7 vs. Wild is the best format ever on YouTube. Clicks are through the roof and some videos have over 10 million views. In this context, I ask myself the question, how much money does that actually make? This is the first thing you think of when you deal with numbers in your job. How much money actually comes around, you will find out in this video. Hi, my name is Melchior from Kontist Steuerberatung and yes, I'm a fan of 7 vs. Wild. I watched all the episodes last year and I'm pretty sure I'll watch all the episodes this year too. And because I deal with business models professionally, I naturally asked myself how big this whole project actually is. So how much revenue does 7 vs. Wild actually generate? In this video we try to figure out these numbers. In order to get closer to the total turnover, let's take a closer look at the potential sources of income. First, of course, the YouTube partner program, i.e. AdSense income. Secondly, the sponsorship of the main videos. Thirdly, Fritz's merch shop, and fourthly, there is also a 7 vs. Wild illustrated book that is currently being sold.
And we'll take a closer look at these categories, i.e. these sources of income, and try to estimate with justification how much turnover there is going to be. One more important note before we take a closer look at the individual income brackets. Namely, participants are not paid for participating in 7 vs. Wild. However, they have a gigantic range boost. Even in the first season, some participants have gained incredible reach – for example, Fabio Schäfer, but also this season it is simply the case that OttoBulletproof, for example, has gained an incredible number of subscribers. In the long term, of course, they benefit from the growth in reach. But there is also, for example, the "Behind the Scenes" series on the DAVE channel, which has more than doubled its channel within weeks and also has millions of clicks on the secret videos. This means that he will also make decent sales with it. And, of course, every participant also reacts to the individual episodes, thereby generating clicks and, ultimately, sales.
And there are actually some participants who use 7 vs. Wild to launch certain products. As an example, we can also take Fabio Schäfer from the first season, who released merch with sayings that he created in 7 vs. Wild last year, or Knossi. Knossi is a participant in the second season, i.e. this year, and he has a beverage brand: ALGE. And he has now brought out his own new edition for 7 vs. Wild, with the flavour "Coconut". And he diligently promotes that while reacting to 7 vs. Wild. And also today this video is brought to you by the taste of 7 vs. Wild "Coconut Shock". This means that he also generates a good deal of sales through the series. He does not have to be paid directly for participation. Of course, I can't take into account all these sales related to the 7 vs.
Wild brand and all this hype in this analysis. Of course, I would still like to mention that this series is also big business for a lot of people on the outside. First, let's take a detailed look at the YouTube Affiliate Program. When you post YouTube videos, you make money from the ads that air before, during, or after the videos, and you get a small commission. And to calculate how much money you make, you need to know how much money you make per 1000 clicks or per click at all, plus the reach. And you need both things to calculate your income at the end. The first season of 7 vs. Wild had a total of 77 million views. That was 16 videos that were viewed an average of 4.8 million times. That is an incredibly huge number. All subsequent videos of the season go through the roof. The videos reach an average of 4.8 million views and the first 16-part season is clicked more than 77 million times on Fritz Kanal.
This makes 7 vs. Wild officially the largest Creator series production in Europe, without that ever being the goal. But we can already see that things are going much better this year when I look at the first episodes because he has an average of 8.1 million views per video. If we now assume that 16 episodes will also be released this year, we can assume that the second season will generate a total of 129.6 million views in more or less two months. Crazy. Almost 130 million views. The second factor we need is the so-called CPM. The CPM is the euro amount you get for 1,000 views and it varies wildly. There are channels that only get 1 € per 1000 views or 5 €, but 10 € or 15 € per thousand views are also possible without any problems. Basically, you can say that the CPM of longer videos is better. Why? Because there are simply more opportunities to advertise in there, which means we can assume the CPM won't be super low simply because some episodes of 7 vs Wild are up to an hour and a half long.
