The song "Somebody That I Used to Know" was released in 2011 and is the most successful piece written by the creator Gotye, whose real name is Wally De Backer. It has topped international charts and as of February 2021, the song's music video was viewed over 1.6 billion times.

You would think that a person with so many views on YouTube would have earned enough money from the ads on the site to last for a lifetime. That is not the case with Gotye: he actually didn't monetize his most successful video or any other video on his YouTube channel. You can only guess what kind of money the music video would have made, but in comparison, the Korean artist Psy earned about $2 million only from ad revenue when the music video for "Gangnam Style" reached 2 billion views.

Gotye doesn't want his music to be associated with products on ads and he's not interested in selling his music. That is the simple reason why Gotye potentially didn't earn millions from YouTube ads.