Maru’s owner – online username of “mugumogu” (I don’t know her real name) has earned between $325,000 and $1,600,000 (approx.) USD through Adsense online advertising from her videos of the world’s most famous online cat: Maru. Maru has achieved a Guinness world record as the animal viewed the most times on YouTube – a total of 325,704,50 times.
My research tells me that a video maker publishing her videos on YouTube can make between $1 and $5 per 1000 views. The amount depends on several factors. If we take the average of the two figures we have $962,000. My guess is she has made around $700,000 USD from her super videos.
There you go. If you are the very top on YouTube you can make a lot of money but you have to be at the top. And YouTube is a monster. Three hundred hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and 5 billion videos are watched on Youtube every single day. The sheer size of YouTube is one reason why Google (the owner) cannot vet and control the videos uploaded and have to rely on visitors to report extreme videos such as from ISIS or extreme right wing groups.
This is a similar problem that Facebook faces. They are unable to fully monitor their own website. And both, Google and Facebook are far too reluctant to take down inappropriate videos. They hate censoring but sometimes you simply have to because these videos can change people. The mega-online businesses have a responsibility to the world and sadly they are not at present fully discharging that responsibility.
