YouTube Benchmarks
For United States Startups

As of 2022, the number of YouTube US users exceeded 197 million. That provides access to the more than 75% adult population of the US.

25%

View Rate
[Unique]

0.5%

Click-Through Rate
[General]

3.8%

Click-Through Rate
[TrueView In-stream]

$3.2

Cost Per Click
[Average]

$11.8

Cost Per Mille
[Average]


Marginalia


As you might note, CTR benchmark for TrueView In-stream format is almost 8x times higher than other video ad formats for YouTube. To date, about one-quarter of the TrueView In-Stream viewers in the United States also choose not to skip an ad. Do what you love; love what you do. Play fair with your customers and they will commend.

And for the record, by General CTR benchmark here I imply the mean CTR for all YouTube video ad formats: TrueView video ads, Bumper ads, Outstream ads.

How did I get those numbers? As I’ve been doing marketing since 2000 I’ve had a chance to accumulate big and small data from corporations, small ventures, own startups, open Google crawlers and API’s, white- and gray-hat marketing communities, helpful insights from colleagues. The final actual numbers for the metrics you see are the results of qualitative research. That means, first, I have an average (mean quantitative) values, and then manually match it with expert numbers (median qualitative). If both data fit - we’re good. If expert numbers go out - I adopt Bayes' law and Daniel Kahneman’s methods to balance the data.

Bear in mind, all those marketing benchmarks and startup metrics below relate to the United States market only. Though they can be applied to other T1 countries (US, UK, CA, AU, NZ), these metrics don’t represent traction benchmarks for startups and companies in T2 and T3 regional markets.


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