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.

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.