Ali Abdaal: Of $5.5M in 2023 Business Revenue, $3.5M Came From Courses — YouTube Was the Funnel, Not the Product

When people talk about a YouTuber’s income, the conversation almost always goes to ad revenue. The figure Ali Abdaal posted on his own X account in December 2023 turns that framing over.

“We made over $5.5 million as a business in 2023. $3.5M came from our courses,” he wrote, and then added that the platform hosting those courses was one he had systematically ignored for four years because he assumed it wasn’t needle-moving. He was wrong, he said.

$3.5M of $5.5M is about 64%. For a doctor-turned-YouTuber with a channel in the millions of subscribers, nearly two-thirds of revenue comes not from ads or brand deals but from online courses sold to viewers. Converted to a monthly figure, $458,000 is more than forty times the median monthly revenue of the cases in this archive (¥1.5M), but the interesting thing is less the scale than the lopsidedness of the mix.

What can actually be verified

Before going further, it’s worth separating what came from Abdaal himself from what is outside estimation.

Several online write-ups estimate his annual revenue above $10M, and most of them state plainly that these are estimates from public sources. This article uses none of those estimates, only figures Abdaal has stated himself and facts verifiable in public filings.

The videos weren’t the product; they were the place the product was sold

A 64% course share explains the P&L structure of a creator business in one line.

Ad revenue scales with views. The rate is set by the market, and the operator’s only real lever is to publish more. A course, by contrast, is priced by the operator. If one viewer in a thousand buys a several-hundred-dollar program, the same thousand views produce revenue of a completely different order. The ceiling on what can be extracted from the same audience is simply not the same.

Put differently: ad revenue is a variable set by views multiplied by a market-determined rate, while course revenue is views multiplied by a price you set multiplied by a conversion rate. The second has two dials the operator can turn, raise the price, or raise the conversion. The $3.5M reads as the result of turning both for years.

The pattern shows up at every scale. A Japanese web-development YouTuber whose ad revenue at 10,000 subscribers ran around ¥30,000 a month earned tens of times more from client work and his own products. See Shogo’s income disclosure, the same phenomenon two or three orders of magnitude smaller. Video count and subscriber count measure the volume of the funnel, not revenue.

The other important part of Abdaal’s post is the confession attached to it: he ignored the platform for four years. The mechanism that became his largest revenue source was not designed in from the start. It was noticed late and then worked on. As with the record of Udemy instructor Naoto Takizawa, whose first course took about 100 hours and earned $165, course businesses do not sell because they exist. They spike only when audience, price and iteration line up.

The year revenue rose and profit didn’t

Reading this as a straight success story means dropping 2022, which would be a mistake.

According to Mark Ellis’s analysis, Abdaal’s business went from roughly $130,000 in revenue in 2019 to several million within a few years, but in 2022 it grew revenue while profit fell below the prior year. The team had passed 20 people and the operation was paying roughly £11,000 a month for a studio in central London. Abdaal himself wrote a reflection on his newsletter under the title “I lost $1 million dollars.”

So the $5.5M of 2023 sits directly after a year in which chasing scale ate the margin. Revenue alone looks like a straight line up. What stayed in the business did not. Hiring and taking a studio pushes up the cost of producing course content. The gross margin of a one-person operation does not survive a twenty-person one.

A note on where the number came from

One caveat is unavoidable when citing this case. The post disclosing $5.5M/$3.5M carries an “#AD” label. It is a sponsored post, written in praise of the platform hosting the courses.

That does not make the numbers wrong. But the story, “the platform I ignored for four years became my biggest revenue source”, is a convenient one for that platform. First-person figures are the most valuable kind of source, and they should still be read with the motive for publishing them in view. That is why this archive prefers primary sources and still writes in the context around them.

What transfers and what doesn’t

The sequence transfers. Gather an audience with free publishing, then offer that audience something you price yourself. It is available to a channel with a few thousand subscribers. In Abdaal’s case the division of labor was explicit: YouTube as the funnel, courses as the monetizer.

The preconditions don’t transfer. He started YouTube as a Cambridge-trained doctor, and his subject matter, productivity and study methods, matched that identity from day one. An unknown creator selling the same course at the same price will not see the same conversion. As the ramp-up of The Kavalier, which left a $120,000 salary for $6,000 a month, illustrates, most channels take years to reach a few thousand dollars.

And the 2022 profit decline states the obvious fact that this business shape does not exempt anyone from: scale does not automatically convert into profit. The $5.5M figure only means anything alongside the trial and error immediately preceding it.