YouTube Growth Blog

Creator deep-dives, YouTube money guides, growth tactics, and tool guides — backed by live channel analytics and real sources.

Creator Files

• Veritasium (Derek Muller) Net Worth 2026: The Science Channel That Was Sold Without Anyone Noticing (Businesses, Income) — A PhD about why good explanations fail, a
  0,000 bet with a physicist, a majority sale to an investment firm in 2023 that most viewers learned about on Christmas Day 2025 — with our measured channel data, the method behind every estimate, and why the net-worth sites all miss the biggest event in the channel's history.
• Linus Tech Tips (Linus Sebastian) Net Worth 2026: The
  Channel, the

  00M Offer, and the Ad Figure He Actually Disclosed (Businesses, Income) — A channel bought from a computer store for one dollar, a company of 120 people that turned down

  00 million, a screwdriver with hundreds of thousands of customers, the 2023 crisis and the 2024 investigation reported neutrally — and the rare creator disclosure that lets us check our own calculator and find it wrong.
• Dude Perfect Net Worth 2026: From a Sandwich Bet to a
  00M Investor and a CEO Exit (Businesses, Income) — Five Texas A&M roommates, a trick-shot video in 2009, and seventeen years later a company with a nine-figure investor, an 80,000-square-foot HQ, a theme park that became a licensing deal, and a CEO who left this month — with our measured channel data, the revenue figures that actually exist, and why the net-worth sites disagree.
• MKBHD (Marques Brownlee) Net Worth 2026: The Reviewer Who Became the Product (Businesses, Income) — From a 2009 bedroom review to a Ridge board seat, a Vox podcast, and the Panels app that failed: MKBHD's businesses, controversies, and income — with our measured channel data, a stated method, and why the net-worth sites disagree.
• DougDoug: The Ex-EA Programmer Who Weaponized Chaos (Net Worth, Charity, the Retired Channel) — Doug Wreden left a programming job at EA, let Twitch chat drive, raised over
  million for an aquarium, and retired his main channel at its peak. The full DougDoug story, fully sourced.
• Markiplier: From Laid-Off Engineering Student to a $50M Box Office (Net Worth, Iron Lung, Income) — Mark Fischbach's full arc: the biomedical-engineering dropout who built 38.9 million subscribers, deleted a channel on purpose, and self-released a movie that made $50 million — fully sourced.
• Rocky Kanaka: The Man Who Sits With Scared Dogs (Net Worth, The Dog Bakery, Income) — How Rocky Kanaka turned sitting silently with terrified shelter dogs into 5.6 million subscribers, a Penguin Random House book, a pet-food business, and an Emmy-nominated TV show — fully sourced.
• Outdoor Boys: The YouTuber Who Walked Away From 15 Million Subscribers (Net Worth, Story, Income) — Luke Nichols built Outdoor Boys into one of YouTube's biggest channels, then quit at his peak. His full story — lawyer past, the explosion, why he really left, and what the channel earns — fully sourced.
• JerryRigEverything: How Zack Nelson Built a YouTube Empire (Net Worth, Businesses, Income) — The full, sourced story of Zack Nelson: from a
  ,000 Jeep repair quote to 10 million subscribers, a wheelchair company, a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, and what he actually earns.
• World Cup 2026: The Biggest Football Channels on YouTube — The 2026 World Cup is underway. Here are the biggest football channels on YouTube right now — and how to track which ones are growing fastest during the tournament.

Make Money

• How Much Do YouTubers With 100K Subscribers Make? (Real Math, Not a Guess) — From ads alone, between about $44 and
  ,980 a month — and the subscriber count is the least important input. The math by niche and audience activity, why the real figure is usually higher, and what moves yours.
• How Many Views Do You Need to Make
  ,000 a Month on YouTube? (By Niche) — The real number for every major niche — from about 121K monthly views in finance and investing to about 909K in music — with the formula, worked examples, and what actually moves it.
• How Much Do YouTube Shorts Pay? (Real Numbers) — What Shorts actually pay per 1,000 and per million views, how the Shorts revenue pool works, and when Shorts are worth making anyway.
• YouTube CPM by Country: Where Views Pay the Most — How much YouTube pays by audience country, why US and UK views are worth 3–4× more, and what creators can realistically do about it.
• How Many Subscribers Do You Need to Make Money on YouTube? — The real YouTube monetization requirements: 1,000 subscribers plus watch hours for ads, 500 for fan funding — and why subscribers alone don't pay you.
• How Much Does YouTube Pay per 1,000 Views? — Real CPM and RPM rates by niche and country, the difference between them, and how to estimate ad, sponsorship, and affiliate income for any YouTube channel.

