People blaming Red for low CPMs (CPM = the amount of money you make per 1000 ad views) in January are talking out of their arses btw. CPMs are up compared to January last year, not down. This is also true of December, CPM was higher (for me at least) in December 2015 than it was in December 2014. 2015 had Red, 2014 did not. CPM does not include Red revenue. One caveat though, not everyone is paid the same CPM. It is possible that some channels have taken a dip in CPM but that it was not caused by Youtube Red. So it turns out, they have just added Youtube Red view counts to Youtube analytics.

Before now, I was unable to prove exactly how much a Red viewer was worth vs a regular viewer in terms of revenue. I can now clearly determine how much Red views are worth vs normal views. If I did my math correctly, since Red started, a Red view is on average worth 20x that of a normal ad view. This calculation is based on taking the total revenue the channel has generated via Red and dividing it by the total number of Red views since Red was first launched, then multiplying that number by 1000 to find the effective CPM of Red. Then I took the total ad revenue over that same period of time then divided it by the number of total channel views in the same period making sure to subtract the Red views before doing so, then multiplying by 1000. This gives you whats called eCPM or Effective CPM, which is how much money you make per 1000 views (this takes into account unserved ads, which can be caused by adblocking, ad fill rate per country, ads simply not displaying on certain devices or on embeds etc etc, all the factors that cause an ad not to play). CPM in itself is not a useful number, eCPM is, because there's no point in having ads that pay a lot of money per view if people aren't being displayed the ads.

Based on this calculation, assuming I got my math correct. A view from a Youtube Red user is worth 20x that of a view from a regular user that sees an ad. This is exactly what I expected to see when I first talked about my predictions with Red since launch. There was no way in hell an ad view would be worth more than a Red view, it just wasn't going to happen. We can now I hope stop arguing that Red is somehow bad for Youtubers. It clearly isn't. It's very good and it will hopefully get even better with launches in other countries. Red has not caused ad CPM to drop in the period since Red launched vs the CPM of the same months last year where Red did not exist. I am not discounting the possibility that it could later on in the year, but the data we have right now suggests that it has not affected CPM in a negative way. Red is obviously going to benefit channels to a greater or lesser extent but the universal truth would appear to be that Red benefits channels, period. No question, the numbers don't lie (AND THEY SPELL DISASTER FOR YOU AT SACRIFICE).