Ali Abdaal: a doctor-turned-YouTuber who publishes his own revenue split

Ali Abdaal is a former NHS junior doctor who started posting study-technique videos on YouTube in 2017 and, by the time he crossed 3 million subscribers in June 2022, had turned the channel into a diversified media business. In a July 2022 tweet, he published his own numbers directly: the YouTube channel itself was making "over $130k each month from Adsense and sponsorships," while total business revenue — including online courses, affiliate deals and products — ran "over $350k per month." He was explicit about the starting point too: "0 views, 0 subscribers and $0 in revenue."

The revenue mix

The $130k/month YouTube figure splits into two of this site's methods: standard platform ad share through the YouTube Partner Program, and sponsored content and brand deals integrated as in-video segments rather than pre-roll ads. By his own later breakdowns, AdSense alone was only around 15% of total income, with sponsorships contributing roughly 20%.

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YouTube's own ad-revenue-share program: 55% of long-form ad revenue, 45% of Shorts Feed ads, paid monthly via AdSense.

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The bigger share came from products built on top of the audience rather than from the platform itself. Online courses made up around 40% of total revenue: Part-Time YouTuber Academy, a course teaching the exact playbook he used to grow his own channel, reportedly generated over $4.5M cumulatively, with individual cohorts hitting close to $1.9M in a single launch. A separate productivity-focused course added several million more in annual revenue on its own. On top of that, affiliate marketing income — from tools and products recommended in videos and show notes — reportedly outearned AdSense in at least one full year (2020), by his own reporting.

Why it worked

The structure is the textbook case for treating platform ad share as a floor, not a ceiling. AdSense revenue on a channel this size is real money, but it was consistently the smallest line in the mix, not the largest — sponsorships beat it, and courses dwarfed it several times over. The audience Ali built through free YouTube content became the distribution channel for a $4M+ course business that YouTube itself takes no cut of beyond hosting the videos that sold it.

The other structural choice worth noting: he published these numbers himself, unprompted, as a growth and audience-building tactic in its own right. Radical income transparency became part of the brand, in the same tradition as the open-startup income reports that made Baremetrics and Smart Passive Income case studies on this site. For a course business specifically, showing the receipts is also the sales pitch — "here's what audience-building can be worth" is a more persuasive course description than any feature list.

What to take from it

If ad revenue is currently your only YouTube monetization method, the lesson isn't that AdSense is bad — it's that it was never designed to be the main event. Ali's channel proves the ceiling on ad share alone (even at millions of monthly views) is a fraction of what the same audience is worth once you sell something to it directly: a course, a cohort, a membership, or a well-chosen affiliate relationship in a niche your viewers already trust you on. The sequencing matters too — the free YouTube content built the audience first, and the paid products came second, sized to what that audience had already shown it wanted.