I checked to see if there was a problem with ads not showing on my videos — but none of my videos bore the telltale yellow dollar sign of demonetization that haunted so many creators during the first adpocalypse. The estimated monetized playbacks stats for my channel all looked fine. There was only one possible culprit — CPM.

Sidebar: 🙋 What’s a CPM?

If you’re not intimately familiar with the advertising industry, you probably don’t know much about CPMs. (If you are a CPM expert, feel free to skip this part.) Heck, there are plenty of people who rely on advertising for income who don’t really understand CPMs.

CPM stands for cost per mille. Mille is the French word for thousand. A CPM is a way of relating the cost of an ad to the views of that ad. A CPM of $1 means an advertiser pays $1 for a thousand views of their ad. Simple, right?

🚫 Wrong. Digital ad auctions these days are complex and opaque systems where advertisers bid what they are willing to pay per click or conversion and then lots of software figures out which advertisements show up where based on a myriad of factors (and personal data). There are also various ways creators get credited for advertisements. If you want to really try and understand this system, listen to this puppet.

There are many other factors that make it difficult for creators to understand CPM on YouTube. For years, YouTube has prioritized reporting on views and watch time, but the engagement metrics that matter from a revenue point of view are estimated monetized playbacks (EMP) or ad impressions. These metrics are hidden in a submenu in the Creator Studio Classic (which has been the default view for years).* YouTube also reports two different CPMs to creators: CPM and playback-based CPM and does a terrible job of explaining the difference between them and how they line up to the engagement metrics. Here are the two equations that matter:

EMP x playback-based CPM x 0.55 = Creator ad revenue 💰

Ad impressions x CPM x 0.55 = Creator ad revenue 💰

*The new Creator Studio Beta forefronts estimated monetized playbacks and playback-based CPM on the Revenue Report. This is a positive change. 🏅

Okay, enough about CPMs, back to my story!

So in January 2018, I noticed that my CPM was abnormally low, even for January. But I didn’t immediately freak out, because I had just cashed a huge check from a content licensing deal and was prepared for January to be a low-performing month. 😎 If my CPM returned to normal by mid-February, everything would be fine. (Spoiler alert: it didn’t and it wasn’t.)

Here’s how bad January 2018 was compared to the previous 3 Januarys:

Alt text: The line on the chart for 2018 is noticeably below the lines for 2015–2017, which are clustered together

Remember that those previous three Januarys were already low-performing months. The highest daily CPM in January 2018 barely reached the lowest daily CPM of the previous three Januarys. 🙁

Worst. January. Ever. (So far.)

Looking at my numbers, it was clear that my CPMs were in a bad place. I reached out to my creator network — the forum at the ICG, the Video Makers & Marketers Facebook group—to see if anyone else was seeing CPM issues like this. Nobody was. In fact, many other channels were reporting a small increase in CPM in February 2018 due to YouTube cutting off monetization to channels below 1,000 subscribers.

Since no one I trusted could explain to me why my CPMs were so low, I begrudgingly reached out to the source.

“Communicating” with YouTube

As a creator with over 100,000 subscribers, I had the privilege of being able to email the support team at YouTube.* On February 21, 2018, I emailed the YouTube Creator Support team with a graph showing my CPMs and asked if they could explain why my CPM was so much lower than previous years.

“I know that CPMs drop at the beginning of every year because of ad spending cycles. But after plummeting on January 1st, they usually are back to normal levels by early February. This year, my CPMs have been riding at the lowest level in 3 years (see orange line on graph below). Can y’all give me any insight into what’s causing this?”

A week later I got a response.** Despite the fact that I had emailed the YouTube support email with a question about my YouTube channel, the response I received had nothing to do with YouTube. 🙄

The email contained suggestions for optimizing ad sizing and ad placement on my website (it was more or less a copy and paste of this AdSense Support page). This was not my problem. YouTubers cannot control ad sizes and placements on our videos. We can just toggle different types of ads on or off.

I had reached out to the experts and they took a week to give me a copy-and-paste response to a problem that I literally couldn’t have had based on the special channel I was communicating with them via. It was like taking my car into the mechanic and being given advice for treating a sick dog. I felt frustrated and alone. I felt silly for thinking YouTube would help. 😖

*YouTube has since lowered the threshold for email support to anyone in the Partner Program (1,000 subscribers) and added a chat option for channels with over 25,000 subscribers.

