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Created December 9, 2025 11:45
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LinkedIn Post - 2025-12-09 06:45
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1-million-views-is-not-a-gold-rush-its-a-tip-jar-unless-you-own-the-funnel.md

1 million views is not a gold rush. It’s a tip jar unless you own the funnel.

My AI research agent pulled the raw 2025 payout data, and the math is boring and brutal. Long-form YouTube ads pay about 3k per million views. Shorts pay lunch money - 10 to 200. TikTok pays grocery money - 400 to 1k. Spotify streams are about 3-5k per million. Blogs with ads can hit 5-15k if your niche is rich. That’s the floor, not the dream.

The upside is stacking. Sponsors on a 1 million-view video often pay 10k-75k. Add your own product and things get spicy. If you follow the “5% conversion on 1M impressions” thought experiment, a 15 dollar Gumroad product could show around 640k. Reality check: 0.5-2% is what most people actually convert. At 1%, that same play is about 128k. Still heavy.

Where technical folks eat: assets. 3D models on CGTrader or TurboSquid can net 70-90% and command 5-200 per item. Code assets on Unity or Unreal keep roughly 88% and solve real pain. Theoretical 5% conversion math looks insane - over a million - but only if your traffic is laser-targeted and you survive support hell.

Writers aren’t dead. SEO blog + newsletter + paid Substack still works. At 1M top-of-funnel, a realistic path is a few hundred to maybe 1,500 paid subs - call it 2-12k monthly - and more if you stack ebooks or a course.

The catch: platforms are tightening. YouTube is demonetizing mass-produced AI. Stock sites demand labeling and they’re flooded. GPT store payouts are foggy. And that 5% conversion you see in screenshots - it’s daydream land for cold traffic.

My take - and I’ll die on this hill: the best play now is long-form YouTube in a premium niche plus brand sponsors plus your own product. Ads give you dependable cash, sponsors scale, your product is pure margin. Do it right and 30k-100k per million views per month is achievable. If you’re dev-leaning, a focused 3D or code store can beat even that. 🔥

Want me to score your niche with my Monetization Index - money per unit, discovery, policy risk, effort, saturation, durability - and map the fastest path to your first 10k?

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