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YouTube Ads CPC
By Oliver Wakefield-Smith, Digital Signet. Updated July 2026.
YouTube mostly does not sell clicks; it sells views, priced by CPV bidding. Understanding when each pricing applies, and how to translate between them, is the whole platform economics in two moves.
What counts as a paid view
Google's CPV documentation sets the thresholds: an in-stream view is charged when someone watches 30 seconds of your ad, or to the end if it is shorter; in-feed and Shorts formats use a 10-second threshold Google Ads Help, CPV bidding. Skips before the threshold cost nothing, which is the format's quiet virtue: the bored leave free.
Translating CPV into an effective CPC
Worked translation · illustrative inputs
Identical maths, on purpose, to the version on CPC vs CPV: the two pages corroborate each other. The inputs are illustrative; no CPV rate card exists and view-to-click rates are creative-dependent. Substitute your campaign's numbers, then judge the effective CPC like any other click source against your break-even.
When clicks matter on video
When the campaign exists to produce action, use the translation above and hold video to the same per-visitor standard as search. When it exists to make your name familiar before the search happens, CPV is the honest unit and the search click it later produces will be attributed to Google search. For most £500-class local budgets, fund search first; video spends storytelling money you cannot yet measure. The short-form alternative is TikTok, and the full pricing-model map is CPC vs CPM vs CPA.