In November 2023 YouTube stopped exposing a public flag that said whether a channel was in the Partner Program. Every tool that answered "is this channel monetized" was reading that flag. They all still answer the question. None of them will tell you they're now guessing.
I built one of those tools, so I want to lay out what mine actually reads, where it fails, and what happened when I pointed it at 1,000 channels across 30 countries.
What you can and can't see from outside
"Monetized" means the channel is in the Partner Program. There are two tiers:
Fan funding needs 500 subscribers, 3 public uploads in 90 days, and either 3,000 watch hours in a year or 3M Shorts views in 90 days. It unlocks memberships, Super Thanks and the merch shelf.
Ad revenue needs 1,000 subscribers and either 4,000 watch hours in a year or 10M Shorts views in 90 days.
Watch hours are private. Subscriber count usually isn't. So from outside you can see the eligibility line but not whether the creator applied, got in, or got kicked out later. Anyone quoting an accuracy percentage is quoting a number they have no way to compute.
The five things I read
Every check returns these five as pass, fail or unknown, and the result page shows all five with a sentence each.
Subscriber count, from the official API. It's a clue about eligibility, nothing more. A 40,000-subscriber channel can be unmonetized and a 900-subscriber one can be in the fan funding tier.
The Join button. Memberships are Partner Program only, so if it's there the channel is in. If it's missing that means almost nothing, because plenty of monetized channels never turn memberships on.
Ads on recent long-form uploads. I sample several recent long videos and check whether ads are actually being served. Strongest signal for the ad revenue tier, with a caveat I'll get to.
Merch shelf. Also Partner Program only, also opt-in, also needs a linked store. Present is strong evidence, absent is normal.
The 500-subscriber floor. Below it the channel can't be in the program at all. This is the one signal whose failure is a real negative.
The trap
Since November 2020, YouTube runs ads on videos from channels that are not in the Partner Program. The creator gets nothing from those ads.
So "I saw a pre-roll" proves nothing on its own, and any checker that only looks for ads will confidently call an unmonetized channel monetized. I require ads on at least two thirds of the videos I successfully sampled, and a channel with one lucky pre-roll doesn't clear that.
How the verdict comes out
Evidence has an order. Partner-Program-only features first, then ad delivery, then subscriber counts. Subscriber counts never override a product signal: if a channel shows a Join button at 480 subscribers, the Join button wins.
Four outcomes:
- Likely monetized — enough subscribers, memberships on, ads running.
- Possibly monetized — one Partner Program feature or the ad signal is there, but the set isn't complete. Usually memberships on, ads not detected.
- Likely not monetized — no positive signal at all, and either under 500 subscribers or clearing 1,000 with every readable product signal negative.
- Can't tell — the evidence is missing or points both ways. I say so instead of picking.
Two rules that took the longest to get right
Unknown is not fail. A blocked fetch, a hidden subscriber count, a channel with no long-form uploads: none of those are evidence of anything. They stay unknown and never push a verdict toward "not monetized". My first version got this wrong and produced confident false negatives for channels that were merely hard to read.
Failed samples stay out of the denominator. If I try five videos and one loads, "1 of 1 has ads" is not a 100% ad rate, it's a sample of one. Below two successful fetches the ad signal stays unknown.
What 1,000 channels looked like
Guessing about aggregate behaviour is easy, so I measured it. For each of 30 countries I asked the API for the most popular videos right now, took the channels behind them, and checked 35 per country.
| Country | Look monetized |
|---|---|
| Greece, Hungary | 51% |
| Brazil, Romania | 49% |
| France | 46% |
| Germany, Thailand | 40% |
| UK | 26% |
| US | 23% |
| Japan | 20% |
| Korea | 9% |
| India | 3% |
Two things surprised me. The US is nowhere near the top, despite being the market everyone assumes is most monetized. And the spread is enormous for channels that are all, by construction, big enough to be trending.
I can't fully explain the US number from outside, which is the honest answer. My guess is that US trending skews to music and network content where memberships and merch simply aren't used, but I can't prove that, so it stays a guess in public too.
The other number worth stating: I couldn't tell either way for 18% of channels. That's the number a tool selling certainty would quietly drop.
Full table, method and the CSV are here: https://monetizationkit.com/data/youtube-monetized-channels-by-country/
One engineering note, and a bug worth stealing
The first version read video data from YouTube's internal player endpoint. That's now gated by proof-of-origin tokens for automated callers, so it reads the public watch page instead. Slower, messier, doesn't pretend to be a browser.
The bug I'd point at, because I suspect it's common: I had a rule saying a forced refresh must not overwrite good cached data with a degraded result. Sensible. But it also blocked the very first write for a channel that had never been cached, so every channel whose signals I couldn't read was silently dropped. The dataset could only ever show three of the four verdicts, and it made the tool look more confident than it was. Data that never gets written is much harder to notice than data that's wrong.
The second one, same flavour: my collection run showed ad-fetch failures jumping from 1.2% in the first hour to 30% in the second. I read that as "these channels are unreadable" and nearly published it. It was my own rate limiting. Slowing down and re-running recovered nine in ten. If you scrape for a dataset, plot your failure rate against time before you believe any of it.
What I'd like torn apart
- Is there a public signal I'm missing? Super Thanks and Super Chat are Partner Program features too. I surface them where visible but don't score them.
- Is one middle tier clearer than two for non-technical creators, or is "possibly" doing too much work?
- If you run a channel: does the breakdown match what Studio shows you? That's the only real validation this can get.
The checker is free and needs no login: https://monetizationkit.com/
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