Home / Link in bio / YouTube
YouTube switched off links in Shorts. Your channel profile takes fourteen.
Long-form descriptions are clickable. Shorts descriptions and Shorts comments have not been since 2023.
Checked August 2026
Every claim links to its source. These rules change without warning.
How YouTube pays creators
Two entry points, and most guides only describe the higher one.3
- Fan funding tier. 500 subscribers, 3 valid public uploads in 90 days, and either 3,000 qualified watch hours in 12 months or 3 million qualified Shorts views in 90 days. Unlocks memberships, Super Chat, Super Thanks, gifts and shopping. No ad revenue.4
- Ads tier. 1,000 subscribers, and either 4,000 qualified watch hours in 12 months or 10 million qualified Shorts views in 90 days. Unlocks Watch Page ads, Shorts Feed ads and Premium revenue.3
The two paths do not add together: Shorts Feed watch hours do not count towards the 4,000. You also need AdSense for YouTube, two-step verification, advanced features, no active Community Guidelines strikes, and to live where the programme runs.3
The thresholds change on 1 February 2027
YouTube announced on 10 August 2026 that entry for new creators becomes 8,000 qualified watch hours in 365 days, or 20 million qualified Shorts views in 90 days, on top of the same 1,000 subscribers. Existing members are grandfathered.5 If you are reading this after that date, check the source rather than us.
What YouTube keeps
55% of net revenue to the creator on Watch Page ads, 45% on Shorts Feed ads, 70% on fan funding.6 The Shorts figure is not 45% of what your Short earned, and YouTube publishes no RPM at all, for anyone.8 Both need more than a sentence: the money side of YouTube is a guide of its own.
A link to your own page has no threshold, no review and no region list. It works at 40 subscribers, while you are getting to 1,000.
Where a link can actually go
YouTube publishes one consolidated table of which links are clickable, and almost no guide cites it. These rows come straight from it, contradictions included.
| Placement | Verdict | So do this |
|---|---|---|
| Channel profile links | Clickable | Up to fourteen, no eligibility bar, and the first shows near the Subscribe button. This is the placement that works from day one, and the fallback everywhere a link is dead. 1 |
| Long-form video description | Conditional | Clickable, but the channel needs advanced features enabled: the phone-verification step, not the Partner Programme, and it comes long before monetization. Your baseline placement on a small channel. 1 |
| Pinned and ordinary comments on long-form | Conditional | Same advanced-features condition, and no account-age rule that YouTube documents. A pinned comment is a separate placement: give it its own tracked link. 1 |
| Shorts descriptions and Shorts comments | Not clickable | Deliberately dead since 31 August 2023. YouTube's words: "To reduce spam and scam attempts, URLs placed in YouTube Shorts comments and Shorts descriptions are non-clickable."2 Mentions and hashtags still work; URLs specifically were switched off. Put the link on your channel profile and say so out loud in the Short. 1 |
| End screens | Conditional | "If you're in the YouTube Partner Program, you can link to an external website." Last five to twenty seconds, video at least 25 seconds, four elements maximum. The in-player placement, and it unlocks at YPP and not before. 9 |
| Cards | Conditional | Same condition, up to five per video. The small circled i during playback. 10 |
| Community posts | Not documented | YouTube's table marks Posts non-clickable, then footnotes them with the advanced-features requirement, which only makes sense where links can be clickable. Test it on your own channel before relying on it. 1 |
| Live chat, horizontal streams | Clickable | Clickable. 1 |
| Live chat, vertical mobile live feed | Not clickable | Not clickable, switched off at the same time as Shorts links.2 1 |
A widespread belief, corrected: cards and end screens no longer require you to verify or associate your website first. Current YouTube documentation names Partner Programme membership as the only gate, on the card pages, the end-screen page and the external links policy alike. YouTube never announced dropping the website step, so we say only that the documentation no longer asks for it.
Four live placements, four labels.
Nobody needs a report to tell them YouTube works. What is worth knowing is that the description carries the traffic while the pinned comment converts better on it, or that the end screen you waited a thousand subscribers for does almost nothing.
All four point at the same page. The code on the end is what separates a description tap from a pinned-comment tap, which nothing on YouTube's side will tell you. How the tracking works.
What the report then tells you
Every email address and every payment is counted against the placement it arrived from.
By placement on YouTube
Example| Placement | Visits | Emails | Payments | Earned |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| YouTube description | 2,140 | 96 | 24 | $341 |
| YouTube pinned comment | 318 | 44 | 11 | $164 |
| YouTube channel links | 402 | 12 | 3 | $38 |
| YouTube end screen | 96 | 2 | 0 | $0 |
The pinned comment brought a seventh of the traffic and nearly half the money. You only learn that by labelling the two separately.
YouTube will not give you their email addresses.
YouTube gives you subscriber counts, analytics and a comments section. It does not give you your subscribers' email addresses, and there is no export that produces them.
Fourteen channel links is generous, and not one of them can take an email address or a payment. Your Linkonz page carries up to ten links of its own, with a sign-up form and a payment block above them. We take 0%.
Addresses come from the form on your page and from the opt-in link on a payment receipt, and export as a CSV. How the capture and the consent record work. The free plan collects without limit and shows you the first five.
* Stripe's card fee still applies.
Sources
- YouTube: sharing links with your audiences. support.google.com
- TeamYouTube: changes to links in Shorts and live chat (August 2023). support.google.com
- YouTube: Partner Programme overview and eligibility. support.google.com
- YouTube: overview of the expanded Partner Programme. support.google.com
- YouTube blog: Partner Programme updates for 2027. blog.youtube
- YouTube: partner earnings overview. support.google.com
- YouTube: Shorts monetization policies. support.google.com
- YouTube: RPM and CPM defined. support.google.com
- YouTube: add end screens to videos. support.google.com
- YouTube: add info cards to videos. support.google.com