How to Make Money on YouTube as a Live Streamer

YouTube pays a live streamer through six separate products, and the one every guide leads with is the one you will qualify for last.

Ad revenue needs 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours. Super Chat, gifts and channel memberships, which is where a live stream actually takes money, need 500 subscribers and 3,000 hours. Those are two separate tiers of the YouTube Partner Program with two separate applications, and confusing them is the most common error in the advice you will find.

This guide is written for people who already stream, or who stream on Twitch and are working out whether YouTube is worth the second screen. It covers the two tiers, what each live monetisation product pays, how YouTube counts a six hour broadcast toward your watch hours, and the one privacy setting that throws all of it away. Every figure below is sourced to a Google page. Where Google publishes nothing, I have said so rather than borrow a number from someone who guessed.

Checked against YouTube's Help Centre on 19 August 2026.

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Four things most guides get wrong

Start here if you have read about YouTube monetisation before. These four points make older advice wrong rather than merely dated, and each one is quoted from a Google page rather than summarised from a competitor.

The two Partner Program tiers

YouTube runs one program with two entry points. Which one you are aiming at changes what you should be doing with your channel this month.

The expanded Partner Program wants 500 subscribers, three valid public uploads in the last 90 days, and either 3,000 qualified watch hours in the last 12 months or 3 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days. Getting in turns on the fan funding set and Shopping. It does not turn on ads.

The full tier wants 1,000 subscribers and either 4,000 qualified watch hours in the last 12 months or 10 million qualified public Shorts views in the last 90 days. That adds revenue sharing from ads and from YouTube Premium on top of everything the lower tier already gave you.

For a live streamer this ordering is good news. The products that pay best during a broadcast are the ones you reach first, and the watch hour requirement for that first door is 3,000 rather than 4,000.

Where you are on the ladder

Enter your current numbers. The rungs you have already cleared are marked, and the gap to the next one is worked out for you. Leave a field blank if you do not have that number to hand.

What else you need to join

The subscriber and watch hour numbers are the part people track. They are not the part that gets applications rejected. YouTube also requires that you follow YouTube's channel monetization policies, live in a country where the program runs, have no active Community Guidelines strikes, have 2-Step Verification switched on for your Google account, have advanced features access on the channel, and have an active AdSense for YouTube account linked.

Review takes about a month. If the first application fails you can appeal within 21 days or reapply after 30. A second rejection puts you on a 90 day wait, so read the monetization policies against your own back catalogue before you press the button, not after.

One rule catches streamers specifically. YouTube reserves the right to switch monetisation off on channels that have not uploaded a video or posted to the Posts tab for six months or more. A channel that only ever goes live and never publishes anything is closer to that line than it looks, which is another argument for keeping your VODs public.

How a live stream earns watch hours

Live streaming has a real advantage over uploading here, and one privacy setting throws all of it away.

YouTube never states positively that live watch time counts. It states the exclusions. YouTube's eligibility page says watch hours do not count from private videos, unlisted videos, deleted videos, ad campaigns, Shorts, or "livestreams that are unlisted, deleted, or not converted to VOD". Read that list the way it is written: a public stream that is archived as a VOD and left up is inside the threshold, and everything else about a broadcast is outside it.

Do the arithmetic once. Four thousand watch hours over twelve months is roughly 333 hours a month. A four hour stream with an average of ten concurrent viewers produces about 40 watch hours in the live window alone, before anybody watches the replay. At that rate you need around eight streams a month to stay on pace, which is a schedule a part time streamer can actually hold. The same 4,000 hours from uploaded videos, at four minutes average view duration, needs 60,000 views.

Average concurrents matter far more than subscriber count here, and that is the reverse of how most YouTube advice is framed. Ten people who stay for four hours are worth 600 people who watch four minutes of an upload.

Shorts sit in their own lane. Shorts watch time never counts toward the 4,000 hours, and views in the Shorts feed are a separate path with a separate number. If you are chasing the hours threshold, Shorts do nothing for it.

What you earn while the stream is running

Three products take money while you are live: Super Chat, gifts and channel memberships. Two of them pay a documented 70%. The third pays a rate nobody outside YouTube can calculate.

Super Chat and Super Stickers

Super Chat pins a viewer's message at the top of live chat. Super Stickers drop an animated image into the feed. Both work on live streams and on Premieres, and both need the expanded Partner Program plus the Commerce Product Module, an age of 18 or over, and a country where the feature runs.

The revenue share is 70%, and the fine print on how that 70% is calculated matters more than the headline. YouTube's own wording: "Creators receive 70% of Supers revenue that is confirmed by Google. The 70% is calculated after local sales tax and App Store fees on iOS are deducted. Transaction costs, including credit card fees, are currently covered by YouTube." A Super Chat bought inside the iOS app therefore nets you meaningfully less than 70% of what your viewer paid. YouTube does not document how Google Play purchases are treated, so I am not going to guess at it.

What YouTube publishes about pricing is thinner than the internet suggests. There is no official table of Super Chat amounts, colours and pin durations. The Help Centre says only that "the color and amount of time pinned at the top of a chat feed changes depending on how much you spend". There is a documented spending cap of $500 a day or $2,000 a week per viewer across Super Chat, Super Stickers, Super Thanks and Jewels combined, and purchases under $5 do not appear in the ticker. The widely republished "maximum Super Chat is $500" appears to be that daily cap being misread as a per message limit.

