Insights & Trends

Shorts vs. long-form comes down to what you need from YouTube right now. Shorts get a channel in front of people who have never heard of it. Long-form is where the watch hours and most of the ad money come from.

If you want to grow a kids’ YouTube channel in 2026, optimize everything: titles, thumbnails, descriptions, tags, and playlists. On videos set as made for kids, that’s most of what you have to work with. YouTube switches off comments, the notification bell, end screens, and cards there, so your metadata has to do the job those features used to do.

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.