As some YouTube advertising rates drop by as much as 50% while viewership rates are up, YouTubers say their pay has dropped dramatically
Advertising rates on the platform have dropped significantly during the coronavirus pandemic — Newspapers, websites, and TV channels have all been decimated by the coronavirus. Tweets: @travisshreffler , @jasonmaestas , @carnage4life , @baekdal , @baekdal , @therevmountain , and @stokel See also Mediagazer Tweets: Travis / @travisshreffler : Interesting to see. I remember when quarantine first started, I predicted that viewership numbers on Twitch would skyrocket but sub counts would drop. Already seen that i'm right about viewership. As always, good reporting from @stokel https://twitter.com/... Jason Maestas / @jasonmaestas : Another hole in the dam of advertising as reliable income for content creators. You can be successful (15% traffic increase) and still make 50% less. Far too much volatility (and stress) in a marketplace where creators cannot control pricing. https://twitter.com/... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : 25% of advertisers have paused their ad campaigns while 46% reduced budgets. 75% of advertisers expect this to be worse impact than the housing crisis. Every business that relies on advertising is going to have the same story. More traffic, less money. https://onezero.medium.com/... Thomas Baekdal / @baekdal : I want to talk about this again, because it illustrates one of the biggest misconceptions that exists in the media right now. YouTube is *more* brand-safe and more trusted than newspapers from an ad perspective. https://onezero.medium.com/... https://twitter.com/... Thomas Baekdal / @baekdal : I talked about this a month ago (back when many traditional publishers started to say that advertisers should stop advertising with Google and instead only advertise with them). YouTubers are publishers too, and they are facing the same crisis. https://twitter.com/... Wes Mountain / @therevmountain : This is what's happening to traditional and digital media too - readership has skyrocketed at most publications, but people don't to/can't advertise at the moment so ads are *cheap*. The ratio of ad $ to reads/views has never been more disconnected. And it's breaking the model. https://twitter.com/... Chris Stokel-Walker / @stokel : The collapse in advertising seen across media hasn't escaped YouTube, according to data from more than 180 channels I've seen. My latest for @ozm https://onezero.medium.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
YouTube built its creator economy almost entirely on advertising, a system that grew by absorbing or displacing intermediaries — the ad brokers and content networks it trampled on the way up. That concentration is now the vulnerability: when advertisers pull back, there is no second revenue line between the platform and its creators.
The pandemic shock made that visible at scale — rates down as much as half while viewership climbed, meaning creators did more work for less money. The pattern has since repeated elsewhere: Twitch streamers losing promotional deals during the inflation contraction, and platforms responding by wiring creators into ad revenue more directly, as Twitter began doing with reply-thread ads for paying users.
First-order effects
- YouTubers take an immediate pay cut of up to 50% per impression even as their channels gain traffic, because advertiser demand — not audience size — sets their income.
- Advertisers are acting on both sides of the ledger: a quarter pause campaigns outright and nearly half cut budgets, leaving Google/YouTube holding inventory nobody is buying.
Second-order effects
- Creators are pushed toward non-ad income — sponsorships, memberships, merchandise — which favors established names and squeezes mid-tier channels hardest, mirroring what hit Twitch streamers when promo deals dried up.
- Competing platforms can court disgruntled creators with better revenue-sharing terms, as Twitter's move to share reply-thread ad revenue shows; meanwhile ad budgets keep migrating toward targetable performance channels, a shift Benedict Evans ties to Amazon's ad business overtaking YouTube's.
Third-order effects
- If ad-rate volatility recurs with each economic cycle, the structural answer is decoupling creator pay from CPMs — subscriptions, tipping, and platform-administered revenue shares become the load-bearing model, and ad-funded reach becomes just the top of the funnel.
- Platforms that control both the audience and the payout mechanism gain pricing power over creators, extending the consolidation dynamic that let YouTube absorb the ad-broker layer in the first place.
The trend: Creator income is decoupling from volatile advertising rates toward direct fan payment and platform-run revenue shares, with each downturn accelerating the shift.