Anastasiia Kyriienko

The 50 highest-paid creators earned a combined $1.02 billion between March 2025 and March 2026, the first time the Forbes ranking crossed a billion dollars. MrBeast alone accounts for about $300 million of that, roughly 30% of the whole list. Every figure here is an estimate of gross income, before production costs, team payroll, and tax.

YouTube pays the most per view in 2026. Long-form RPM across 274 monetized channels in MilX data runs $1.79 to $18.23 by niche, against $0.40 to $1.20 per 1,000 qualified views on the TikTok Creator Rewards Program and $0 per view on Instagram, which routes creator income through brand deals, Gifts and Subscriptions instead.

Live stream RPM runs between $0.70 and $5.98 per 1,000 stream views across MilX partner channels, so 100,000 stream views pay somewhere between $70 and $600. On top of that, YouTube returns 70% of net revenue from Channel Memberships, Super Chat and Super Stickers, and 55% from ads on the watch page, under the revenue share rates in its partner earnings terms. One MilX partner channel ran 12 streams in a month for 867,317 views and $610.61. A much smaller one pulled 53,843 views and $321.79.