How to Make Money on YouTube: 9 Ways (With Requirements)

The question has two answers, and most guides blur them. Some income is paid by YouTube and needs YouTube to approve your channel. The rest comes from viewers, brands and clients who never ask YouTube's permission. This guide sets out nine ways, what YouTube's own pages require for each, and how often we see each one in real channels' public data.

How can you make money on YouTube? Nine ways at a glance

The rest of this guide takes them in groups, then shows what our data says about how common they are.

Which level do you need first?

Which routes are open depends on where the channel stands. YouTube Help sets the levels for the ones it pays.

From February 1, 2027, new applicants for ad revenue need 8,000 watch hours or 20 million Shorts views. The requirements guide has the detail, and the application guide walks through applying.

What does YouTube pay for, and on what terms?

YouTube Help lists six features inside the Partner Program: advertising revenue from watch page ads and Shorts feed ads, Shopping, Premium revenue, channel memberships, Super Chat and Super Stickers, and Super Thanks. It says each feature has its own eligibility requirements on top of the subscriber and view counts, and that some may not be available to you because of local legal requirements.

The shares come from the partner earnings page. On the watch page, YouTube pays partners 55% of net revenue from ads on public videos. In the Shorts feed, it pays 45% of the revenue allocated to the creator from the Creator Pool. For memberships, Super Chat, Super Stickers and Super Thanks, it pays 70% of net revenue. Our Shorts monetization guide explains the pool.

Some conditions surprise people. Memberships need the creator to be at least 18, to live where the feature is offered, to have accepted the Commerce Product Module, and to run a channel that is not set as made for kids and is not a music channel under SRAV. Super Thanks excludes music channels under SRAV too. Shopping asks that the channel meets the subscriber threshold or is an Official Artist Channel, is not set as made for kids and has not had a hate speech strike.

How does YouTube Shopping pay?

There are two parts. You can sell your own products through a store on your channel, and you can tag products from other brands and earn commission through the Shopping affiliate program. YouTube Help says the affiliate program is by invitation: your channel must be in the Partner Program and meet its subscriber threshold, be based in one of the listed countries, not be a music channel or an Official Artist Channel, and not be set as made for kids. It lists Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, the United States and Vietnam.

Commissions are paid through AdSense within 60 to 120 days after purchase, to allow for returns, and they are reversed if a customer returns the product. That delay matters for planning, so a first sale does not become cash for two to four months.

Can you make money without the Partner Program?

Yes, and YouTube's own data says many creators do it alongside ads. YouTube states that of the Partner Program channels that earned five figures or more in 2024, over 50% earned revenue from sources other than ads and Premium. That statistic is about channels already in the program, so it says nothing about how many channels earn without it.

Outside YouTube there is nothing to approve. You still follow two sets of rules.

On disclosure, the FTC says a material connection to a brand includes the brand paying you or giving you free or discounted products, and that as an influencer it is your responsibility to disclose it. In a video, the disclosure should be in the video itself, since a note in the description alone can be missed. Terms such as "ad" or "sponsored" work, and vague ones such as "sp", "spon" or "collab" do not. The FTC adds that US law applies to a post from abroad when it is reasonably foreseeable that it will affect US consumers.

On YouTube's own label, YouTube Help says that if you feature branded content, sponsorships, endorsements or other commercial relationships, you have to tell YouTube by selecting the paid promotion button in the video details, which adds a disclosure label at the start of the video. Both rules apply together.

How do sponsorships, affiliate links, services and products work?

Nothing below needs a subscriber count from YouTube, but each has a practical bar.

• Affiliate links. You put a retailer's tracked link in the description or say it in the video and earn a commission on sales. The bar is fit: the product has to match what viewers came for, and the link needs the disclosure above.
• Sponsorships and brand deals. A brand pays you to feature its product. YouTube Help says Partner Program creators are discoverable to brands through the Creator Partnerships tab in Studio's Earn page, and can opt out of search recommendations. No public rate exists that we can vouch for, so treat any per-view sponsorship figure you read as unsourced.
• Services and coaching. Viewers become clients. It suits channels that teach a skill and is limited by your hours.
• Products and merchandise. Templates, courses, guides or physical goods sold through a store you run. Shopping on YouTube needs the Partner Program, but a store outside YouTube does not.

YouTube's August 2026 announcement adds a note for smaller channels: it says channels below the 10 million view line will get new incentive programs, such as bonuses for Shopping, incentives for brand deals and earnings boosts for trends, with details to come.

How common is each way? What our data shows

To see which income signals show up in real channels, we drew 60 channels at random from each of four subscriber bands in our tracked set on September 26, 2026, leaving out YouTube's auto-generated Topic channels and channels with fewer than 10 videos. We read each channel's latest 20 uploads through the YouTube Data API: 4,659 videos and 334 quota units. A channel counts for a signal when at least one of those 20 videos shows it.

We used four signals that can be read without guessing. The first is the creator's own paid promotion disclosure, the hasPaidProductPlacement field in the API. The second is a link to Amazon or an affiliate network in the description, such as amzn.to, geni.us or ShareASale. The third is a fan support or membership link: Patreon, Ko-fi, Buy Me a Coffee, Streamlabs, PayPal.me, GoFundMe, Kickstarter or a YouTube membership join link. The fourth is a store or merchandise platform link, such as Creator Spring, Teespring, Shopify, Gumroad or an Etsy shop.

Read this as a floor. Many deals never appear in a description: a sponsor can be named only in the video, a link can sit in a pinned comment, and services and products often have no link at all. Some Amazon links point to a creator's own products and not to an affiliate account. The samples are small, the tracked set leans toward channels that had a breakout video, and the 100 to 999 band had only 107 eligible channels to draw from, so differences between neighbouring bands are within noise.

Even so, three things stand out. Visible off-platform income signals are uncommon at every size: 73% of the channels at 100,000 subscribers and above showed none of the four. Declared paid promotion rises with size, from 2% to 13%. And fan support links, which include YouTube membership join links, are the most common signal in the largest band.

Which way fits your channel?

This part is our judgement, not YouTube's, and it is a starting point.

How much can you expect?

There is no public figure we can trust for what a typical channel earns from any of these. YouTube publishes a total, over $100 billion paid to creators, artists and media companies in four years, and no median. For ads, our earnings guide shows the arithmetic: at the $4.20 base rate in our Money Calculator, $1,000 takes about 238,000 views, and between about 97,000 and 348,000 across the calculator's range of country and niche factors. Those rates are our assumptions, and your own RPM in YouTube Analytics is the only reliable figure. For sponsorships and affiliate links, rates depend on the deal, so ask before you accept.

YouTube Help adds that you may be liable to pay tax on your earnings in your country of residence and that you should check with your local tax authority.

What mistakes cost creators money?

• Skipping disclosure. The FTC and YouTube's paid promotion button both apply, and a missing label is the easiest mistake to avoid.
• Waiting for approval before earning anything. The off-YouTube routes need no permission, and a small audience with a clear need can support services or a product.
• Counting on one feature. YouTube's own statistic says over half of the channels earning five figures used something beyond ads and Premium.
• Ignoring country limits. Shopping affiliate, memberships and other features are not available everywhere.
• Treating ads on a video as proof that a channel is paid. YouTube may place ads on videos in channels outside the program, as we found when we measured it in our application guide.

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