How do you price accounts? Follower number? Engagement rate? Niche?
Depends, but for YT I’d say it’s similar to pricing websites. Since Adsense brings in revenue you can easily calculate that + round up if any other monetization sources are active. So for example, it’s common to see sites go for the monthly rev x 12 x 3 years. So $100 monthly would be $3,600 total.
But it varies: Where did the $100 come from? Is it a one time viral video, or is the channel making $100 consistently for months on end just through ads. Obviously there’s risk in the 3 year timeframe for accounts that sometimes last a few months or weeks even. But, there’s also huge hype factors in some niches. I remember years back in either 2014 or 2015 I sold a BTC/ altcoin pump Twitter account with 900 followers for over $2,400. I made the account 4 weeks earlier. Somebody saw the value in each follower being worth a few bucks. Why? Because even though Twitter didn’t have ads, I sold pump info to followers for $300 a pop, and people actually bought. So the buyer would need to sell 10 people out of 900 to get a profit of $600.
Another example would be crypto youtube channels today. You don’t really see people selling their crypto accounts because they’re engaged, usually a good audience (US/UK/Canada/etc.) that also has money and wants to invest. Companies are willing to pay outside of Adsense A LOT. My CPMs were and still are around $4.70-5 which compare that to $1 for entertainment channels and it makes a world of a difference. You only need 20K views monthly to get $100… but even better, crypto companies pay for a sponsored video with a few hundred views sometimes a few dollars per each view, monetized or not. So while people use adblocker for ads, in-video ads EVERYBODY sees. The most I ever made off of a 15K sub channel from a single sponsored ad was $5K for a video that wasn’t even published in the end (the company decided to leave it unlisted, they had bigger projects: for example crypto youtubers over 100K subs regularly got paid and still get paid $50-100K per big promos. Or you can get equity in a company). So finance channels, personal finance like Graham Stephan or Andrei Jikh are exploding in popularity right now and they have revealed that their CPMs are ginormous. Some videos get $10-15 maybe even $20 if it’s stocks related or credit card scores. My average CPM is usually around $5 but I’ve had videos come close to $12-13.
So even though technically one of my pages would be worth only around $4K if you looked at Adsense right now, the true value of the account is worth more because my lifetime adsense earnings from that channel are approaching $8K with 1.5m views while lifetime sponsored ad earnings would be low 6 figures. I had a local company pay $8K in crypto for 1 video and 1 livestream. I held onto the ICO tokens and they went up in value 6x. Some people got paid in VIBE tokens which a $3K sponsored video 4 months later was worth over $1M… but then of course many ICOs crashed and burned. Now you’ve got DeFi all the rage. So maybe the true account value would be 5 figures since Adsense 4 and sponsored ads low 6.
It depends on a lot of variables. What niche is it? Is it copyright free? Any strikes? Any popular collabs on the channel? is it easy to replicate the channel? For example vlogging channels about any niche are easy to replicate, maybe the host will change and trigger some unsubs but you can still keep posting. But if it’s scripted in a specific location, if your channel’s about snowboarding and you live in Hawaii it would be a bit tough talking snow stuff.
Some niches like MMJ are worth a lot… but it’s super risky as some accounts might get banned. So for a local business, a good social media page can bring in thousands of dollars of extra revenue per week but be worth a few hundred bucks. It really depends.
Today finance is worth a lot. Maybe 10 years from now there’s going to be lots of space advertisers or electric car companies. Some niches crash and burn. But the easiest is take revenue and plug it into the simple formula. Prices for accounts without ads are trickier. But then take into account maybe merch sales if its a big account, sponsored ads, selling services, etc.
Engagement does matter too. A crypto account with lots of views but mainly audiences from poor countries and spam comments isn’t worth much…
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