That means there is plenty of space to place advertising in it. And that's why I'm assuming, conservatively estimated, that Fritz's CPM will be around 5 €. Now that's my guess, I don't think it's super unrealistic. And now, to calculate the total revenue from the YouTube Affiliate Program, let's take the 129.6 million views, multiply by the CPM of 5 € and the result is revenue of 648,000 €. Do we now have to let it melt in our mouths: YouTube pays 648,000 € to Fritz Meinecke just for the clicks on YouTube. The second source of income is sponsorship.
Each episode of 7 vs. Wild has a sponsor. It is presented at the very beginning and named at the end, and the companies pay for it, of course. And of course the question arises, how is such a price actually calculated? Of course, I don't know exactly how much is being billed. But there is empirical evidence of how expensive influencer marketing is on YouTube, and we also have a number of influencers as customers. This means that the estimate I am giving here is not entirely far-fetched. These are the prices paid in the influencer marketing market on YouTube. And these prices are mostly based on the thousand-contact price, that is the CPM. In the end, TKP is exactly the same as CPM. That is exactly the price, how expensive such an advertisement is per 1000 contacts. This means that with a CPM of 10, a company has to pay 10 € for this advertisement to be seen 1000 times. And in influencer marketing on YouTube, between 20 and 100 euros CPM is paid on average. This means that companies have to pay between 20 euros and 100 euros for 1000 views and here the price depends, of course, like any price, on supply and demand.
If the offer of advertising space is particularly large, then the price usually goes down and honestly 16 episodes within two months is an insane amount of videos. That means Fritz needs sponsorships for 16 videos within two months. In other words, the supply is very, very large and that suggests that the price is low, simply because there is a lot of advertising space on offer and possibly not that much demand. So, it tends to keep the price relatively low. On the other hand, 7 vs. Wild is the most well-known YouTube project of all, and if you want to present yourself as a company on currently biggest stage on YouTube, then you should talk to Fritz Meinecke. This means that demand should also be relatively high. With 7 vs Wild, both the supply is pretty high and the demand is pretty high. And that's why I'm assuming that the CPM isn't super low, but maybe in the lower third and that's why I'm now assuming a CPM of 50 euros in my calculation.
That means I assume a sponsor pays 50 euros to be seen by 1000 people. And here, of course, we also take the views that we have just calculated. That said, we expect Season 2 to generate 129.6 million views. And if we take the 129.6 million hits and multiply by the CPM of 50, then we arrive at an unbelievable turnover for the sponsoring of 6.48 million euros. 6 and a half million euros for the sponsorship, that would be a fair price and even if we say here now, well there are so many consequences and there aren't that many companies that have that much budget and so on.
That's why the TCP will not be quite as high. Can I really almost rule out that the CPM is less than half and even if the CPM were only half as high, i.e. only at 25 euros, we are still talking about 3 million euros in sales for the sponsorship of the episodes. The third source of revenue is merch. There is 7 vs. Wild Merch, i.e. t-shirts, hoodies, keychains, whatever, and there is an online shop. Namely the online shop of Fritz Meinecke. And to calculate how much money, i.e. how much turnover, an online shop actually makes, you need several things. First, someone has to go to the website first. That means how many visitors does this online shop actually have? And there are different analysis tools. I used one to find out how many website views does this online shop actually have? And my tool spat out that Fritz Meinecke's website has an average of 64,000 hits per month. That means 64,000 people go to Fritz Meinecke's website every month.
Of course, not everyone buys something. For example, I went to the website to look at the products and didn't buy anything. This means that not everyone who visits this website buys, of course. But some people are already buying, and the real question here is what percentage of people are actually buying? And that's called the conversion rate for online shops, and it also varies greatly.
To be honest, 5% is not a particularly good value for an online shop, but I have now assumed a conversion rate of 5% in my calculation. That is, out of 100 visitors to the website, five people buy and that means that out of 64,000 visitors per month, 3,200 people buy something. And if we imagine a supermarket like this, 3,200 people go in every month and buy something. As for the next question we should be asking, how much money are they spending? It makes a huge difference whether I buy something for 2 € or 200 €, and I looked at all the products that are currently available in Fritz’s online shop that have anything to do with 7 vs. Wild. And then I did a relatively simple job, just calculated the average prices of these products. So if we assume that each product is sold exactly the same number of times, then the average selling price of the products is 28.08 €.
