Dismissed as high or low? With all due respect to your YT friends, most people will lie to you about how much they make in an attempt to make you either think they make more or less than they actually do.
I can give you a real number. A friend of mine runs http://youtube.com/moviebuzz. He's making $8-10K a month. He only has 144K subscribers. Not too bad for a 22 year old working 1 day a week.
He says the big guys, like DeFanco, are bringing in well over $100K a month.
Both, some partners have external syndication or promotion deals. A lot of partners are now using services like Blip.tv and Revision3 alongside Youtube. Other's sell products, do advertising and other things on the side, all because they are popular on Youtube, but not related to their viewcount (Rhett & Link is a good example, they now have a successful TV show). Some have lower CPC/CPV values due to their audience and content. Some don't even use adds. This report was put together under the logic of "The average CPV is $0.001 so every 1k views = $1", rather than doing any actual research
