You may have noticed a huge drop of around 40-50% of the total Youtube Content ID revenue occurred in January. Here we explain to you why this happens.
Youtube Content ID is an advertisement-based service. The royalties pool is calculated each month based on the total advertisement investments. Since Western markets are hugely influenced by holiday periods, and Christmas is the most important season of the year, brands focus their advertisement investments before the Christmas season, with a great peak in December. The immediate effect is that they stop the investment by the end of December, and thus the January ad-revenue market size is significantly lower.
This is a repeating phenomenon regarding YouTube royalties outpayments and consequently should be taken into account every year.
Below you have a screenshot of our Youtube royalties. As you can see that the drop is repeating every January. But August and September are also difficult periods due to post-summer.