‘Tere Bin’: How Much Did Geo Earn on YouTube Alone?

Omar Faizan

Islamabad: Geo TV says that its popular drama ‘Tere Bin’ has been viewed more than three billion times on YouTube which raises the question of how much Geo earned on YouTube only from this drama.

The last episode of the drama was aired on Thursday and currently the drama is among the top trends on YouTube and Twitter in Pakistan.

According to Google Trends, the highest interest in this drama was shown in Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, followed by Islamabad, and then Sindh.

Wahaj Ali and Yamna Zaidi play the lead roles in this drama, and the other cast includes Bushra Ansari, Sabina Farooq, and Sohail Sameer.

Geo has claimed that the drama’s episodes, promos, and various clips have been viewed a total of three billion times on YouTube. According to Independent Urdu’s research, these figures are almost correct. Independent Urdu examined 80 percent of the drama’s clips which were viewed nearly 2.718 billion times.

Only Tere Bin’s song has received 55 million views on YouTube so far.

With three billion views, if compared to any other Pakistani content, Geo TV’s drama ‘Khuda Aur Mohabbat’ is ahead in terms of views per episode.

All 24 episodes of Hum TV’s popular drama ‘Humsafar’ are available on YouTube and only one episode has crossed the million-view mark. Compared to this, an episode of the drama ‘Tere Bin’ has an average of three and a half million views.

Similarly, the drama ‘Zindagi Gulzar Hai’ has 1.4 million views per episode on YouTube. The drama ‘Mere Paas Tum Ho’ had a total of 23 episodes with an average of 7.8 million views while the 30 episodes of the drama ‘Parizaad’ have 2.64 million views.

Earning on YouTube is through advertisements, and if you open almost all the episodes of this drama, you will see advertisements from YouTube in each episode. The more ads, the more earnings.

Earnings depend not only on the views but also on the country from which they are coming. If the waves come from the US or Western countries, more dollars are earned, while relatively less is earned on the waves from Pakistan and India. YouTube uses the RPM (Revenue percentage) measure for ad rates, which refers to how many dollars will be earned for every 1,000 views.

In Pakistan, the RPM rate for political content is usually around one to twelve dollars, while this rate is higher for entertainment content. But for this research, we will resort to RPM for political content.

Geo’s earning from YouTube

According to Independent Urdu’s research, Geo’s earnings from this drama on YouTube are estimated to be around 3.6 million dollars which is about one billion rupees.

This can be compared to the fact that a vlogger based in Islamabad got 1.8 million views on his YouTube channel last month (June), earning him $2,484.

That is, the income of 0.0013 dollars was earned on each view, so the income of 2.8 billion views is about 36 million dollars on this channel. If the same criteria are adopted for the Tere Bin drama, 2.8 billion views would make 3.6 million dollars.

In this regard, when Talha Ahad, the well-known Pakistani podcaster and owner of The Centrum Media (TCM), asked for an opinion on how much revenue was collected from this drama, she said that if it is estimated by looking at the views, it is estimated to be around $3.6 million.

He also clarified that “no definitive opinion can be given regarding the revenue as it is not known whether the montage was on all the time on these videos and the montage was available everywhere around the world”.

The report has been published in Independent Urdu and reproduced by The PenPK.com.