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                   Tuesday, May 26, 2026

Calculator showing how much money your social media posts make for a platform

By DAN ROBINSON
Editor/Photographer
Important Message 30 Years of Storm Chasing & Photography Dan's YouTube Video Channel Dan's RSS/XML feed

As part of my larger page on the copyright infringement issue, I put together this calculator and data table to educate social media users how much money their posts earn for the platform, and how much is taken from creators when their videos are stolen. This information is based on current data (as of May 26, 2026) on advertising rates and CPM, some of which are estimated averages.

This represents generational wealth being transferred from many individuals to these mega-corporations.

How Much Money is Generated from Content?

Corporation / Platform 2024 Revenue 2024 Profit 2025 Revenue 2025 Profit
Meta $164.5B $62.4B net income $201.0B $60.5B net income
ByteDance / TikTok* $155B $33B net profit $186B $50B net profit
X / Twitter* $2.5B Not disclosed $1.8B ad revenue Not disclosed
YouTube YouTube ads: $36.1B Not disclosed separately Over $60B total revenue Not disclosed separately
Warner Bros. Discovery $39B -$11.3B net loss $37.3B $727M net income
Disney $91.4B $5.0B net income $94.4B $12.4B net income
Netflix $39.0B $8.7B net income $45.2B $11.0B net income
* Estimated (private companies)

Calculate how much money your posts made for a social media platform

Enter the number of views and choose whether the content is a photo or video. Results estimate the gross ad revenue platforms may earn from that single piece of content.

Content type
Platform Assumed RPM Estimated gross revenue

These are gross platform revenue estimates as of current data on May 26, 2026. Creator payouts will depend on the revenue sharing agreement for a monetized account. For non-monetized accounts (the vast majority of users), the platform keeps all of this money and does not share any of it with the poster. For a stolen video, the original owner receives none of this money, it all goes to the platform and, if monetized, a share goes to the poster. The calculator assumes revenue is earned per 1,000 views. Actual revenue varies by country, viewer quality, ad load, time of year, demand, topic, account history, ad blockers, bot filtering, and whether ads were actually served.

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