these two things, making money with shorts is physically impossible. You need to post a high quantity of content for a consistent amount of time. If you just post 10 shorts sporadically over the period of a month and then complain that you haven't been monetized, you get discouraged, and you give up, well, then I I don't know what to tell you. This is a game of consistency and volume; people who possess these qualities will win and people lacking them will lose, and most people lack them. That's the reality. But if you stay consistent and focus on volume along with following the steps that we went over, well then you're going to be very successful.
If you want to learn more, I have more content on this channel and on my second channel to help you out. On top of that, I have more advanced detailed education, resources, and support inside my premium community, Viral Cash, linked down below. I have helped numerous people in there hit thousands of dollars a month with faceless YouTube Shorts. So, there is absolutely no reason why you can't do it, too.
Looking forward to seeing you inside.