This man makes money in his sleep, lots of money.

The first rule about YouTube earnings is you don't talk about YouTube earnings.The second rule about YouTube earnings is you don't talk about YouTube earnings - There’s a veil of secrecy (almost) when it comes to the cash earnings that the biggest YouTubers earn. The most popular YouTuber is currently PewDiePie, aka Felix Kjellberg a 24 year old Brighton resident who creates wacky gaming and lifestyle videos on YouTube. He currently has over 27 million subscribers who tune in regularly for his latest online antics.

In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal Felix revealed he is earning a staggering  $4 million a year from YouTube in advertising, an amount he's earning 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,even in his sleep.
Felix comes across as a pretty level headed guy, despite the fact his videos can be quite unusual to say the least. Appeal is everything with a successful YouTube channel, on the one hand you need to tap into the audience in the right way and engage them on a level that will gain the most interaction and followers but on the other hand, also keeps your content fresh, interesting and above all unique.

His earnings and success are the core result of You Tube subscribers, a captive audience that advertisers and brands love to reach. In today's digital climate more and more brands rely on social media to reach their audiences, in fact some brands dedicate more into social reach than they do in more traditional forms of advertising. Take Coca Cola for example, apparently the third largest brand in the world, with over 86 Million facebook followers its able to reach an incredible number of consumers, more economical than Coca Cola spending hundreds of millions of dollars in print or TV ad spend to reach the same number of people. On Twitter Coca-Cola has 2.4 million followers. Over the last month, @cocacola has Tweeted 1,994 times. That’s over 60 Tweets a day, this in turn creates billions of impressions and reach.

For YouTube though its all about content, its important that content is unique and engages the audience enough that it'll either get a kick out of it or share it further socially.
If your channel reaches over 100,000 subscribers, you will receive a framed silver "play button" plaque that has the YouTube logo and their username on it from Google themselves. Channels that get over a million subscribers receive a the exact same plaque (Only exception is that the play button is gold) also from Google.
In order to successfully monetize YouTube videos there are a set of strict guidelines that YouTube partners need to follow.

• You must own the rights to everything in your video, including music, images, and text.
• Anything you don’t have the rights to, you must have written permission from the creator to use it and make money from it.
• Your videos must follow the Community Guidelines set down by YouTube. Sexually explicit content, gratuitous violence, shock videos, hate speech, and more are all prohibited from being posted. The complete list can be found here.

Every 1000 times a pre-roll advertisement is shown, Youtube gets paid some amount of money. The amount can vary but typically Youtube is paid between $20 and $25 for every thousand ad views.Youtube takes 45% of whatever the partner channel earns. The CPM price varies a lot, but typically a Youtube Partner ends up earning roughly $5-7 CPM.This means that for every 1000 times an advertisement is shown on their channel, the Partner could earn $7 ( Youtube would take the remaining ($18). Ad values vary though, premium ads for example can earn significantly higher rates for partners depending on the number of subscribers and views or interactions with the advertising.

The top 5 Youtube Earners are...

#1: Pewdiepie – $7 million (3.7b views)

#2: BlueXephos – $6.7 million (2.4b views)

#3: Smosh – $5.7 million (3.1b views)

#4: DisneyCollectorBR – $5 million (1.6b views)

#5: BluCollection – $4.8 million (1.4b views)

Felix (pewdiepie) rarely ever talks to the media about his personal life, occasionally he'll do a Q&A with fans where he'll answer questions but mostly there is a huge dose of humor added to the answers and for the most part he likes to keep himself to himself.

One of my favorite YouTubers is FPS Russia, Activision were quick to seize on his popularity even featuring him in their advertising and PR campaign for Call of Duty .FPSRussia is a popular YouTube channel consisting of videos involving firearms and explosives. The videos feature Kyle Myers, an American born in Lavonia, Georgia playing the role of Dmitri Potapoff, a heavily accented Russian.

Another great channel to check out is Smosh which consists of Ian Andrew Hecox and Anthony Padilla. Padilla first began posting flash movies on Newgrounds in early 2003, under the name Smosh. With 18 million subscribers and some seriously wacky content no wonder these guys are pulling in the $$.

For a more in depth look at the YouTube high rollers and earners see the Social Blade stats here