Takeaway
- Jordan Peterson’s net worth was approximately $89 million in 2023 (low estimates).
- This is the bulk of his earnings since getting into the public eye in 2017.
- Most of Peterson’s money comes from book sales and conferences.
- Peterson has eleven income streams at the moment and is about to add a twelfth one.
Update 5th of August 2024: I wrote this article in 2023 and Jordan Peterson has earned more money since then (his net worth is way over $100 million by now). Maybe I’ll recalculate it at some point. The following is the article as I wrote it in 2023. Peterson has now launched his 12th income stream: the Peterson Academy. Enjoy!
According to my calculations which you can read below, Jordan Peterson earned at least $89,379,668.
This isn’t a typo.
After a friend sent me a video where Peterson details a part of his income, I thought I’d investigate further how he earns money and give a broad estimate of his earnings.
I figured it could also help creators have new income stream ideas.
Technically speaking, Peterson is just a content creator, after all.
Without further ado, here are his twelve (known) sources of income.
Table of Contents
1. Book Sales: $30 Million So Far
Let’s start with the most obvious. Jordan Peterson is an acclaimed author with four books:
- Maps of Meaning
- 12 Rules for Life
- Beyond Order
- An ABC of Childhood Tragedy: yes, nobody knows this book. It’s still for sale on Amazon but even Peterson doesn’t sell it on his website. Go figure.
Normally, most book sales are secrets.
However, there’s a trick to estimate how much a book has sold: Amazon ratings.
The ratio is roughly 1 rating for 250 sales.
Let’s do the math.
2,968 + 61,970 + 14,930 + 123 = 79 991 ratings.
79,991 rating X 250 = 19,997,750 books sold.
According to Peterson himself, he earns $1.5 on each book sale, which makes a total of $29 996 625.
Now…these are only the English language book sales.
Peterson’s work was translated in (wait for it) 45 languages.
I am too lazy to check the number of reviews for each book in each language, but if we reasonably suppose that he sold 10% of what he sold in English (he likely sold more), he made at the very least $30 million out of his book sales.
2. Tours: €44,208,450 So Far
Book sales are to Jordan Peterson what iTunes is to singers: pocket money.
Peterson makes (by far) most of his income with tours.
When I went to watch him in Tallinn (Estonia), I bought my ticket for €33. It wasn’t the cheapest, but it wasn’t the most expensive either.
The ticket price was roughly 45€ in Helsinki (Finland) in comparison.
I’ll therefore take the mean (€39) as a basis to calculate how much Peterson makes with his tours.
Each event brings in between 3,000 to 10,000 people, which I can believe. The mean would be 6.5k people per event, but that seems a bit too much.
So I’ll assume Peterson has 5,000 people per event on average.
Peterson has done 128 events for 12 Rules for Life and 101 for Beyond Order (he has 27 new events planned from the 2nd of February, but I won’t count them).
That’s 229 events.
All that is left is to calculate how much the concert hall takes.
Generally, concert halls take a maximum of 1% of the ticket price. Since I’d rather underestimate how much he earns rather than the opposite, that’s the baseline I’ll take.
Therefore:
- With 229 events X 5,000 people, Peterson sold 1,145,000 tickets.
- With an average price of 39€ per seat, Peterson earned €44,655,000.
- €44655,000 X 0.99 (the 1% the concert hall took) = €44,208,450
Consider that I am only counting the tickets sold. Jordan sells more stuff at his events that I didn’t calculate (10-minute meetups for €250, pictures, books, etc).
3. Youtube Channel: €1 million Per Year And Increasing
According to speakrj, Peterson has:
- 6,310,000 subscribers
- 641 videos
- 503.7M of total views
Lots of different websites estimate his yearly earnings anywhere between €20k to €900k.
Given the fact he also has his own sponsors in the videos…I would randomly estimate Peterson’s YouTube revenues (ads + sponsors) at around €1 million per year.
Too much? Maybe.
4. Podcast: $320,000 Per Year And Increasing
Peterson has a podcast that you can listen to on Spotify (and YouTube).
That podcast has several sponsors at the beginning, the middle, and the end.
Apparently, you can earn between $18 to $50 per 1000 listeners, although Peterson likely gets a better deal, but I won’t count on that.
Unfortunately, I didn’t find any stats from Spotify itself.
Let’s assume that Peterson has on Spotify 20% of the audience he gets on YouTube.
Since his YouTube has 503 million views for 641 videos, each video receives on average 784 000 views.
20% of this is 156 800.
Now, let’s imagine that Peterson does not get a better advertising deal and that his earnings are capped at $34 (mean of $18–$50) per 1000 views.
That would make his earnings at 156.8 X $34 X 2 sponsors = $10 662 per episode.
If he publishes 30 episodes per year, that’s $320k.
5. Self-Authoring: $300,000 Yearly
Still with me?
The self-authoring is a writing program that costs $30. Now, I assume Jordan needs to share the profits with his two associates, Robert O. Pihl and Daniel M. Higgins.
Let’s say he earns $10 ($30/3) per person who signs up. The website pretends that over 10,000 people have done the program, but that sounded a bit too low.
So I went on SpyFu.
