Why Small Channels Make 10x More Money

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Imagine you're creator B with just a tenth of the subscribers as creator A.

[00:00:04]You might think that creator A is going to make 10 times more than you. But you'd be wrong. That's because most creators rely on YouTube AdSense to make their money off of a single video. But if you're creator B, you know that there are a lot more levers you can pull to make a lot more money off of just one video. Today, we're going to be exploring those various levers of monetization, and we're bringing the receipts to prove it as well. For example, I'll tell you about one creator who went from making $50 a month to $64,000 a year by layering their income streams. They didn't go viral. They didn't hustle for more subscribers. They built a sustainable and profitable business. And they did so by thinking outside the box. The bottom line is that your subscriber count and your potential income on YouTube have virtually nothing to do with each other. So, let's dive into all the ways that you can make a whole bunch of money off of one single video. Meet Dave, a YouTube creator who, like so many of us, has experienced his fair share of burnout when it comes to making content. That was until one day when Dave decided he would add a coaching program to his weekly newsletter. This immediately took his $50 a month YouTube channel and made it a $400 a month YouTube channel, proving that YouTube AdSense was not the only thing that was going to be making him money going forward. But this was just the start for Dave. Dave had his coaching, his brand deals, his affiliate sales, and eventually his own paid program. That's four paid income streams that Dave built for himself over time, all operating simultaneously. In the end, it wasn't just about the money.

[00:01:19]This earned Dave freedom. The freedom from having to worry about being perfect on YouTube just to make ends meet. I'd end up making 21K in total from the program spread out across 6 months.

[00:01:29]8,200 from onetime payments and the start of payment plans is how September's total was just shy of 17K.

[00:01:34]That meant I wasn't dependent on any single revenue stream. AdSense could tank. Sponsorships could dry up and I'd still be okay. But if you think Dave was inspiring, let's talk about Chris. This channel shows us how your highest margin income stream doesn't always have to be hard or complicated to set up.

[00:01:49]>> So when I launched my first course, it was a typography course. It sold for like $49 as a super early bird discount.

[00:01:55]And the way I built this was I created several videos doing design critiques about type and showing people so that there was awareness that I know how to do what I'm doing. Then somewhere in there I mentioned, oh, I'm going to be launching a course. Let me know if you're interested. Here's how we did it.

[00:02:08]We told people if you tune in on Friday at this time, we're going to live stream to you the course for free. It'll be up for 24 hours. After that, it just disappears. And we did it. And a couple hundred people showed up. I think by the third week, I think we had over a thousand people showing up live and then they would complain, you didn't give us enough time to watch us.

[00:02:25]>> Go here, pay.

[00:02:27]>> Yeah. Yeah. And we sell you the course.

[00:02:29]So, what everybody did was in the very beginning, the best price is this price right now. After this, it'll go for $79 or something. So, you can save a lot of money, can buy us, and a lot of people did. So, we had $100,000 launch. To date, we've raised the price a couple times. The course has earned us over a million dollars.

[00:02:44]>> That one course, >> that one course that started $49.

[00:02:47]>> That's amazing. With one simple setup, Chris's income exploded. No crew behind the scenes, no fancy expensive equipment, not even a budget to speak of. Just like increasing your subscriber count doesn't necessarily get you more views, increasing your effort doesn't necessarily guarantee success. With Chris's channel giving us the benefit of hindsight, it becomes a bit absurd to think about how making significant money on YouTube is kind of obvious. Chris relied on his expertise. He took a chance and then he leveraged his success into a massive payday. Now, niches are relevant in this conversation because it's about you carving out your own slice of the YouTube pie. Picking the right niche and finding an audience for the type of content you want to make can reward you monetarily. I bring this up because super broad niches can have a relatively low CPM compared to specific niches. For this example, let's take a look at Max Foch. He has millions of subscribers, and we're looking at one video here with 17 million views, which earned him $37,000. But that same video would have earned him $170,000 if he had a higher CPM on his side.

[00:03:41]>> It showcases it. it wildly fluctuates between um how much you can get paid per video.

[00:03:47]>> Specific niches can turn a $3 CPM into a $10 CPM. And that is how some small channels can outperform larger channels, at least in terms of making money. Now, of course, larger channels do have an easier time sourcing brand deals and things like that. So, they do just fine for themselves. It's not like becoming a larger creator is somehow going to make you less money overall. The thing about brand deals is that they can go to all sorts of channels of all sorts of sizes.

