What YouTube Actually Pays, by Niche: Real RPM Data for 2026

Last updated: October 2026. This is real, disclosed-methodology data — not estimates. Where we couldn't verify a number against a named source, we left it out. See Methodology and sourcing.

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Median RPM by niche

AIR Media-Tech pulled real YouTube Studio Analytics — not advertiser estimates — from 300 monetized channels across 3,595 monetized channel-months (May 2025–May 2026), and reported median RPM (revenue per 1,000 views) for all 13 niches they tracked:

*Niches marked with an asterisk drew on fewer than ten channels in AIR's sample — read those as directional, not precise.

All-niche median RPM sits around $2.30. One structural finding from the same study matters more than the ranking itself: the top 10% of channels capture 58% of all ad revenue on the platform — which niche you pick moves the ceiling, but execution inside it moves the actual number far more.

Why the spread is this wide

RPM isn't just "ad rate." It's the product of three things: what advertisers bid for that content (CPM), what share of views actually carry an ad (monetized-playback rate), and how many ads run per monetized view (ad load). AIR's data shows niches can have similar CPMs and wildly different RPMs because of the other two factors — Gadgets & Tech, for example, posts a Studio CPM ($5.73) close to Education's ($5.91), but only 34% of its views ever serve an ad, against Education's 77%, so the RPM lands at $2.33 instead of $10.22.

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Where does faceless/narrative content actually fit?

This is where we have to be honest about what this dataset is and isn't. AIR's 13 categories are broad, platform-wide content buckets — they don't break out narrative story content, horror, or sleep/meditation videos as their own niche, so there's no AIR-sourced RPM figure specifically for "Reddit-style story videos" or "faceless horror channels." If you've seen a specific RPM number quoted for those sub-niches, it's coming from a narrower, different data source than this one — see our own faceless niche picks with RPM estimates for that angle, and how we rank faceless niches by winnability for a competition-based (not just payout-based) view.

What we can say from our own research: narrative/story-driven faceless content most closely maps to AIR's Entertainment category ($2.43 median RPM) — and on the demand side, "reddit story videos" is a real search term carrying 260 monthly US searches at a $22.52 CPC — the single highest CPC of the 414 keywords in our AI video generator statistics research, meaning advertisers are bidding aggressively on that exact audience even though it's a mid-tier RPM category. Explainer/educational-style faceless content (facts, history, "untold story of X") sits closer to the Education & Science category, which carries by far the highest median RPM in the dataset — at the cost of also being the niche with the widest internal spread (8.4x between top and bottom quartile).

Methodology and sourcing

• RPM-by-niche data: AIR Media-Tech, sourced from real YouTube Studio Analytics across a panel of 300 monetized channels, 3,595 monetized channel-months, May 2025–May 2026. Four niches are based on fewer than ten channels and are marked accordingly.
• Search-demand data: VidPuff's own DataForSEO pull, covered in full in our AI video generator statistics page.
• We did not independently re-run or verify AIR's underlying Analytics data; we're reporting their disclosed, named-methodology figures as published.