Cooking YouTube Channel (1.1M Listed / 110K Subscribers) Sells for ¥3,500,000 (About 30.3 Months of Monthly Revenue)

A Channel That Stopped Updating Became Batch 2’s Top Price

Just 49 videos posted, and according to the listing title, “no updates for nearly 5 years.” Even so, this cooking YouTube channel closed at ¥3,500,000 — the highest price among the 20 deals of batch 2. Revenue stops if you stop making videos, how did the pricing of an “asset-type channel” that inverts that conventional wisdom get decided? We examine it using Rakko M&A’s closed-deals list and the deal-detail page.

Note: the “1.1 million subscribers” in this article’s original title followed the closed-deals list as first published, but the subscriber count stated on the deal-detail page is 110,000. The analysis below assumes 110,000.

The Deal Numbers (from Rakko M&A’s Listing)

This is not an operator interview; it records market rates from the publicly available closed-deals and deal-detail listings.

A Batting Average of 45 Out of 49 Videos Over 100K Views

The channel’s format: hands-only footage with full on-screen captions, no face or voice. Opened in March 2020 with only 49 total uploads, yet 45 of them exceeded 100,000 views and 8 passed one million. Only 4 videos failed to reach 100K. That is the batting average. The listing notes the footage was used on the TBS Friday drama “Fermat no Ryori” and Kansai TV’s “Yo-i Don!”, showing the material’s quality had earned external recognition.

What sustains the revenue is the traffic structure. Search traffic accounts for roughly 35–40%. Recipes are content that “gets searched when someone wants to cook,” so old videos keep getting watched without new uploads. Revenue sources are the YouTube Partner Program plus Rakuten, Yahoo!, and Amazon affiliate links. The track record of maintaining ¥1,400,000–1,500,000 in annual profit with zero updates is what the listing title puts front and center.

Auditing the ¥3,500,000

¥3,500,000 is about 30.3 months of the most recent monthly sales of ¥115,000. By the valuation multiples listed on Rakko M&A, it equals 31 months of recent profit and 28 months of average profit. The YouTube deals this site has recorded across batches 1 and 2 scatter wildly across roughly 3.5–229 months, but for a deal earning over ¥100,000 a month, this level is on the high side.

The factors that pushed the multiple up can be identified from the listing. First, the track record of “revenue maintained without updates” is itself proof of neglect tolerance. Second, the no-face, no-voice format means the performer-replacement problem structurally does not exist. Third, the transfer includes the channel (brand-account ownership transfer) and copyright to all content, plus an operations manual, documents on “traits of videos likely to take off,” “target-audience details,” and “SEO methods,” and 2 months of post-purchase support. And a non-compete period of 36 months. The seller is contractually barred from building a similar channel for 3 years, an exceptionally long restraint among the 20 deals, protecting the buyer.

On a per-subscriber basis, ¥3,500,000 / 110,000 = about ¥32 per subscriber. That is an order of magnitude above the landscape-photo Instagram in the same batch (59K followers, ¥150,000 = about ¥2.5 per follower), because this is pricing not of a follower count but of the revenue track record those followers keep generating.

The Decay Curve as the Biggest Variable

The risks also show in the numbers. Monthly sales run peak ¥194,000, average ¥126,000, most recent ¥115,000, recent sitting below average suggests a gentle downward slope. There is no guarantee a non-updating channel’s views hold at the same pace, and the buyer’s payback period stretches to 30 months or beyond depending on the slope of that decay curve. The listing also explicitly marks key-person dependence as “present.” Hands-only footage or not, the cooking and compositional skill belonged to the previous owner, and whether a buyer posting new videos could reproduce the 45-of-49 batting average is an open question. That the 61-day close sits on the long side within batch 2 is most naturally read as the time it took to appraise, beyond the ¥3,500,000 absolute price, this structure of “past results are solid, but the future can decay.”

Under What Conditions Does This Generalize?

The conditions for reproduction have to be considered as a combination. A genre that keeps getting searched (recipes, how-to), a faceless format that suppresses key-person dependence, and a construction that competes on per-video quality rather than volume, when these three align, a channel can become an asset type that retains revenue even after updates stop. The mere 49 total uploads reads as a case where the polar opposite of the daily-upload strategy converted into asset value. That said, 45 videos over 100K views is a clear outlier, and copying the format will not reproduce the batting average. What this case demonstrates is not a methodology but a pricing principle: a YouTube channel’s price is determined not by subscriber count but by the revenue that remains after updates stop.

Comparison with 20 Deals Closed in the Same Period

Combined with the 15 deals of batch 1 (psychology YouTube at ¥4,800,000 and others), the picture firms up further: websites at roughly 20 months, YouTube widely scattered at 3–120 months, and SNS accounts priced at a few yen per follower. The scatter in multiples is precisely the scatter in “confidence in revenue durability.” This deal’s 30 months stands as a case where search traffic, a concrete basis for durability, was converted into the multiple.

Further Reading

• The practical mechanics of selling a telecom site for ¥950,000 in 21 days
• Cross-comparison of the 15 batch-1 deals
• The Amazon seller account in the same batch 2 that fetched ¥1,380,000 with revenue undisclosed