PSY’s official channel on YouTube, which curates his songs and videos of his concerts, has nearly 1.4 billion views. TubeMogul, a video ad buying platform, estimates that PSY and his agent YG Entertainment have raked in about $870,000 as their share of the revenue from ads that appear with YouTube videos. The Google-owned video service keeps approximately half. PSY and YG Entertainment also earn money from views of videos that parody his songs. Google detects videos that use copyrighted content. Artists can have the video removed or allow it to stay online and share ad revenue with YouTube. In the last week of September when ‘Gangnam Style’ had around 300 million views, more than 33,000 videos were identified by the content identification system as using the song.īut since YouTube can be accessed from all over the world, wouldn’t Asia be responsible for a significant chunk of the $870,000? The countries with the second- and third-highest views of the video are Thailand and South Korea.
“Ads rates vary depending on which country the video is played.