Insights & Trends

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.

India has close to 500M YouTube users in 2026 — more than the next three countries combined. But creators chasing that audience often earn less per view than a channel with a tenth as many viewers in Germany or the US. If you're planning global YouTube growth, the biggest audience isn't automatically the best one. Here's how user counts, CPM, and competition compare by country, so you know which international viewers to target first.

The back catalog already sitting on your YouTube channel can earn a second income on Microsoft's MSN, with nothing new to film. Outdoors with Erik, a yard-cleanup channel with 499,000 subscribers, now makes about as much from MSN each month as it does from AdSense, all from the videos it had already published. A home-and-DIY channel earned $74,951 from its existing archive in six months.

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.