[00:04:09]And depending on how big you are and how successful that company is, they can range anywhere from a couple hundred to thousands of dollars. And something a lot of creators don't know is that there's still such a thing as long-term sponsorship deals. You would think that these have kind of been phased out given how fast everything moves now, but they are absolutely still happening. So, let's say you're a smaller creator and you get your first brand deal, and it's not for a ton of money, but there's an interest on the table for becoming long-term partners. You should absolutely pursue that. If you do a good job and your channel continues to grow, then that partnership would hopefully grow alongside you. For an example of what a long-term partnership could look like, let's take a look at Macho Nacho, one of my favorite YouTube channels.

[00:04:42]Tito is a channel dedicated to restoring and modding old tech products, mostly game consoles. And his viewers enjoy watching and restoring these products alongside him. Look at this thing. It's so fun. The screen is gorgeous. It actually lights up. I don't know if you know, but back in the day, these didn't have a light in them. You had to just shine a flashlight on to see what the heck you were doing. Anyway, for as long as I've been watching Tito, the one sponsor that comes up over and over again in almost all of his videos is PCB Way. Essentially, they are the perfect partner to have for Tito's audience. An audience full of people who are always tinkering with various little consoles and computers. Now, Tito's channel may be approaching half a million subscribers, but he's been partnering with PCB way for over 3 years. At least that's what I saw when I went back through the archives of content. So, even if you don't have a huge audience, that's really not what brand deals are about. They're more about the stickiness of your audience. And I'm the perfect example when it comes to Tito's channel because I've been watching for years.

[00:05:32]I've only built a handful of GameBoys and a Gamecube, but I watch every single video because I'm a very sticky viewer.

[00:05:38]I really enjoy seeing these projects come to life. But, okay, let's put brand deals aside for a second because they're just one piece of the puzzle. Next, let's talk about digital products and I want you to meet a creator called Andrew.

[00:05:47]>> I have a product called the one-click grade that I promote in my YouTube videos. So, I released the one-click grade back in May of 2024. And for a few months, it netted me a few hundred. And then at the end of the year, it started to ramp up, and that's when I did $40,000 in one month for the one-click grade. Andrew took his expertise and created a highquality digital product that exploded in popularity. Andrew created this product, leveraged YouTube to reach his target audience, and basically created a bit of a passive income stream for himself, selling this really popular thing for as long as he wants because it's digital. He doesn't ever run out. The best part is when you sell a digital product, that income is completely independent from YouTube AdSense. And the days of relying solely on AdSense are over. There's also leveraging your niche for higher CPMs, brand deals for smaller, stickier audiences, digital products that provide passive income perpetually, and finally, you can play the long game. As you become a more skilled content creator, your income can grow even if your views or subscribers stagnate from time to time. And that is because you are building one very important thing as you continue down the path of being a YouTuber, and that is expertise. For someone like Tito, that expertise comes in the form of pushing yourself to build bigger and better things. moving on from GameBoys to rebuilding the original Xbox prototype. For someone like Max Foch, it's taking what he knows, his expertise, and using it to launch a consulting brand. And that one thing accounts for 7.5% of Max's income, or about half of his YouTube AdSense earnings. And in case you didn't catch what I just said, Max's AdSense only accounts for 15% of his income. I know a lot of people watching this channel want to reach 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours. They want to get monetized so they can start making money in the background while they just make videos and do the thing they love. But AdSense pays so little compared to what's on the table if you can leverage your expertise and stack multiple income streams. The caveat, of course, is that being an expert doesn't always mean feeling like one. But the point is that even if it doesn't feel like you're building expertise, you are. And it's important to remember that not just YouTube expertise, but expertise in whatever field it is that you showcase on camera.

[00:07:47]And what you can do is take that expertise and leverage it in a multitude of ways that can make you far more money than AdSense ever could. And you might be thinking, Dan, listen. Every single channel you showed me here is huge compared to me and sure for now, but they started with zero views and zero subscribers just like anybody else.

[00:08:03]These creators aren't successful because they have big channels. They have big channels because they are successful people. They are driven, creative, they believe in themselves, and most importantly, they do not think that AdSense is the beall endall. They don't stop there. In fact, if you would like to see what YouTube pays channels who generally have about a thousand subscribers, you can watch this video next.