Ajey Nagar is the top individual YouTuber from India, according to a recent report by financial insights hub Top Dollar.
The popular comedy content creator and gamer has more than 25.7 million subscribers for his channel CarryMinati.
The report lists the top YouTubers from every country and their estimated monthly income from the Google-owned video-sharing platform.
Nagar though lags behind top YouTubers of seven countries — England, USA, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Spain, and El Salvador — in subscriber count, as per the report.
Felix Kjellberg, alias PewDiePie, is the top YouTuber from England, with over 107 million subscribers. Luis Alvarado, known as Fernanfloo on his Spanish YouTube channel with almost 38 million subscribers, is the top YouTuber from El Salvador, the smallest country in Central America with a population of about 6 million as of 2018.
The report estimates Nagar’s monthly income from the platform at around $66,100. This does not include income from corporate sponsorships, merchandise sale, or fan donations.
Stacked against popular content creators from other countries, however, his YouTube earnings fare rather poorly.
Top YouTubers of at least 71 countries make more money than Nagar makes off YouTube ads.
Anastasia Radzinskaya, the top YouTuber from the United States, makes approximately $7 million a month from YouTube revenue for her kids channel Like Nastya.
Top YouTubers from India’s neighbouring countries such as Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh, running channels titled Apé Amma, Kitchen with Amna, and Farjana Drawing Academy, respectively, earn between $95,000 and $225,000 monthly from YouTube.
Nagar said the report does not accurately represent his earnings from YouTube, and declined to disclose the numbers himself. YouTube did not comment when contacted by ET.
Deepak Char, Nagar’s brother and business manager, said that the rates for CPM (cost per thousand impressions) on YouTube vary from country to country, based on factors like the region, the reach and the frequency of posting videos, the type of advertisers interested in the content, the video’s watch time and viewer demographic.
India’s CPM rates for YouTube are one-seventh that of most of the 71 countries whose top YouTubers earn more off YouTube than Nagar.
“Despite the illusions of it being the quickest way to build wealth, making money on YouTube is much harder than the numbers suggest,” Char added.
Advertising is inefficient as a business model on YouTube, he pointed out, and stressed that creators will see a dimensional shift in the revenue model only when viewers adopt the mindset of voluntarily paying for the consumption of good content.
“Of late, traffic on YouTube has been surging due to the (Covid-19) pandemic, but it’s not translating into parallel revenue creation for creators because companies who generally advertise on YouTube are pausing their ad spends owing to the rapidly changing consumer landscape,” Char added further.
Prince Khanna, cofounder of influencer marketing firm Eleve Media, said the lower earnings and the relatively lower subscriber base compared to top YouTubers from other countries should prompt a few creators to grow their audience base to include international users.
That will also solve the issue of lower CPM rates in India as the international audience also brings in ad dollars as per CPM rates of the viewer location, Khanna said.
Leave a Reply