How much will a successful viral youtube video earn the submitter these days?

It’s impossible to say.

The main reason is that you don’t create viral videos. You create regular old videos, and if you are lucky, they become viral. It’s the audience that makes them viral, not the creator. (What you are saying is something like “I want to create a best selling book”. All the author does is write the book – the readers decide it it’s any good by buying it and making it a best seller.)

That said, again, it depends on the video and the audience. If your audience is surgeons doing cardiac surgery, the bar for being viral might be 1000 views. If your audience is people doing stupid pet tricks, then there is a heck of a lot more competition. And if your video is some sort of music, then there is an enormous amount of competition and being viral will be difficult.

Concentrate on making the best video you can. If it’s any good, people will watch it. If it’s not, well, then you learned something.

About one dollar per thousand views.

Surely it can only be viral after you’ve published it to youtube and it’s gone… viral. (Given how the internet works that could be years later).

Is everyone familiar with the definition of the word “potential”?

See I have no idea about how it works, but I am waiting for someone who knows about the details. They might tell me what to expect, the difference between a video getting lots of hits and being viral, where is best to promote a popular video. Those are just a few examples of the details that surround the industry that I am already aware of but do not know about in great depth.

Anyone who tries to answer on fluther in a confrontational manner is really wasting their own time, and the time of anyone who ever wonders about this same question. Readers who come to Fluther from google search are going to read the answers and be squeamish about considering posting their own questions, or hoping to find meaningful answers.

I hope the moderators delete more unhelpful combative answers in the general section.

Yes, like oliver says a video will earn about a dollar per thousand views. So if a video has 1 million views it earns about 1000 dollars. That’s just from the ads that play during a video. But if the channel has a lot of subscribers then companies offer to sponsor a video. That could be from several 100 dollars to few thousand. That’s on top of the ads.