Psychology & Trivia YouTube Channel Sells for ¥4,800,000 (About 8.6 Months of Monthly Revenue)

The Deal Numbers (from Rakko M&A’s Closed-Deals List)

The Nature of This Record, and Why It’s Worth Reading

This deal appears on the closed-deals list that Rakko M&A publishes on its official site. No detailed story such as an operator interview exists. We do not know who the seller was or why they let it go. It is still worth recording because the bare fact that “a psychology & trivia YouTube channel earning ¥560,000 a month actually found a buyer at ¥4,800,000” serves as a fixed-point data set for gauging the going rates of the individual-scale M&A market. In business sales between individuals, it is rare for closing prices to be disclosed at all, and a platform’s official closed-deals list is one of the few primary sources from which a sense of market pricing can be assembled.

Note that the closed-deals list rotates as new deals close. When we rechecked the list while writing this article, this deal’s listing had already ended and been replaced by newer closed deals (the additional data discussed below was collected at that time). The 15 deals below are the figures recorded while the listing was live.

Cross-Comparison — Position Among 15 Rakko M&A Deals Closed in the Same Period

Lining up all 15 deals, the market’s pricing logic comes into view. Search-traffic websites fetch around 20 months of revenue, YouTube channels 2–18 months, and zero-revenue SNS accounts are priced on their follower base alone. Even for the same “monthly revenue,” the assessment of how breakable that revenue is (algorithm dependence, terms-of-service risk, key-person dependence) shows up as the difference in multiples.

This deal has the largest sale price and monthly revenue of the 15, yet its multiple stays mid-pack at 8.6 months. Compared with the 18–24 months of monthly profit generally cited as the going rate for individual website sales, that is less than half. The bigger the revenue, the more cautious buyers become and the stricter due diligence gets. On top of that, total dependence on the YouTube platform is priced in as a deeper discount than a website would face.

Additional Data — Days to Close and Subscriber Counts

When we rechecked the list later, some deals also showed subscriber counts and days to close. Here is what could be confirmed.

There are two points worth reading here. First, closing speed. Buyers appeared within 1 day at the fastest and 20 days at the longest, showing that a standing pool of buyers exists for YouTube channels in the hundreds of thousands to millions of yen range. That speed is consistent with the firsthand account of a ¥950,000 telecom site selling 21 days after listing. Second, the existence of deals where revenue and price are not proportional. The pastry shop documentary channel closed at ¥560,000 against monthly revenue of just ¥4,692, roughly 119 months by simple arithmetic. What the buyer priced was not current revenue but the channel base of 5,170 subscribers, a “foundation to monetize from here.” It is the same kind of trade as the camping Instagram account that fetched ¥300,000 with zero revenue: a purchase of the follower asset itself.

The Buyer’s and Seller’s Arithmetic

• Buyer’s side: The ¥4,800,000 price pays back in about 8.6 months if the ¥560,000 monthly revenue holds. It is a decision to buy with money the time it would take to grow an equivalent channel from zero (content-production trial and error, the period until the algorithm picks you up, meeting the monetization requirements)
• Seller’s side: A swap of the expected earnings from continued operation for cash locked in now. Since YouTube revenue can go to zero overnight through demonetization, bans, or algorithm changes, “cash out while things are good” is a rational call
• This price band (tens of thousands to a few million yen) has deep buyer demand, just like the telecom site that sold for ¥950,000 in 21 days, and with seller fees at zero the cost of testing a listing is close to nil

Limits of the Data, and Risks

Some caveats for handling this kind of closed-deals list should be stated plainly. The listed monthly revenues are seller-reported figures, not third-party audited. Even if buyers do due diligence by checking dashboards and the like, nobody guarantees the durability of the revenue. Moreover, since transferring a YouTube channel takes the form of handing over the account, keeping monetization and the channel’s standing remains dependent on the platform’s terms and their enforcement. The multiple sitting a notch below website deals can be read as the pricing of this structural risk. Furthermore, faceless, script-driven genres like psychology & trivia are easy to hand over but also have low barriers to entry. The risk that similar channels multiply after the acquisition and views sink is borne entirely by the buyer.

Conditions for Reproduction

What can be generalized is the existence of the market itself: channels run facelessly with systematized operations are tradable assets. Highly person-dependent channels where the performer and operator are one and the same are hard to hand over, whereas explainer/trivia genres like this one can run on a division of labor between scripting and editing, which is why they fetch prices in the millions of yen. What cannot be generalized is the multiple. The 8.6 months is merely this deal’s valuation at this point in time. Even at the same ¥560,000 a month, price swings widely with the revenue mix, the genre’s terms-of-service risk, and the recent view-count trend. The multiples on the same list scattering from 2.0 to 60.8 months is the best proof of that. As a practical way to learn the market, cross-checking seller-side public accounts like Market pricing for website and account sales: “monthly profit x 24 months + goodwill” against fixed-point observation of closed-deals lists like this one is the realistic approach.

Related Cases

• A firsthand account of selling a telecom affiliate site for ¥950,000 in 21 days
• Market pricing for website and account sales: “monthly profit x 24 months + goodwill”