Two thresholds, one of which nobody mentions.

Most guides describe one threshold. There are two. The lower one unlocks money from your audience without unlocking money from advertisers.

The two thresholds

The fan funding tier: 500 subscribers

YouTube's expanded Partner Programme opens at 500 subscribers, three valid public uploads in the last 90 days, and either 3,000 qualified watch hours in twelve months or 3 million qualified Shorts views in ninety days.1

It unlocks channel memberships, Super Chat and Super Stickers, Super Thanks, gifts, and shopping features. It does not unlock ad revenue or YouTube Premium revenue. Both of those sit in the higher tier, which is the detail most write-ups get wrong.2

The ads tier: 1,000 subscribers

1,000 subscribers, plus either 4,000 qualified public watch hours in the last twelve months or 10 million qualified Shorts views in the last ninety days.2

Only public long-form videos generate qualified watch hours: private, unlisted and deleted videos do not count, and neither do Shorts. The two paths do not add together, because "any qualified watch hours from Shorts views in the Shorts Feed won't count towards the 4,000 qualified watch hours threshold".2

Where applications actually fail

The subscriber count is the headline. You also need an AdSense for YouTube account linked to the channel, two-step verification on the Google account, advanced features enabled, no active Community Guidelines strikes, and to live in a country where the programme runs.2

The monetization policies apply per video and can switch ad earnings off without touching your membership.4 In July 2025 the policy renamed Inauthentic Content began requiring that content "be your original creation" and "not be mass-produced, generic, repetitive, or manipulative".4 If your channel assembles other people's material, that is the rule that ends it.

What YouTube keeps

YouTube publishes the splits.5

• 55% of net revenue to the creator on Watch Page ads, including playback embedded in the YouTube player elsewhere
• 45% on Shorts Feed ads
• 70% of net revenue on fan funding: memberships, Super Chat, Super Stickers and Super Thanks

The Shorts 45% is not 45% of what your Short earned. Shorts ad revenue is pooled monthly across creators, music licensing is paid out of that pool first, the remainder is allocated by each creator's share of engaged views, and you keep 45% of your allocation.6 YouTube's own worked example: a Short using one track sends half the revenue from its engaged views to the pool and the other half to music licensing.

Fan funding is the best split on the list, and it unlocks at the lower threshold.

Why nobody can tell you your RPM

YouTube publishes no average RPM, no benchmark and no range. Its help centre defines the term and then explains only how to see your own figure in YouTube Studio once you are in the programme.7 The earnings overview says "there are no guarantees under the YouTube partner agreement about how much or whether you'll be paid".5

Ad rates vary by subject, country, season and advertiser demand. A figure from somebody else's finance channel in December tells you nothing about your gardening channel in June. We are not going to publish an estimate we cannot source.

What works before you qualify

We sell this part, so weigh it accordingly.

Direct support from your audience has no threshold at all. No subscriber minimum, no watch-hours test, no ninety-day window, no country list, no review, and no application that can be rejected. It works on the day you publish your first video, at forty subscribers, in any country where Stripe operates. The payment is charged on your own Stripe account. We take 0%.*

* Stripe's card fee still applies. The free plan collects email addresses without limit and lets you read and export the first five; Pro is $15 a month.

It also cannot be demonetized, because there is no monetization state to switch off. A video that gets limited ad earnings under the advertiser-friendly guidelines still has a working link in its description.

It is not a replacement for ad revenue. A channel doing serious view volume will out-earn its tip jar from advertising. It is what works while you are getting to 1,000, and afterwards it is a second line that does not depend on advertiser demand in your category.

Ad revenue leaves you nothing to keep

A viewer who watched four hours of your videos is still a stranger you cannot contact: YouTube's subscription data exposes a channel title and a thumbnail and no email field.8

A description link that ends in a sign-up form turns some of those viewers into email addresses you hold. The longer version is here.

Getting the link into the right place

URLs in Shorts descriptions and Shorts comments are not clickable, deliberately, and have not been since 31 August 2023. Long-form descriptions are unaffected, but they need advanced features enabled on the channel. Your channel profile takes up to fourteen links with no eligibility bar at all, which makes it the placement to fall back on.

Give each placement its own tracked link. One for the description, one for the pinned comment, one for the end screen, one for the channel profile: four links, four labels, all pointing at the same page and differing only by the ?r= code on the end. You already know YouTube works. The labels tell you which part of it does.

Untagged visits are not all filed as direct traffic: we read the Referer origin, and the in-app browser's User-Agent where the referrer has been stripped. The ?r= code is still the primary signal, because Instagram and TikTok send no referrer at all.

The full table — cards, end screens, live chat, and the one row where YouTube's own documentation contradicts itself — is on the YouTube placements page, next to the per-placement report those four links produce.