My July YouTube Income Report: $47K With Zero Ad RevenueA Transparent Look at Every Dollar We Earned, Spent, and Kept

Last month our YouTube channel brought in $47,443.50, and none of it came from ad revenue. In this YouTube income report, I’m breaking down exactly where every dollar came from in July 2026, all of it reconciled straight from our books in Xero and Stripe.

I’m not doing this one alone either. I brought on our COO Matt Feldman, who happens to be one of my oldest friends, to walk through the numbers with me. We’ve known each other for 20 years, and our first business together was back when we were 22 or 23, so doing this again feels pretty full circle.

About a year ago we started ideating on a new business and decided to join forces. We launched Refresh, an organic growth agency focused on SEO, GEO, and video, and we wanted to put our money where our mouth was by growing my channel from the ground up. The plan was to do it mainly through sponsored content, and this report is us showing you how the sauce actually gets made.

So the short version is this. Of that $47,443.50, a full $45,443.50 came from 12 channel sponsorships, and the remaining $2,000 came from Refresh agency work.

No ads, no course sales, just sponsorships and a little client work. Here’s our full video walkthrough of how we did it:

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Key Takeaways for Building a YouTube Income Report

1. Last month we brought in $47,443.50 and not a single dollar came from AdSense or the YouTube Partner Program. It all came from sponsorships and a bit of agency work.
2. We kept $36,975.32 in net profit, which works out to a 77.9% profit margin after $10,468.18 in expenses.
3. Twelve channel sponsorships drove $45,443.50 of the total, with the remaining $2,000 coming from Refresh agency work.
4. The channel grew from 5,000 subscribers in March to over 154,000 by August, and one non-sponsored video did a lot of that heavy lifting.
5. Three-packs are our best offer, and we raised the price from $7,500 to $15,000 right before our biggest event of the month.
6. We run with just two full-time people plus seven contractors, which is a big part of how the margin stays so healthy.
7. These income reports are now monthly, so you’ll get the good months and the down months from here on out.

Blog Income Breakdown for July 2026

Here’s the month at a glance before we get into the line items. We brought in $47,443.50 across 13 companies, spent $10,468.18, and kept $36,975.32 in net profit.

Now here’s exactly where every dollar came from. Twelve of those companies were channel sponsorships and one was a piece of Refresh agency work.

On the other side of it, we keep the business lean, so expenses stayed at $10,468.18 spread across 32 vendors in seven categories.

And here’s what actually stayed in the account after everything was paid out, which lands us at a 77.9% profit margin for the month.

Being able to pull a clean breakdown like this every month is exactly why we run our books through Xero, it keeps everything tax-ready without the mess.

The Two Assets That Win Sponsored Video Deals

Before any of that money hits the account, there are two things that do the heavy lifting to actually land a client. One is what we call three-packs, and the other is our media kit. These are the two assets we lean on to pitch a brand and eventually win them over.

The Three-Pack Pitch

A three-pack has probably been one of the more surprisingly successful things we’ve built. It’s a pitch we bring to a live client call, and it lays out three video ideas for that brand in one clean package.

Each one opens with a headline where we show we understand what the client wants to communicate to their audience. From there we keep it quick and to the point, with some high-level stats about the channel up top. Then we frame up each of the three videos with the format, the hook, a short paragraph on the concept, a few A/B test title options, and a quick visual of how we imagine the thumbnail coming to life.

We pitch three videos on purpose instead of just one. It lets us hit multiple features and release them in segments, dropping one every two to three weeks so we keep building momentum for the client from the last video. A brand can start with a single video, a three-pack, or a quarterly package, but the three-pack is what we push for the first time we work with someone.

We landed on this format the hard way. We tried long versions, we tried super short ones, and something right in the middle but leaning concise tends to perform best on a real call. What surprised us most is that almost every prospect seems genuinely shocked by how prepared we show up. It’s like they expect other creators to walk in with nothing, so putting in the thought ahead of time has gone a long way toward closing deals.

The Media Kit

The media kit is what a potential client sees from us before they ever book a call. It’s taken on a lot of iterations since we first built it back in January of 2026, when it started life as a set of Google Slides.

Back then my numbers were at 5,500 subscribers and we were charging a max of $2,500 a video. We’ve updated our pricing three or four times since, tripling it along the way, and the current version pulls in past collaborators’ analytics to show new clients exactly what we can do for them.

One thing I really like is that we’re not shy about putting our numbers on a live page that anyone can find. If you’d rewound the clock two or three months, I wasn’t comfortable with that at all. Raising prices has been genuinely hard for me, and Matt has been the one pushing the envelope and encouraging us to test which clients will happily pay more because they see the value.

