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This was happening during a golden age for YouTubers, when advertisers were throwing money at them. “Our first paycheck from Google, we were like, ‘What? You can actually make money off of this thing?’” Kam told me. But even then, it was never steady money. Google decides the rate that contributors are paid according to a mysterious, ever-changing formula known as the “cost per mille” (CPM): the amount advertisers pay per thousand views.
In 2012, YouTubers typically made about $1 per 1,000 views, but the CPM can vary widely according to the type of content, the country the viewer is watching from, how old they are, what type of videos they usually watch, their gender, and any number of other factors. “There’s no real system to the formula. It’s all completely up to Google, and they are constantly changing it,” said Kam. Still, they were making enough for Chambers to quit her day job as an assistant to an author in Atlanta, and they moved to Los Angeles – the global magnet for agents and advertisers as well as content creators – to be full-time YouTubers.
Although Kam and Chambers are professional YouTubers, they have never spoken to anyone at YouTube; they have no handler, no contact to nurture their career, and they are paid purely according to their numbers. YouTube works through analytics, the vast reservoir of data the company gathers on who watches the videos, who makes them and how valuable they are to advertisers at any given time. That means that when the market changes – as it did in March 2017, when YouTube faced mass advertising boycotts after Google’s automated system placed ads for brands including HSBC, Sky and Vodafone alongside neo-Nazi content – YouTubers have no way of anticipating how they might be affected. They just have to generate the greatest number of views they can, and hope it translates into a decent paycheque.
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– The YouTube star who fought back against revenge porn – and won | News | The Guardian (via newdarkage)