• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, October 6, 2014

There’s a great post out there from Hank Green, one half of the VlogBrothers, in which he does something you’ve probably never seen any media company do as openly as this before: He spills the beans on his YouTube multichannel network’s CPM growth.

Not only is that impressive, so is the growth. And in context, it’s interesting that Green is doing it, since the VlogBrothers not so long ago said YouTube was a miserly mistress that took too big of a share of the ad revenue to let hardworking content creators much profit.

“The picture is a nice one,” he writes.  “From Q1 of 2012 to Q1 of 2014, there’s a roughly 200% increase in ad rates. From February of 2012 to today, a 450% increase.”

That's nice. True. 

Say what you will about the loss of privacy in this world, there is something jarring -- and rather refreshing at this point -- about a media company of any size that flat out tells the public how it’s doing -- with a chart, even --i n terms of being able to move the advertising needle. Every year, big media companies hold their upfronts and later, reporters work hard to ferret out the percentage increase those big cats get. Sometimes, I think reporters would easily concede, it’s just a bunch of good guesses. So this VlogBrothers data spill feels really, really odd.

“I would like to know if anyone else has similar data that they can share,” Green writes. “I don’t think there’s any good reason for us to keep this stuff a secret; not from the community and not from each other. Indeed, having a greater understanding of the growth of CPMs is vital to capital investment plans and our relationship with YouTube and other ad sellers. If you’d like to share your data, anonymously or publicly, you can email it to me at hankmt@gmail.com.” 

So, good for openness. I would guess he might not be so open if things weren’t so good, but then again, the VlogBrothers were among those who complained when things weren’t so good. Even that act of honesty is pretty rare.

As to the content, I was surprised to see that like other electronic media, political spending makes a huge difference with the VlogBrothers, even on an multichannel network that has only 15 channels. Any place politicians advertise online means there are lots of campaign dollars to go around, at least in some campaigns -- and that there’s more recognition of the online video as political ad platform than I thought.

Green writes: “We also see that elections are almost as important to YouTube’s ad ecosystem as Christmas is. That might seem a little odd, until you realize that YouTube provides the kind of demographic specificity that makes campaign managers’ keyboards sticky. This is unfortunate because I FREAKING HATE THOSE ADS.” (The emphasis is his; the sentiment, I’d say, is universal.)