**The Creator Support team now commits to responding to emails within one business day.

Extra money! Wait, what? 💵 🤔

During the week I was waiting for a reply from Creator Support something strange happened. I received my YouTube payment for the month of January. The 3-week lag is totally normal, but the fact that the check was significantly larger than YouTube had estimated it would be was strange. In fact, it was 20% higher than the estimate — which equated to more than a thousand dollars. There is always a little disconnect between YouTube estimated revenue and actual AdSense payments, but it is usually around 0.05% — a few dollars at most. This extra amount was almost a whole rent payment. 🏦

(Months later, when I mentioned this bizarre extra amount of money to YouTube experts and YouTube employees, they all said they had never heard of anything like this before.)

I was thrilled to have this extra money. But also deeply confused. Did this mean there was a deeper reporting problem in YouTube analytics? Maybe the estimated numbers were off by 20% and my CPMs weren’t actually as bad as they seemed to be? I was hopeful but skeptical. 🤨

“Communicating” with YouTube - Part 2

On March 3, I responded to Creator Support to 1) tell them they had misunderstood my question 2) attach another graph showing the severity of the CPM drop 3) ask them about payment discrepancy in January. I wasn’t asking for a magical fix to the CPM drop, just for a simple explanation.

“I’m just trying to understand what happened. If this because of advertisers pulling out of the YouTube ecosystem as a result of Adpocalypse? Has my channel been downgraded to receive lower paying ads? Is there anything I can do about this?”

It took Creator Support nearly two weeks to acknowledge they had received my email and say they would look into it. It was now nearly a month since my initial email and they were just beginning to actually investigate my problem. It was like talking to a slow unhelpful chatbot. 😒

It was another two weeks until they responded to tell me that “the fluctuations appear normal” and that compared to the last 365 days “the revenue follows a very similar pattern.” Here’s a look at my channel’s CPM for the first 91 days of the year for the last 4 years.

Alt text: Once again, the line for 2018 is significantly lower than those for 2015–2017

The CPM line from 2018 is so far away from the previous three years, it never even overlaps. How can they look at this data and not see that something is different in 2018? How does it take six weeks to get such a non-answer? 🤦🏻‍♂️

It made me feel like I was going crazy. Something was clearly off, but I couldn’t figure it out. And the one source that should be able to clarify it kept telling me that everything was normal. 😵

Regarding the strange payment overage in January they said, “we identified an issue with the YouTube revenue calculation and are processing adjustments so that you always receive the correct payment.” Notice that while this answer notes that was an issue and they are making adjustments, it’s not specific enough to say whether this was isolated to January or ongoing. It was only a January thing. At the end of March, I got my revenue from February and it was exactly as low as it had been predicted, no bonus money this time. So much for that scant hope. ☹️

Living the nightmare

While all the “communication” with YouTube was going on, I kept making content. Ad revenue had accounted for 75% of my business income in 2017, so I did everything I could to release videos that were guaranteed to bring in views. All the excess money I had in January was being eaten up maintaining the monthly budget now that AdSense was underperforming by 40% every month. And I never did take that week off in January. 😪

Simultaneously, I did a massive outreach to brands to try and set up sponsored videos. Out of over $40,000 in proposed projects, two deals came through for a grand total of $3000 over 4 months. But I needed $4000-$5000 every month to make up the AdSense gap.

I was working harder than ever and getting paid less and less. 😧

In hindsight, I could have budgeted better so that there was more slack in my budget and I didn’t need every dollar from AdSense just to keep the lights on. I put too many expenses on my personal and business credit cards. I had probably jumped my employee from part-time to full-time too quickly. I own those mistakes. At the time I couldn’t see any of that. 👀

Being a full-time YouTuber is a constant grind. Rather than feeling a sense of pride when I launched a video, it was crippling anxiety, “will this get enough views so that I can pay all my bills this month?” 😰 When I switched to YouTube full-time, I went from having YouTube as an escape and having a day job full of colleagues to bounce ideas off of to being trapped alone in a hall of mirrors. Every decision I made reflected back on me in a million ways.