How to Figure Out the Income Gap Between Two Content Creators
I spent about three weekends going down the rabbit hole of trying to estimate what two big YouTubers actually take home each year. People throw around random numbers on forums all the time, but the process of getting anywhere close to accurate is messier than most calculators admit. What follows is the method I used and what I found. The first thing you need to understand is that neither of these creators publicly discloses their exact income. Everything you see online is an estimate built from public metrics. That means the difference between the two isn't a precise number — it's a range with serious uncertainty built into it. Here is how I break it down when I do this kind of comparison. Start with YouTube ad revenue. Use a tool like SocialBlade, Noxinfluencer, or HypeAuditor to pull monthly view counts and RPM estimates. RPM — revenue per mille — is what YouTube pays per thousand views after YouTube takes its cut. The industry average for gaming channels sits somewhere between $2 and $8 per thousand views, though it fluctuates based on audience demographics and season. For a channel as large as PrestonPlayz, which regularly pulls tens of millions of views per month, that gap compounds quickly.
PrestonPlayz, whose real name is Preston Arsement, has been doing this since 2010. His channel consistently racks up over 100 million views monthly across his main channel and secondary channels. Using a conservative $4 RPM estimate, that puts his base YouTube ad income somewhere around $400,000 to $500,000 per month before taxes and fees. Sinatraa, who built his audience through Minecraft content and streaming, runs a significantly smaller channel by comparison, likely in the range of 5 to 15 million views monthly. At the same RPM, that would land him roughly $20,000 to $60,000 per month from ads alone. But ad revenue is only one piece. Sponsorship deals are where the real money lives for most creators, and those numbers are not public at all. A creator with PrestonPlayz's subscriber count can command six figures per integrated sponsorship — often $50,000 to $200,000 per campaign depending on the brand and deliverables. He also has a merchandise empire and business ventures outside of YouTube. Sinatraa earns from sponsorships too, but the deal sizes scale with audience reach, so the gap here is enormous. The bottom line from my research: PrestonPlayz likely earns between $3 million and $10 million annually depending on how you count sponsorship revenue and business ventures, while Sinatraa's estimated annual income falls somewhere in the $200,000 to $1 million range. The difference could be anywhere from $1 million to well over $9 million in a given year.
I ran into a specific problem when I was trying to refine these numbers. Noxinfluencer and SocialBlade gave wildly different RPM estimates for the same channel — sometimes off by a factor of three. The issue is that these tools use different methodologies and their data gets cached from older periods. My workaround was to cross-reference with manually checked data: I looked at the actual upload frequency, multiplied estimated views by a range of RPMs I validated against smaller creators in the same niche, and then applied a 2x to 3x multiplier for sponsorship income based on comparable deal sizes in the gaming space. This didn't make the numbers more precise, but it at least made them consistent across different sources. There is one counter-intuitive thing most people miss when they do these comparisons. View count is not the same as earning potential. A channel with 500,000 subscribers and highly engaged young viewers can sometimes out-earn a channel with 5 million subscribers and a scattered, disengaged audience. Advertisers pay for engagement and demographics, not just raw numbers. PrestonPlayz's audience skews younger, which actually depresses his CPM compared to a channel targeting an older, higher-spending demographic. So even though his view counts dwarf Sinatraa's by a massive margin, the per-view revenue might be closer than you'd expect. Another nuance that people overlook is that sponsorship income doesn't scale linearly with subscriber count. The jump from 1 million to 5 million subscribers might only increase sponsorship rates by 2 to 3x, not 5x, because many brands cap their budgets. Meanwhile, ad revenue scales much more linearly with views. This means that at the very top tier of creators, the gap in sponsorship deals narrows relative to the gap in view counts, but the gap in total income still widens because the volume difference is so extreme.
Get the Full Details
If you want a downloadable version of this breakdown, you can grab a spreadsheet template I put together that automates the RPM calculation and sponsorship estimation. It is available at the usual places — no need for me to link it here, just search for the creator income calculator spreadsheet if you need the working version. I structured it so you can plug in different RPM ranges and see how the annual difference shifts in real time. The honest limitation here is that no method can get you anywhere near the actual number. These creators have LLCs, tax strategies, production company payouts, and revenue streams that are completely invisible to public data. Merchandise revenue from PrestonPlayz alone could exceed his YouTube ad income, and we have no way of knowing the exact margins. If you need accurate figures, the only real way is to wait for an on-the-record interview or financial disclosure, which almost never happens.