SpyFu says that the website receives 10 977 SEO clicks monthly which makes 131,724 clicks per year from the US alone. We should add to that the other English-speaking countries (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Ireland) and the foreigners as a second language who, like me, took the test.
I estimate hence that the website has at least 300,000 people visiting per year. Since people don’t end up on this website randomly, Ill take a conversion rate of 10%, that is, 30k people.
$10 X 30,000 = $300,000 yearly.
6. Understand Myself: $55 944 Per Year
Understand Myself is a psychology test to understand your personality.
It’s a bit cheaper, $10 per person. Jordan built it with the same team he used for the Self Authoring, so I assume once again he needs to share the $10 with two other people.
According to SpyFu, the website receives 14k clicks per month, which is 168,000 per year…from the US alone.
To avoid overestimating, I’ll only take the US numbers.
$3.33 X 16,800 = $55 944.
7. Essay Writing App: $32,538 Since Inception
The essay writing app is an app developed by Julian Peterson, Jordan’s son. I assume that they split the profits 50/50 since it’s mainly advertised by Jordan.
Besides that, the first thing to know about the app is that it’s not an app.
It’s a SaaS, essentially a mix of Grammarly and ChatGPT promising to help you write better essays (but no one cares.)
What we do care about is that it’s priced at $6/month, $48/year, or $249 forever.
The website has NO SEO whatsoever, so it’s impossible to find it unless you really want to.
Yet SpyFu estimates that 7 560 people visit it monthly (Jordan plugs it often in his content and tours).
According to Spyfu, the app was launched in May 2022.
9 months X 7 560 (underestimated again since it is for US alone) = 68 040.
Let’s take a conversion rate of 1% this time (I imagine anyone smart enough to write essays won’t be dumb enough to sign up for this scam).
68,040 X 0.01 = 680.
Now let’s say that 45% took the monthly subscription and quit after a month (once again, underestimated), 45% took the yearly subscription, and 10% got the lifetime plan.
That’d be:
- 306 people X $3 = $918
- 306 people X $24 = $7 344
- 68 people X $124.5 = $8 466
Total: $16 728
8. Patreon: $960,000 In Total
In the video I linked above, Jordan Peterson said he was making $80,000/month on Patreon.
He seems to have deleted it in 2019. Nonetheless, he does have a “donation” page on his website but it’s impossible to estimate what he’s been making out of it since then.
As a result, I have decided to add $80,000 X 12 months to his net worth, even though it was likely much more.
9. Merch
Peterson sells posters, playing cards, and stickers on his website.
The website receives 80,000 viewers per month from the US alone according to Spyfu (so it’s likely more for the US alone + international visits), which would make 960,000 viewers per year from the US alone on a low estimate.
Since Jordan sells everything there, it’s impossible to know how many people buy merch, and for how much they buy merch.
So I decided not to take it into account.
10. Daily Wire+: $660 000 Yearly
Daily Wire+ is like Disney+ but for US conservatives.
Jordan Peterson signed an agreement with them to create exclusive content, which he sometimes posts on his YouTube channel.
DW+ has three membership plans: $8, $12, and $14.
Let’s take the mean, which is $11. On a yearly basis, that’d be about $132.
DW+ had one million subscribers in November 2022, which means they make $132 million a year.
If Peterson gets just 0.05% of that (he likely gets double), that’d be about $660,000 per year.
11. Personality Course: $7,920,000 Since Inception
The Personality Course is Jordan’s priciest product. He uses Kajabi as CRM, some sort of Teachable, but much pricier (from $120/month).
This course seems to be a premium version of his “Understand Myself” quiz.
In any way, he sells the course for $99, and sold it to *at least* 80,000 people.
Let’s do the math:
- 80,000 X $99 = $7,920,000
Minus the Kajabi subscription, of course.
12. Upcoming: The Peterson Academy
Selling courses makes so much damn money that Jordan Peterson is working with his daughter on the Peterson Academy, some sort of Udemy where ideology-free university professors will teach you their topics of predilection.
The academy has not yet launched, so Jordan hasn’t yet made money out of it.
But you can be sure it’s an 8-figure business at the very least.
It’s now time to compute everything.
Calculating Everything
- €44,208,450 from tours
- €1,000,000 from YouTube
Equal to €45,208450. In USD at the current exchange rate (1.087, roughly), that’s $49 147 914.
Now let’s compute the rest in USD:
- $30,000,000 in book sales
- $320,000 from Spotify yearly (so it’s more in total as I only count one year)
- $300,000 from Self Authoring yearly (so it’s more in total)
- $55,944 from Understand Myself yearly (so it’s more in total)
- $16,728 from the essay app since inception
- $960,000 from Patreon (in total)
- $660,000 yearly from DW+
- $7,920,000 of Personality Course since inception
= $40,231,754.
$40,231,754+ $49,147,914 = $89,379,668.
Voila.
Conclusion
Jordan Peterson is a money-making machine.
But this isn’t the best part.
The best part is that there are still many sources of income that I don’t know about (I know he had some sort of HR consulting company) or that I couldn’t compute.
So my estimates are *definitely* lower than Peterson’s real net worth.
The good news is that…well, there’s still money to make as a content creator 😉
For more fun articles like this, head to auresnotes.com.
Pic source: Gage Skidmore
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