Yup. A good pivot if the profits in original activity dry out. Mine out all the gold, tell people there still may be some, and sell shovels to suckers.
I don't doubt you, but I've heard a wide range of numbers. What I've never seen is a screenshot of someones actually stats. Maybe I'm not looking, maybe it's against TOS, maybe no one wants to share because it's not as good as it seems.
It's definitely against their rules to publicly tell people how much youtube's paying you.
0.50-1.00 USD per 1k is also the range I've heard. But there are ways you can completely screw yourself over...
If you get a copyright notice on the video, even a false/automated one, you don't get anything until it's resolved. If you're a popular channel most of your views are going to be within the first 48 hours, and the money you would have gotten within that time is gone.
The last time I checked, your videos can also be de-monitized randomly without notifying you, because they "may not be suitable for advertising". This is done by bots 99% of the time and you'll have to have the video reviewed manually before you can run ads again (Yes, they're actually trying to get bots to recognize offensive content, and it's done with the content itself, not just the video title/desc).
I also once saw someone do a video subtitle/translation and strike the original owner for copyright infringement. Whether this was accidental or not I don't know, but it took days to resolve.
(this post is accurate based on how youtube worked ~6 months ago, it's possible they've changed things but I'm not betting on it)
There's a small time news guy named Tim Pool that I enjoy watching on YT. He has taken to silly things like saying "items which move projectiles at very rapid speeds" instead of "gun" when presenting a news story because the Google AI automatically demonetizes his news stories if the voice recognition hears the word "gun." He has to do this for any potentially controversial words.
