Popular artist and digital content creator Priya Dhapa recently released a comprehensive breakdown of her various income streams, providing a rare look into the financial reality of mid-tier creators in India.
Dhapa, who balances a career as a traditional fine artist with social media production, explained that her monthly revenue is a combination of YouTube advertising, high-value brand collaborations, and private art commissions.
By sharing specific figures, she aimed to demystify the creator economy for her growing audience of aspiring artists and influencers who often view the industry as either a guaranteed goldmine or a financial mystery.
The artist disclosed that her YouTube earnings typically fluctuate between 15,000 and 25,000 rupees per month, depending on her upload frequency and the performance of her long-form videos.
She noted that YouTube pays creators through AdSense, a program that places advertisements on videos and shares the revenue with the channel owner based on views and viewer engagement.
While her current income from the platform is modest, Dhapa emphasised that long-form content remains a more reliable source of passive income than short-form videos like YouTube Shorts, which require millions of views to generate significant revenue.
On the Instagram front, Dhapa revealed that her most lucrative income source is brand collaborations rather than direct payments from the platform itself.
She shared that her first major deal was with the global confectionery brand Cadbury, for which she received 1.5 lakh rupees for a single promotional reel.
She explained that while some creators with 15,000 to 20,000 followers might struggle to find deals, others in high-value niches can command significant fees based on their engagement rate and audience demographics.
In addition to her digital presence, Dhapa continues to generate steady revenue through her work as a professional painter and sketch artist.
She maintains a strict pricing structure for her commission work (custom art requested by a client), starting at a minimum of 5,000 rupees for a basic A3-sized pencil sketch.
For more complex projects involving acrylic or oil paints on large canvases, her fees range from 25,000 to 30,000 rupees.
She defended her pricing by explaining that clients pay for a creator’s skill and time rather than just the raw materials like paper and pencils.
Priya Dhapa currently manages a growing digital community with over 4.7 lakh subscribers on her primary YouTube channel, where she shares vlogs, art tutorials, and behind-the-scenes content of her creative process.
Her transparency comes at a time when the Indian creator economy is seeing a surge in professionalisation, with more individuals seeking to turn hobbies into full-time businesses.
Dhapa encouraged her viewers to start creating content not just for the potential financial rewards, but as a way to improve communication skills and build a digital archive of their personal growth and memories.
