How Much Do Local Content Creators Make On YouTube?

One question that I constantly asked myself years ago was, how do people on YouTube (aka YouTubers/Content Creators) make money. I mean most of us don’t pay for the content we access on the video sharing site.

It took me a while to discover that the adverts we see when watching YouTube videos is how content creators make their dough. After this discovery the next question that naturally came to me was how much money do Zimbabwean YouTubers make?

This is a harder question to answer because 1) the data available to the public doesn’t disclose exactly how much content creators make and 2) local content creators partner with local brands for advertising and this advertising isn’t accounted for in the estimated revenue data available to the public.

Finally, the last thing to keep in mind when looking at YouTubers revenue is that the final amount also varies based on the following factors;

Number of views – more viewers usually means more money (but not ALL the time)
Location of viewers – A viewer in Zimbabwe is less lucrative to advertisers than a viewer in the USA. This is primarily because very few local companies are advertising on YouTube.

All that is to say the revenue estimates below are exactly that – ESTIMATES. The tool we used to compile the data is called Social Blade which tracks user statistics for YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and Twitter. Please note that generally we have realised that the lower value estimate is closer to the truth.

Content Type	Content Creator	Videos	Subscribers	Estimated Monthly Earnings	Estimated Annual Earnings	Social Blade Rank
Comedy
	BUSTOP TV	879	83 300	$423 – $6 800	$5 100 – $81 300	B
	Magamba TV	229	12 700	$35 – $564	$423 – $6 800	B-
	P.O Box Reloaded	80	24 300	$46 – $743	$557 – $8 900	B-
	Madam Boss	362	44 800	$89 – $1 400	$1 100 – $17 100	B-
	Mai T’s Diaries	281	721	$140 – $2 200	$1 700 – $26 800	B-
	Madhorofiya Rebublic	43	1030	$16 – $265	$199 – $3 200	N/A
	Nigel The Slick Pastor	126	17 900	$87 – $1 400	$1 000 – $16 800	B-
	Comic Pastor	280	53 100	$120 – $1 900	$1 400 – $23 100	B-
Shows
	College Central	31	56 700	$483 – $7 700	$5 800 – $92 600	B
Music
	Winky Online	76	78 200	$209 – $3 300	$2 500 – $40 200	B
	Jah Prayzah	94	216 000	$538 – $8 600	$6 500 – $103 300	B
	Chillspot Records	189	5 070	$259 – $4 100	$3 100 – $49 700	B
	Nyamayaro Media	45	42 100	$16 – $253	$190 – $3 000	C+
News
	ZTN	1 287	11 300	$51 – $815	$611 – 9 800	B-
	Techzim	310	2 620	$4 – $63	$47 – $755	C+

One of the things that stands out for me is how popular College Central has become overnight on the back of Wadiwa Wepamoyo.

The complexity of YouTube monetization is also clear because there is no clear correlation between subscriber counts and revenue.

An example of this can be seen between Mai T’s Diaries and Madam Boss’ channels. Mai T has less than a 1000 subscribers and is making anything between US$1700 – U$26 800 whilst Madam Boss’ channel has just under 45 000 subscribers is estimated to be making US$1100 – US$17 100.

How Accurate are social blades estimates for revenue earned on YouTube?

Social Blade’s data on YouTube is garnered from estimates based on revenue per thousand impressions (RPM) which is the estimated earnings for every 1000 impressions.

The site uses a ranking methodology – Social Blade Ranking – to assess the quality of a channel and in their own words, this is how the ranking works;

When Social Blade was created we first just listed rankings based on number of subscribers and number of views, but it quickly became evident that this was not an accurate indicator of how people were actually doing on YouTube.
Someone could have a bazillion subscribers that they cheated to get without having any actual views. The SB ranking system aims to measure a channel’s influence based on a variety of metrics including average view counts and amount of “other channel” widgets listed in.
If you have a A+, A, or A- SB rank, then you can consider yourself very influential on YouTube. If you’re not there quite yet, don’t fret – just keep up the good work!
Social Blade explainign how their ranking works

In our experience, the Techzim channel was $15 above the lower end of the monthly revenue estimate which stresses how important it is to keep in mind that these are estimates and unless the data is coming directly from the content creator then only use this data as estimates.