YouTube Community Posts: Requirements and How They Work

Community Posts sit in an odd spot: everyone has seen one, and almost every guide to them repeats a subscriber number that is out of date. This guide sets out what YouTube Help currently says about who can post, what a post can contain, where it shows up, how comments and moderation work, and what the Analytics report behind it measures.

What are YouTube Community Posts?

YouTube Help describes posts as a way to connect and interact with viewers through polls, quizzes, GIFs, text, music, images and video, shared between video uploads. A separate, related feature, called a Community, is a more limited version aimed only at subscribers: YouTube Help says posts made inside a Community are shared only to that Community and do not appear on the wider Posts tab, Home tab or Subscriptions feed the way a regular post does. This guide covers ordinary posts, which are the ones most creators mean when they talk about the Community tab.

Do you need a subscriber count to post?

Outside guides disagree with each other here, citing 500 subscribers, 1,000 subscribers, or a rollout date in 2023 or 2024 when the feature supposedly opened to everyone. YouTube Help's own page on posts, read on September 27, 2026, states no subscriber requirement at all. It lists exactly three situations where posts are not available:

YouTube Help adds a separate note that access to posts can change based on a person's channel role, which matters for channels with more than one manager or editor. Our Made for Kids guide covers what else that setting switches off.

What types of posts can you create, and what are the limits?

1. 01

   Open the composer

   Sign in to YouTube, select Create at the top of the page, then Create post. In the app, tap Create, then Post.

2. 02

   Type a message, or choose a post type

   Type text directly for a text post, or choose video, poll, quiz or image from the menu at the bottom of the box.

3. 03

   Fill in the type's own fields

   A poll needs a question and up to 4 answers. A quiz needs a question, up to 4 answers and one marked correct. An image post takes up to 10 images.

4. 04

   Post, or schedule it

   Click Post to publish immediately, or click the arrow next to Post and choose Schedule Post to pick a date, time and time zone.

Two more rules apply across every type. YouTube Help says it limits how many posts a channel can create in a 24-hour period, and gives no exact number, only that repeated attempts past the limit return a "limit reached" message. And you can mention another channel in a post by typing @ followed by its handle, which may send that channel a notification.

Separately, in the YouTube app, you can add up to 10 quizzes directly to a video itself, each pinned to a timestamp, rather than posting a standalone quiz. That is a video feature that uses the same quiz format, not a Community Post.

Where do viewers actually see a post?

A post is not confined to one tab. YouTube Help lists four places: the Posts shelf in your channel's Home tab, the dedicated Posts tab, a subscriber's homepage and their Subscriptions feed. Image posts can additionally show up in the Shorts feed. Subscribers may also get a notification when you post, depending on their settings.

That reach depends partly on other people. YouTube Help says engaging with other creators' posts may increase the chance your own posts are seen elsewhere on YouTube, without specifying a mechanism. You can also move or remove the Posts shelf from your Home tab layout in Studio, under Customization, Home tab, Layout, which is a display choice and does not affect the Posts tab itself.

How do comments and moderation work on posts?

Comments on a post generally follow the same settings as comments on a video, with one link worth knowing: YouTube Help says a post that shares a video reflects that video's own comment setting. If the video's comments are off, comments on the post sharing it are off too, whatever your default post setting is. Comments can be off on the underlying video for several reasons: the owner disabled them, YouTube turned them off for safety, the video or channel is set as made for kids, or the viewer has Restricted Mode turned on.

For a post's own comments, you have the same tools you have on videos: you can hold comments for review, reply to any comment from the Comments page for that post, and add a heart to a specific comment to show it came from you. Posts that violate the Community Guidelines can be removed, and a removal can carry a strike against the channel, the same consequence YouTube Help describes for videos.

Can Community Posts make you money?

Not directly. YouTube's earning features are ads, Shopping, YouTube Premium revenue, channel memberships, Super Chat and Super Stickers, and Super Thanks, and none of the Help pages describing posts mention a payment attached to a post itself. Our ways to make money guide covers each of those six in detail. Posts work indirectly: a poll or a video post can drive views and watch time to videos that do earn, and Help notes that a post sharing a video already in a viewer's feed may not show again, which limits how much a post alone can repeat a video's reach.

One optimization feature is worth flagging for planning, not earning. YouTube Help says text and image post tools that use generative AI, currently limited to English on the mobile app, can rewrite a post's wording or generate images with a feature called Dream Screen, itself limited to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States on iOS for select creators. Content made this way still has to follow the Community Guidelines, and Help says creators using YouTube's own generative AI tools for a post do not need to take extra disclosure steps, unlike the disclosure rule for realistic AI content in videos.

What does the Analytics report for posts show?

Posts get their own tab inside YouTube Studio's content performance reports, alongside Videos, Shorts, Live, Playlists and Podcasts.

To reach it, sign in to Studio, select Analytics, then Content, and choose the Posts chip among the report's tabs. Our Analytics guide covers the rest of that report and which numbers are public versus private.

What happens to a post after it is published?

Posts do not stay live forever in the same way a video does. YouTube Help's own interface separates a channel's posts into a current Posts tab, a Scheduled section for posts set to publish later, and an Archived section for posts that have expired, which is visible only to the channel owner. Help does not state a fixed expiration window on the pages we read, so treat archiving as something that happens on a schedule YouTube controls rather than a fixed number of days you can plan around.

Can outside tools read a channel's Community Posts?

No, and the reason is specific enough to state plainly. YouTube's Data API, the same public interface our tools and every third-party YouTube tool read from, has no resource for Community Posts. Channels, videos, playlists, comments and captions each have their own API resource; posts do not. The closest thing that once existed was a type of channel activity called a "bulletin," and Google's own developer documentation for the activities resource states that the channel bulletin feature has been removed, so activities.list can no longer retrieve bulletins and the related insert method is not supported.

That is not a gap in our tools specifically. It means no outside service can pull a channel's post history, post count or post engagement from the public API at all, which is also why this article has no data section built from our own tracked channels: there is nothing in the public API to measure.

What mistakes do creators make with posts?

• Believing a subscriber count still gates the feature. Check the requirements above rather than a number from an older article.
• Combining a poll with text in the same post. YouTube Help says text posts cannot include a poll.
• Assuming a post inside a Community reaches the same audience as a regular post. Community posts are visible only inside that Community.
• Posting a video already sitting in a subscriber's feed and expecting it to reappear. Help says YouTube may suppress a repeat.
• Forgetting that a shared video's comment setting overrides the post's own setting.
• Expecting a post to earn directly. It supports the features that pay, such as watch time on a linked video, rather than paying on its own.

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