RPMRevenue Per Mille
RPM stands for Revenue Per Mille — the creator-side equivalent of CPM. While CPM measures advertiser spend on ad impressions, RPM measures what actually lands in the creator's account per 1,000 total views (not just monetized views). RPM bundles AdSense, YouTube Premium revenue, channel memberships, Super Chat, and Shorts ad revenue into a single per-view rate.
RPM (Revenue Per Mille) is the dollar amount a creator earns per 1,000 video views, after YouTube's revenue share and across all monetization sources.
Why RPM matters for YouTube creators
RPM is the metric creators should optimise. CPM tells you what advertisers pay; RPM tells you what you earn. A video can have a great CPM but a poor RPM if half its views come from non-monetized regions, ad-blocked browsers, or Shorts. Tracking RPM month over month — and comparing it to your niche's benchmarks — surfaces three things: whether your audience country mix is shifting, whether ad inventory matches your content, and whether your long-form vs Shorts ratio is helping or hurting income. Most healthy long-form channels in English-speaking markets run an RPM of $3-8; finance and B2B channels can push $10-20.
How RPM works
RPM = (Total estimated revenue / Total views) × 1,000. "Total views" here is every view of monetized and non-monetized videos combined, which is why RPM is always lower than CPM. YouTube Studio reports RPM in the Revenue tab; the number is updated daily and finalised by month-end as YouTube reconciles ad inventory.
RPM in practice
A 500K-monthly-view tech-review channel earning $2,400 in a given month posts an RPM of $4.80 — well in the long-form bracket for tech.
A 5M-monthly-view dance channel earning $1,500 posts an RPM of just $0.30 because Shorts dominate the view mix and Shorts RPM is structurally lower than long-form.
See RPM on real channels
FameLifter pulls public rpm data for 500K+ YouTube channels — refreshed hourly via the official YouTube Data API v3.