Olha Kapinos

How much YouTube pays after monetization follows your views, and for small channels, the views often drop in the first months. At AIR Media-Tech, we took 297 channels with under 10,000 subscribers that were earning on their own, without help from us or other YouTube experts, and looked at six months of their YouTube Studio data. The typical one earned $88 in its first full month and $32 in its sixth, as its views fell by more than half. These numbers show where small channels usually start, so you can check whether your own first months look normal.

On YouTube, a demonetized video usually means a yellow dollar icon in YouTube Studio, and that video still earns. The icon stands for Limited ad earnings, so brands that only run on the safest content skip it, while other advertisers stay. A channel removed from the YouTube Partner Program is the full version, with no ad revenue at all.

YouTube allows two active strikes and can remove a channel at the third, as long as all three land within 90 days. The part that trips people up is that it keeps two separate counts, one for the Community Guidelines and one for copyright. So a channel with two copyright strikes and two guidelines strikes is still online, and it's the third strike of the same kind that can take it down.