Of course, certain products may be sold more or less frequently. And of course it can also be the case that certain customers buy more than just one product. I have excluded everything here and I simply assume that everything is sold evenly, that a customer spends an average of 28.08 €. That means we now know we have 3,200 customers per month and a shopping cart value of 28.08 €. And if we multiply that together, we get a monthly turnover of 89,856 €.
This means that the online shop makes around 90,000 € in sales per month. 7 vs. Wild runs not just one month, but two months. That means we have to calculate the whole thing twice and that brings us to a merch turnover of 179,712 €. The fourth source of income that I would like to take a closer look at here is the illustrated book. To be honest, it has already caused a lot of negative criticism, because people thought it was all too commercial now and so on. I think all the time, the series are for free, look at them, you don't have to buy them, it’s ready! Of course, he also wants to make money with it.
Someone who takes that big of a financial risk has the right to make money from it. And the calculation of how much sales are made with it works in a similar way to Fritz's online shop. First of all, we have to find out how many views does this page actually have? There's a separate page, so you can't buy this illustrated book through Fritz Meinecke's merch shop, but there really is a separate sales page and this separate page had 29,852 visitors in the last 28 days. So far about a third of Season 2 is over and if we now want to know how many views we can expect in total during Season 2, well then let's calculate these 29,852 x 3 and the result is 89,556 visitors. That means you can expect around 90,000 visitors to this sales page throughout the second season. The next step here is also the conversion rate, so how many people actually buy when they visit this page.
Of course I don't know that 100% either, but I started with 5% in the workshop, so I'll stick with 5%. Admittedly, I assume that the conversion rate, i.e. the purchase rate, will be higher. This site can't do anything other than sell this book. There's nothing else on it and I don't see why 100 people should visit the site and only five people actually buy it. Such a sales page is not that exciting. I'm still counting on 5% and if I assume that 5% of the 89,556 visitors buy, we have 4,478 buyers for this illustrated book.
That means now we know how many customers there are. What do we need to know next? How much money do these customers spend? And that's pretty easy, because on this site, there's only this one book, and this book has only one price. Of course it can happen that one or the other buys two books or three or four, but in my calculation I assume that everyone only buys one book. This means that each of the 4,478 people buys exactly one book and this book costs 55 €, which means we calculate 4,478 times 55 €.
That is a total turnover for the illustrated book of 246,290 €. The whole calculation for the illustrated book is super interesting, by the way. And you can order it now. But you don't want to get the photo book until after the season has aired. Why? Because the photo book shouldn't spoil anything that might happen in the series. That means you want to get it in the first month or two. And to be honest, that's super smart, because the whole team can collect the orders and only then produce this illustrated book. They don't have to somehow produce for stock in the hope of being able to sell it afterwards. No, we can just wait for the order, then we know exactly how much you have to produce and only then can we go into production.
That means they don't have to pre-finance this production in any way. It's more difficult with merch, although there is also print on demand merch where orders are first issued and then it is produced. The whole thing usually delays the shipping and that's why you don't usually do it. That means it's super difficult with merch. But super easy with the illustrated book. I think it's a super efficient way to collect the money for the order or to produce these illustrated books afterwards. Let's take a closer look at the different sources of revenue and add it all up. The YouTube affiliate program is expected to generate approximately 648,000 € in revenue, with main series affiliate sponsorships expected to generate approximately 6.48 € million in revenue.
For merch sales we can expect sales of around 179,000 € and the coffee table book is likely to generate sales around 246,000 €. All this added up is a total turnover of 7.55 million €. Did you know that a simple YouTube series can generate 7.6 million € in sales? The numbers really aren't completely irrationally high, I've been pretty conservative everywhere, and that's for a free series on YouTube. Honestly, I can only take my hat off to that. From an entrepreneurial point of view, I have the greatest respect for Fritz Meinecke and his team.
