It's a pretty simple calculation.
How much money do you need / want per month in $ ?
Multiply that number by 1000
= That's how many views you need per month.
(That doesn't allow for taxes and any expenses. So you could probably increase that monthly view target by 20%
Example: someone who is targeting $2,000 would need 2 million views per month. (Plus 20% to allow for taxes / expenses)
This question comes up pretty often, and this is the true answer that many people should consider.
We all have different expense amounts and need to plan accordingly to cover those expenses along with any additional savings you choose to have. And of course, you need to cover taxes.
If the "1 X 1,000" doesn't apply to you, then you have to look at your monthly revenue average over a whole course of year. You have to consider months where traffic is slow and months where CPMs drop. The beauty of YouTube, though, is that if you're a growing channel, you can expect a growing trend in revenue month to month as long as you continue to put work into growing the channel. You still, however, want to gauge your income on your current revenue and not rely on crossing your fingers that you will get paid more down the line.
After considering all of this, know that subscribers will not always mean a lot of views. Some channels do very well with growing in subscribers but hardly see any change in views. I would consider my channel to be an example of this. I see a lot of channels out there that have hundreds of thousands of views but hardly break 300 subscribers per day. I'm on the opposite end, where I'm comfortably raking in 1,200 subscribers a day but struggle to break 100,000 views. However, this can be a good thing, since that means that I have a high conversion rate of new viewers to subscribers, which means there's a good chance they will come watch new videos I publish. Knowing this, if I want to make enough money to sustain full-time on YouTube, then I need to release more videos for my subscribers to watch and not focus too much on finding new viewers.