Grow Your Channel

• Why Is My YouTube Channel Not Growing? 7 Checks, in the Order That Finds the Leak — A stalled channel usually has one leak, and it is almost always in the same two places. Seven checks in the order that finds it fastest — click-through, retention, cadence, views per subscriber, demand, catalogue, format — with the free tool for each.
• How the YouTube Algorithm Works in 2026 (What Creators Can Actually Control) — There is no single algorithm ranking your video — there are four surfaces, each predicting what one viewer will click and keep watching. The signals YouTube has said it uses, the myths, and the five things you control.
• The Best Time to Upload on YouTube (And How to Find Yours) — Why there's no universal best time to post on YouTube, the general best windows, and how to find the exact times your own audience is online.
• How to Find Trending Topics for Your YouTube Niche — A repeatable process for finding YouTube trends: where they surface first, how to validate demand before filming, and how to add an angle that wins.
• How to Write YouTube Titles That Get Clicks (With Examples) — The title patterns that raise click-through rate, the psychology behind them, and before/after rewrites you can copy for your own videos.
• Why Your YouTube Views Are Dropping — 9 Causes and Fixes — A diagnostic guide to falling YouTube views: how to find which metric dropped, the 9 most common causes, and exactly how to fix each one.

Tool Guides

• How to Read YouTube's Trending Chart Like an Analyst (Worked on Today's Chart) — The US trending chart on September 8, 2026, read properly: why the Science and Tech chart is 34/50 Shorts while the main chart isn't, ranking by views per day, and the 16.7K-subscriber channel sitting on 5.7M views.
• Finding a Channel's Hidden Gems (Worked on Kurzgesagt and Tom Scott) — Hidden Gems run on two real channels on September 8, 2026: Kurzgesagt's 16 gems split into launch tails and genuine evergreen resurfacers, and the reading trap in Tom Scott's five — plus how to act on your own list.
• What 5 Real YouTube Channels Earn From Ads — Worked Through the Calculator — MrBeast, MKBHD, Cocomelon, Veritasium, and T-Series run through the same public-data method on the same day — with the three cases where the method breaks (kids' content, monthly uploaders, music catalogues) and why.
• How to Audit a Competitor YouTube Channel in 10 Minutes (Worked Example) — A real competitor audit, start to finish, on a 3.6M-subscriber science channel using public data: the audit grade, reading the upload list, hidden gems, a head-to-head, and what it earns — with the traps to avoid.
• How to Add a Live YouTube Subscriber Counter to Your Website (Free) — Put a real-time subscriber count on your own site in about a minute — one snippet, no account, no code skills. Works on WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, and plain HTML.
• How to Get the Transcript of Any YouTube Video (Free, in Seconds) — Three ways to pull the full script of any YouTube video — including a free tool with timestamps, language picker, and TXT/SRT export — plus five ways creators turn one transcript into five pieces of content.
• How to Test a YouTube Thumbnail Before You Publish — A practical guide to testing thumbnails: preview them in the real feed next to competitors, check readability at the sizes viewers actually see, and know which measurements matter.
• YouTube Sub Battles: Watch Any Two Channels Race in Real Time — Put any two YouTube channels head to head and watch their subscriber counts race live. How sub battles work, the greatest rivalries, and how to read the momentum.
• How to See Any YouTube Channel's Live Subscriber Count — How to watch any channel's subscriber count update in real time, why public counts are rounded, and why no tool can show the exact number except YouTube Studio.
• How to Compare Two YouTube Channels Side by Side — A practical guide to comparing YouTube channels: which metrics matter, what they reveal, and how to read the differences like an analyst.