Tsusshi: 1.5M Subscribers, 21.38M Monthly Views, ¥335,866 in YouTube Ad Revenue — A Creator Publishes the Real Shorts Rates

One and a half million subscribers. 21,384,096 views in a single month. The ad revenue that YouTube Shorts creator received for it: ¥335,866.

He posted 112 videos that month, four a day for 28 days, and gained 8,075 subscribers. TikTok added about ¥70,000. The channel is run by a solo creator publishing under the name “Tsusshi no Fude,” making faceless illustration Shorts, and he posts these monthly figures on note with no paywall (the post went up on 28 February 2026; its title labels the month as February 2025).

He calls this month “the worst since the channel found its footing.” It is not a good month. But the combination of a bad month disclosed in full, and a second note from the same creator laying out per-video revenue from 10,000 views up to 20 million, makes this one of the more precise measurements of Shorts economics available.

One month, itemized

Subscriber growth fell to roughly a quarter of normal, and his explanation narrows to a single cause: nothing went viral. “Normally at least one video a month clears five million views. This month, zero.” What he got instead were videos in the 250,000–300,000 range. He attributes it to insufficient trend research and to spending less production time on Shorts.

Line up views against revenue and the rate appears

A second disclosure from the same creator provides the yardstick. Below are eight of his own videos with view counts and ad revenue as published. The right-hand column (revenue per 1,000 views) is our arithmetic.

The rate stays roughly within ¥7–12 per 1,000 views. The implication of the table is that a tenfold increase in views does not raise the rate. Shorts ad revenue is pooled from the entire Shorts feed and then distributed by share of views, so no advertiser attaches to any individual hit. On top of that, he explains, sit two modifiers: whether music is used, and which countries the views come from.

A separately published breakdown of one four-million-view video shows about ¥52,900 in revenue, roughly ¥13.2 per 1,000 views. That video’s top viewing country was the United States, with an average view percentage of 82.3%, 126,000 likes, and 4,619 new subscribers from that single upload. The upward deviation in rate lines up with his geography explanation.

Returning to the monthly figure with that in hand: 21,384,096 views against ¥335,866 works out to about ¥15.7 per 1,000 views, higher than any single video. Monthly totals can include revenue components that don’t map cleanly onto individual videos, so the comparison isn’t exact. But the order of magnitude, twenty million views producing a mid-six-figure yen sum, is consistent across both datasets.

That rate band sits near the ¥20-something RPM reported in the TikTok trivia channel that disclosed about ¥9M over two years. Shorts look dramatic because the view counts are large. The economic value of a single view is small.

He answers the “that’s all?” question himself

For readers who find the number small for 1.5 million subscribers, the creator supplies the structural explanation. Shorts, he writes, are an entrance. Earning over ¥1 million a month from Shorts alone is “seriously hard mode.” The point is to use them as an acquisition engine and expand monetization from there, which also means, he notes, that revenue is achievable without enormous view counts if the funnel exists.

The income streams he lists: multiple channels, TikTok, a blog, note, affiliate links, illustration freelancing, and brand deals. On note he sells paid articles at ¥1,280–1,980 and runs a membership. The ¥335,866 of ad revenue is one strand in that bundle.

That framing (funnel, not view count) is the same structure seen from the other end in the YouTube case where 10,000 subscribers produce ¥30,000 a month in ads, held up by ¥100,000 brand deals and own products. The scale differs by a factor of 150 and the conclusion doesn’t change: ad revenue alone is not a business. For converting audience size into payments, the creator who built ¥9.27M a year on note off an 830,000-follower social base is worth reading alongside this.

Where the weaknesses are

First, volatility. Whether one five-million-view video lands in a given month swings subscriber growth between 30,000 and 8,075. Posting 112 videos does not guarantee a hit. That he maintains four uploads a day while writing that Shorts is “a domain where quality matters more than quantity” reflects a probability game and a quality bar operating simultaneously.

Second, the rate is not his to move. Of the three variables (pooled distribution, viewer geography, music usage) the only ones a creator can deliberately touch are music, and nudging international viewership up by putting titles and hashtags in English.

Third, the paid-content revenue rests on the channel’s scale as its credential. If the channel stalls, ad revenue and information sales can thin at the same time. He describes the current stall as one he has hit “more times than I can count,” treating the waves as part of the job.

¥1 million a month from ads alone means nearly 100 million views

The rate is the usable measuring stick. Seven to thirteen yen per 1,000 views is a starting point regardless of genre or size. Building ¥1 million a month from Shorts ads alone would require something close to 100 million views every month, which is exactly why “hard mode” holds up arithmetically.

The view counts themselves rest on his particular template: an illustration format, a structure built to pull in international viewers, and the discipline of four uploads a day. Even for the four-million-view video, he says outright that he adapted the structure from an overseas creator’s video rather than inventing it. He does not claim that copying the template reproduces the numbers.

The practical value of this record is as a measuring stick rather than a success story. Cases where the bad month and the per-view rate table come from the same person are rare.