YouTube Monetisation Checker

Two routes, both requiring 1,000 subscribers: either 4,000 valid public watch hours over the previous 12 months, or 10 million valid public Shorts views over the previous 90 days. You also need to live in a country where the programme is available, follow the monetisation policies, and have no active Community Guidelines strike.

No, and no third-party tool can give you the real figure. YouTube only publishes view counts and durations. We multiply the two and apply a retention rate, which is why the number moves so much when you change that slider. The real value lives in YouTube Studio and only the channel owner sees it.

Because it multiplies everything. A channel with a million views on ten-minute videos has 166,000 hours at 100% retention and 58,000 at 35%. That is nearly a factor of three on the number that decides eligibility, which is exactly why any tool quoting a single precise watch-hour figure is guessing.

We look at whether recent videos carry ad placements in their public data. It is a strong signal, not a certificate: a monetised channel can have ads disabled on a specific video, and some formats are limited rather than fully demonetised.

No. Shorts views feed the separate 10 million views over 90 days route. Watch time from Shorts does not count towards the 4,000 hours, and vice versa — you qualify through one route or the other.

Passing the thresholds only makes you eligible to apply. Review is manual and looks at whether your content is original, whether it follows the monetisation policies, and whether your AdSense account is set up. Reused content and channels built from other people's uploads are the most common rejections.

Any public channel. Subscriber counts are hidden on some accounts by choice — when that happens we say so instead of inventing a number.