YouTube video cost and ROI tracker template

One row per video, starting with your time. Hours on the script, hours filming, hours editing, hours on the thumbnail, and an hourly rate you set yourself. A grey column turns those into a labour cost, adds whatever cash you spent on props, music or freelancers, and gives you the total the video really cost.

The other half of the row is what came back. Views in your chosen window, the RPM that video earned, the ad revenue those two produce, and the sponsor fee if there was one. Then profit, in red when the video lost money and green when it made some, and a cost per 1,000 views so a cheap video and an expensive one can be compared honestly. Pinned at the top: total invested, total returned, and net profit across everything you have logged.

A second tab called Assumptions holds the three judgement calls the maths rests on, which are your hourly rate, how long a window you count views over, and what you are treating as a cash cost. Change them there and you change what every row means.

1. 1Open the link below and take your own copy, with File then Make a copy. The original stays untouched and your copy is yours to change.
2. 2Read the Assumptions tab first and set your hourly rate to something you would actually get out of bed for. Then look at the Example tab, which has three videos costed out, including a Short that earned almost nothing per view.
3. 3Log the hours on the day you do the work rather than guessing at them a month later, and fill in the views and RPM once your window has passed.

The sheet asks for an RPM on every single row, which looks like duplication until you see the spread. RPM moves with who watched: views from lower budget advertising markets earn a good deal less than views from higher income ones at the same view count. It moves with the calendar too, running higher in the fourth quarter while advertisers spend down what is left of the year's budget. One channel-wide figure would flatten all of that into a number you cannot learn anything from.

Why your YouTube RPM dropped covers the rest of what moves it, and why a falling RPM next to flat revenue is usually the channel growing.

The tracker is only as good as the hours you remembered to write down, and nobody remembers. It has no idea what you actually did on the day, no link to the calendar row for the same video, and no way of telling you a format has quietly stopped paying for itself.

The sponsor fee row here comes straight from the YouTube Sponsor Tracker. Both are part of the set at the template library.

Chewbr is being built to count the work as it happens, across all 47 steps of a video. The waitlist is at /waitlist. No date on it yet. You will know first.