How to Get Monetized on YouTube - How Long It Takes, How to Apply, Review Process, AdSense, Dos & Don’ts
If you want to start making money on YouTube, this is the email that will make you leap on your feet and excitedly exclaim, “I did it!”
Before you get to this point though, this is what you will be stuck looking (and probably cursing) at every day:
Watching the meters go pixel by pixel was excruciating. Thankfully, after lots of hard work, my channel just got monetized, and I’m here to share with you my whole process of getting monetized as a music production channel. I will talk about:
Requirements to become eligible for the YouTube Partner Program (aka monetization)
How long it took me to get monetized, and my YouTube analytics leading to monetization
How long it took for my application to get officially approved
What happens and what to do after you meet the subscriber and watch hours requirements
What you can do to make the application process go faster while you are still working towards meeting the two requirements
Dos and don’ts
If you prefer watching a video than reading a long blog post, check out the video I made:
Requirements for Monetization
You might already know this but it’s still worth mentioning—you will need to have 1000 subscribers and 4000 public watch hours in the last 365 days in order to be eligible to apply for the YouTube Partner Program (YPP). This means that if you have a viral video from two years ago that nobody watches anymore, all those watch hours generated from two years ago will not count. Views from videos that are not public (e.g. unlisted or private) also won’t count.
You can find those two gauges showing you where you are in terms meeting the requirements in the “Monetization” tab in your YouTube Studio. I think the gauges only update once a day—for me it was always around 3am EST, so don’t expect it to change a few hours after you upload a video.
My Journey of Getting Monetized
It took me about seven months to get monetized. I started taking YouTube seriously and regularly uploading videos since June 2020, and I met the 1000 subscribers threshold in September, but it wasn’t until January 18th this year that I met the 4000 public watch hours requirement.
It was quite brutal, because in this period you are basically making videos without getting paid, and when you get monetized, the videos you made during this period won’t make you much money because they are not new videos.
If we look at my channel’s watch hour history in the last 365 days, you can tell that I really started to accumulate a lot of watch hours since the first video I posted last June, and as I keep pushing out videos, I got more and more watch hours.
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I do want to mention that it would probably have taken me longer to meet the requirements because I didn’t really start completely from scratch. I did have about 500 subscribers from when I was making really bad and awkward Reaper tutorials and some other videos occasionally, but if you look at the watch hours I gained before I rebooted my channel last year, I only got 3.2k watch hours in seven years! In contrast, I got over 4 thousand watch hours in the last 7 months.
What this tells you is that, if you want to meet the watch hour requirement fast, keep pumping out good videos.
Depending on the kind of videos you make, the time it takes for a channel to meet those two requirements can vary drastically. It took a channel that blew up last year one year and a half just to get monetized, but now the channel is sitting at over 300k subscribers. So don’t compare yourself to others and just focus on creating good content regularly. Everybody progresses at their own pace just like everything else in life.
After You Met the Requirements
Once you have one thousand subscribers and four thousand watch hours, you will see an “APPLY NOW” button under the gauges to apply to the YouTube Partner Program, which is basically a fancy way of saying you can now apply to make your channel eligible for monetization.
After you clicked apply, it will tell you your channel is under review, and one of the things you will need to do is to set up your Google AdSense account, which is where you actually get paid. You don’t actually get paid by YouTube.
I highly recommend setting up your AdSense account as early as possible, like today if your goal is to get monetized, because it will speed up the monetization review process if you’ve already had it set up beforehand, and also because it takes time to set it up. When you first create the account, Google will literally mail you a code via snail mail to your address to I guess confirm you actually live at the address you put in AdSense and you are a real human. Getting the mail can take a week or two, or even longer if you live in rural areas, so just get your AdSense account set up now instead of waiting until you can apply to the YPP, so you can get approved faster.
How Long Does It Take to Get Approved for Monetization?
After I applied for monetization, I was approved within 24 hours, which was insanely and unusually fast because I heard that some people waited for 2 days, some waited for a week and some even waited for over a month, so it’s different for everyone and be patient if you don’t get approved in a few days. When you do get approved, you will see this email telling you you have been approved and can monetize your videos. This means if you go to your YouTube studio now, you will see a whole lot of happy little green dollar signs on your videos.
Configuring Ads for Your Videos
Once you have the dollar signs on your videos, you need to actually configure your ad settings because ads is the only way you can make money directly from YouTube. You will want to go to the settings page in your YouTube studio, then go to Monetization, and make sure to learn about the types of ads and turn on whichever you deem appropriate.
If you want to maximize your ad revenue on YouTube, then I would recommend turning on all of them. I absolutely would not recommend checking the “during video” option here though because this will allow YouTube to automatically place a whole bunch of ads anywhere in the video, and that can be disastrous. I’ve heard people saying YouTube automatically putting 12 mid-roll ads on a 30 minute video, which will be a terrible experience for your viewers. The best way to do mid-roll ads is to manually place them for each video, and you can do that in the monetization settings of each video. You obviously want to be careful where to put your mid-roll ads as well so they are not too interruptive, and how many of them you put in one video.
For me, I usually put two for a video that’s around 10 to 15 minutes long, and I will put one or two more for videos that are 20 to 30 minutes. For my tutorial videos, I’m a lot more careful because if people are following along to try to do something and there’s suddenly an ad, that can be super annoying. That’s why I try to find transitional spots to put the mid-roll ads, and if I can’t find any good place to put them, I will just not put any because the viewerss are much more important. I know a lot of big YouTubers put three for every ten minutes, so you will have to make your own judgement on that.
Keep in mind that, only videos longer than 8 minutes can have mid-roll ads, which means that videos shorter than eight minutes will have much less potential to generate ad revenue compared to longer videos, so another good thing you can do starting today is to make longer videos, NOT by meandering and rambling in your videos, but by actually including more good content in your videos.
If you look at my catalog, most of my videos are over eight minutes, so I was able to put mid-roll ads on them. Having longer videos will also help you reach your watch hour requirement faster because no matter how long your video is, the view duration will be very similar in percentage. For example, my Neural DSP Gojira review video is 15 minutes long and the average view duration is 3 minutes and 46 seconds. For my 6-minutes REAPER video though, the average view duration is 2 minutes and 10 seconds. So don’t look at a video and be like oh, people are watching 3 minutes of my 15 minute video, so if I make a 3 minute video, then I can put in less effort and reap the same amount of watch time. If you publish shorter videos, you will just get proportionally less watch time in general. YouTube also likes to push longer videos now because YouTube wants people to spend as much time watching videos on their platform as possible, so to sum up, make longer videos that are high quality, and that will set you up for success.
YouTube Is Not for Everyone
If you are not familiar with the journey of becoming a full-time YouTuber, I want to make sure you are aware that YouTube, for most people, is a long game. You are not going to earn a lot of money from it overnight or even over a year or several years. YouTube is a marathon, and most people can’t even make it past the subscriber and watch hour requirements.
The most important thing is that you enjoy making videos, because if you don’t, this will be the most unrewarding thing ever. You might as well do something else because even a minimum wage job will earn you more money and probably require less effort in the first few years.
But, if you enjoy making videos for your channel, then this will be a really amazing journey because you will learn so much as you grow your channel. You will learn more about the topics you make videos on, you will become better at video editing, you will become better at producing videos, you will become better at presenting information, you will connect with people who appreciate your content and so on. And you will eventually start making money from it and even make a living from it.
Hope this article helps you with your YouTube journey if you plan to or are about to embark on one. Consider subscribing to my YouTube channel if you are interested in videos on making money on YouTube and music production!