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THE REQUIREMENTS
Subscribers
Subscribers
You need at least 1,000 subscribers before you can apply for monetization (the YouTube Partner Program).
Watch Hours
Watch Hours
This is one of the two ways to qualify. You need 4,000 hours of watch time on your regular videos in the past year.
Shorts Views
Shorts Views
This is the other option. Instead of watch hours, you can qualify by getting 10 million views on your Shorts within 90 days.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Once you get accepted into the YouTube Partner Program (YPP), YouTube starts putting ads on your videos, and you get paid for them. Generally, you'll get 55% of the ad revenue.
There are other ways to make money as a partner, though! Like memberships, donations during streams, and YouTube Premium members watching your videos.
The amount of money you can make changes a lot. It depends on things like how many views you get, how much of the video your viewers watch, and what kind of content you make. Some videos/channels will do really well, and some don't make much at all.
Especially starting, it's not a steady paycheck.
MY JOURNEY
My Monetization Experience & Future
My Monetization Experience & Future
I first became monetized in early 2023 after meeting the requirements through consistent uploads on my VR channel. That period was my first real experience seeing how YouTube monetization works. A few of my videos performed very well, each reaching over 100,000 views and earning me a few hundred dollars per upload. However, once my upload schedule slowed down due to school and other commitments, the income stopped coming in consistently, and I eventually stepped away from posting for a while.
In early 2024, I uploaded a video on my second channel where I had been posting For Honor content casually. That video unexpectedly took off and passed 1 million views, which pushed my new channel into monetization in July. It earned a few hundred dollars, although most of the growth happened before monetization fully kicked in. Even so, it showed me how quickly things can change on the platform.
I have since unlisted that video because it no longer fits the direction I want for my content, but the channel remains monetized. My original VR channel is no longer monetized due to inactivity, but the experience across both channels taught me a lot about how unpredictable and inconsistent YouTube income can be.
Going forward, I want to use monetization more intentionally as I continue building content creation as a long-term path. It's about learning how to build something sustainable and eventually turn it into a real career over time.
Through monetization, I also learned more about how YouTube’s payment system and ad revenue work. Although I am still learning about the financial side of content creation, I now understand things such as ad placement, how creators are paid through AdSense, and the minimum payout threshold required before receiving monthly payments. Earlier on, I also experimented with channel memberships, where supporters could pay a small monthly fee in exchange for perks such as early access to videos and guaranteed spots in uploads. In addition, I created an affiliate partnership with Dubby Energy that allowed viewers to use my discount code for purchases.
Overall, monetization taught me to take content creation more seriously and showed me how important consistency and hard work are when trying to build income online. It also pushed me to improve the quality of my content and think more competitively about what I create. At the same time, I learned how unpredictable YouTube income can be, since revenue can quickly change when uploads slow down or videos suddenly stop performing well.
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