For me personally, it's amazing how much you can generate in sales with a free series on YouTube. But to classify, of course, you have to say, that's the turnover. That is also the gross turnover, which means that VAT is also deducted and so on. That's not the amount that Fritz Meinecke is now carrying somewhere in his trouser pocket.
Definitely not! There are really a lot of high costs on the other side. How much does the series cost to produce? I'll put it that way, many, many, many times more than Season 1! I mean, it's clear, it's also a lot further away, of course. It's another continent and so on. Um, it's a very, very juicy good six-figure amount, let's put it that way. And now it's not finished yet, you know what I mean? That makes another "DRRRRR". In the background things are always added every day. For the pure production costs, you only have to consider what it cost to rent the helicopters. After the helicopter run, we also noticed for the first time how incredibly f*cking expensive a helicopter is. Very briefly, you have to imagine that, a helicopter flight – how far is it? 80km? An 80 km helicopter flight is more expensive than two flights from Germany to Panama, so it's sick. I think what did we pay in the end? I think over 5,000 € or so for this one test run just to see if it works at all. The cameras, the flights, the whole team will be paid for, the island's rent alone is said to have been in six figures.
Then we agreed pretty quickly: Hey, that's it! But that also meant we had to rent this giant island. We got these prizes in, where of course the whole thing is expensive. Yes, the first estimate, insane! When you then hear that the island rent for the period in which we need it is in the six-figure range, it's just sick. These are also sums that we don't deal with on a daily basis. That's just utopian for us actually. This means that the risk of what is being taken on financially and what costs have to be financed are also incredibly high.
And of course the whole thing doesn't just refer to the production of the videos, but also to the merch or an illustrated book. That also costs a lot. With merch, the profit margin is not that high, because you have to buy all the clothes and so on here first. This means that there are also a lot of costs and of course the same applies to the illustrated book. It felt like he got the most negative criticism, but just google how expensive it is to have such an illustrated book printed. In all honesty, I don't think the team behind 7 vs. Wild is making great profits from this book, factoring in taxes and production costs. Yes, 55 € is a lot, but printing high-quality images costs a lot too. That's why I'm assuming that in the calculation of the illustrated book, it’s seen more as a fan service. The big profits are definitely not made with it, which is also an important point, the money does not all go directly to Fritz and Fritz is sitting at home counting his money. There are some companies behind it, some of which are involved or not.
Of course, Fritz Meinecke, for example, is clearly behind it, but if I look at the imprint of the online shop, for example, then there is a GbR, namely a "My Merch" GbR. That means there's some people, and Fritz isn't one of them. He runs this website. Of course, he would also participate in some way, but he is not the one running this online shop. What is also very interesting is that 7 vs. Wild GmbH was only founded in September 2022.
It's now in the commercial register and 50% belongs to Fritz Meinecke and the other 50% belongs to the two guys who always do the whole production in the background. You could also get to know them in the "Behind the Scenes" series, for example. That means the three of them have now founded a GmbH and I assume that it is there to produce this 7 vs. Wild series, because the business purpose is: video production and advertising agency with a focus on web video content. What I just want to say here at this point, there are a few companies behind it and there is not one accounting department that handles all of the sales I'm just listing. It's distributed among different people and there are a lot of people working in the background, there's not just one person, not Fritz, who sits at the very end and puts all the money in his pocket.
I hope this video was insightful for you and you had one or the other train of thought that you might not have had otherwise. If you have any questions about my calculation or comments or criticism or whatever, please write us a comment. If you want to learn more about financial management, accounting and taxes for the self-employed then you should subscribe to this channel. We regularly publish exactly such videos or you can simply watch one of these videos directly, e.g. this one or this one. So I really thought, where are we? That's not YouTube, that's not sometime where I was asked about the internet and made some funny videos there, but I really felt like I was in an action film..
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