As a creator who’s been doing this a long time, it’s so easy to undervalue yourself when brands out there are already stoked to reach your audience. The quality was always there. It was really just about showing up with the numbers and the engagement to back it up.

How We Grew the Channel From 5,000 to 154,000 Subscribers

None of the pricing works without the audience, so growing the channel was the whole game. We went from 5,000 subscribers in March 2026 to more than 154,000 by August, and honestly most of that came from one video.

That video blew up far beyond anything I’d ever posted, landing at 245K views and bringing in a ton of subscribers. Here’s the important part though. It wasn’t sponsored content. That’s exactly why I think you need a blend of the two, because the organic swings are what build the audience that sponsors want to reach.

The way you get there is repetition. We’ve been hitting consistent weekly drops, somewhere between two and four videos every single week, and putting in the reps is pretty much the only way to get better at this as a skill. The quality has to level up over time too, which it has across our editing, our thumbnails, and everything else.

The real lesson is that you never know which video is going to be the one. Once it hits, you have to know how to double down on it to keep the momentum going in the right direction. That’s exactly what we’ve been trying to do.

How Affiliate Summit East Turned Into 16 Sponsorship Meetings

July really came down to one event. We went to Affiliate Summit East in Times Square, which is actually where Matt and I met up in person, and we only heard about it through one of our existing clients who told us it was a great place to meet companies looking for sponsored content.

So we signed up, went through the event app, and looked up every company that would be a good fit for the channel. I reached out to all of them and lined up 16 meetings, some of which we started before we even arrived, then locked in once we got there.

For every single one of those meetings, we built a custom three-pack. The day before, Matt and I basically parked ourselves in a coffee shop near Times Square and cranked out three-pack after three-pack. Walking into each meeting knowing we had a leg up on whoever else they were talking to felt incredible.

Here’s the part that still gets me. We had our three-packs priced at $7,500 heading into the show. The night before, after building all of them, we looked at each other and decided our videos were worth more than that. We doubled it, going from $7,500 to $10,000 to landing on $15,000 for a three-pack, all within about a week, right before the event.

Presenting at that new number for the first time, across all those meetings, felt surreal. And then we learned at the conference that some people were charging around $100,000 for a single video, which was a good reminder that the ceiling is a lot higher than you think.

The Lean Team Behind a 77.9% Profit Margin

The margin comes down to how few people it takes to run this. Right now Matt and I are the only two full-time people on the business.

On top of that we have a team of seven contractors, made up of three video editors, three thumbnail designers, and one admin. That’s the entire operation.

I expect that number to grow over time as we reinvest in the business, but for now, keeping the team tight while the revenue climbs is exactly what keeps a month landing at almost 78% profit. It won’t stay this lean forever, and that’s fine, but it’s a good place to be starting from.

That’s It for My July YouTube Income Report

So that’s the full picture of our $47,443.50 month. As mentioned earlier, it came from 12 sponsorships and a bit of agency work, powered by a lot of preparation, a big swing at Affiliate Summit East, and an audience we grew from 5,000 all the way past 154,000.

More than the numbers, it’s just been fun to build something like this with Matt again after 20 years of friendship. There have been plenty of challenges along the way, but doing real business together has made the whole thing worth it.

The biggest thing is that we’re committing to publishing one of these every single month from here on out. Good months, down months, and everything in between, all as transparent as we can make it. If you find these useful, let us know, because that’s the only way we’ll know to keep them coming.

FAQs About YouTube Income Report

A few quick answers to the questions that tend to come up whenever we share numbers like these.

Final Thoughts About My July YouTube Income Report

Looking back on July, the thing that stands out isn’t just the $47,443.50. It’s that we built the entire month on preparation, a willingness to raise our prices, and a lot of reps on the channel over the past few months.

The honest truth is that a lot of this came down to showing up ready when most people don’t. The three-packs, the media kit, the 16 meetings we lined up before Affiliate Summit East, all of it worked because we put in the thought ahead of time. That’s something anyone can do, no matter the size of their channel.

If there’s one takeaway I’d want you to leave with, it’s that you don’t always know which video or which pitch is going to be the one. You keep putting in the work, and when something hits, you double down. That’s the whole game, and it’s what we’re going to keep doing.

We’re committing to one of these every single month from here on out, the good and the bad. If you want us to keep sharing them this openly, let us know, because that’s the only signal that tells us to keep going.