Super Chat also switches off in circumstances a streamer can trigger by accident. It is unavailable on age-restricted, unlisted, private and made for kids streams, on streams with a YouTube Giving fundraiser attached, and any time live chat is turned off.

Gifts, Jewels and Rubies

Gifts have the strangest economics of anything on this page. Viewers buy Jewels in the YouTube mobile app, redeem them for animated gifts during your stream, and you accrue Rubies.

YouTube publishes the conversion outright: "Every two Jewels redeemed for gifts will earn you one Ruby" and "the revenue we pay per Ruby, which is $0.01". So a hundred Rubies is a dollar. What YouTube does not publish anywhere is what a Jewel costs a viewer, and it explicitly reserves the right to change bundle sizes, prices, and how many Jewels a given gift requires. That means the effective revenue share on gifts cannot be worked out from public information, and any article quoting a percentage for it has made the number up.

Gifts sit behind a different agreement from everything else. Where Super Chat and memberships run on the Commerce Product Module, gifts need the Virtual Items Module, an age of 18 or over, and an AdSense account that has passed identity verification. Creators who have never been through AdSense ID verification get prompted the first time they try to switch gifts on, and there is a 45 day window to supply the documents before monetisation is paused.

Before you build a stream around gifts, check two things. They only reach you from the mobile app, so desktop viewers cannot send them at all. And YouTube's own pages currently disagree on orientation: the expanded Partner Program overview describes gifts on "vertical and horizontal live streams", while the Virtual Items policy page still describes them as a vertical product throughout. If you stream horizontally and gifts matter to your plan, check the Virtual Items card in Studio rather than trusting either page.

One more thing to check in Studio before you switch gifts on: whether it takes Super Stickers away. YouTube has described the two as alternatives rather than additions, and Super Stickers pay a documented 70% where gifts do not.

Channel memberships

Memberships are the closest thing YouTube has to a Twitch subscription: a recurring monthly payment in exchange for badges, custom emoji and members-only content. The share is 70% of net revenue, the same as the rest of the fan funding set.

You can build up to six levels, each carrying between one and five perks, and higher levels inherit what the levels below them offer. During a public live stream you can restrict chat to members while everyone else keeps watching, which is the practical tool for a raid or a bad night in chat.

The badge and emoji artwork is where memberships turn into a design job, and YouTube's required pixel sizes are not the same as Twitch's. Our YouTube size guide has the current numbers for membership badges, emoji, banners and thumbnails, which saves re-exporting everything twice.

Ads on a live stream

Ads need the full 1,000 subscriber tier. Once you have it, the share is 55% of net revenue from ads on your public videos, which includes live streams.

Turning monetisation on for a stream automatically enables pre-roll and display ads. Mid-rolls are the part you control, and there are three modes. Automatic lets YouTube place breaks at natural points, with a Low, Medium or High frequency setting. Scheduled fires a break every 6, 12, 18, 24 or 30 minutes. Manual means you press the button yourself, and YouTube is blunt about the consequence: "If you do not insert any mid-roll ad breaks, no mid-rolls will be served."

Automatic mode does more than place breaks. It limits ad disruption for channel members, temporarily pauses mid-rolls for viewers who have just sent a gift or a Super Chat, and snoozes ads for everyone during moments of high engagement. YouTube's published measurement is that creators who chose automatic live mid-rolls saw "on average, over 20% uplift in instream ad revenue per hour", averaged across 207 countries in January 2024. If you are running manual breaks out of habit, that is the figure to weigh it against.

There is also a side-by-side mid-roll format that plays next to the stream instead of over it, so viewers are not cut off from what you are doing. It appears automatically on eligible streams, with one exception that catches people: streams with captions turned on do not get side-by-side ads.

A couple of settings will silently kill live ad revenue. If your player is embedded on an external site with auto start, ads are turned off for that stream. And in automatic mode you can hit Delay ads in the Live Control Room to hold mid-rolls back for ten minutes during a moment you do not want interrupted, which is the correct tool for a boss fight or a reveal.

Take a Break turns your away screen into ad inventory. Set a break of one, three or five minutes and ads may run to eligible viewers; anyone who does not get an ad sees your away slate instead. The slate can be YouTube's default, a video from your library, or a browser source overlay you add in your encoder, which is where a matching graphic from your pack goes.

What the stream earns after it ends

The replay is a second earning window, and on YouTube it is a large one. Watch page ads run on the archived VOD under the same 55% share. Super Thanks becomes available on the archived long form video even though it was unavailable while you were live. And the watch hours keep accruing toward your threshold for the full twelve months the VOD stays public.

On a platform where the money sits in the live window, a four hour broadcast stops earning the moment you stop. On YouTube it does not, as long as the archive stays public. That makes the privacy setting on your VODs a revenue setting.

YouTube does not document whether the ad settings you chose for a live stream carry over automatically to the replay. Live streams and live replays are tracked as separate revenue lines in Analytics, so check the replay's monetisation settings after your first few streams rather than assuming.

Shorts, and clipping your own broadcasts

Clipping a stream into Shorts is the obvious repurposing route, and the money works nothing like long form. Shorts feed ad revenue is pooled monthly across all monetising creators. Music licensing comes out of that pool first, based on how many tracks each Short uses: one track sends half the revenue from that Short's views to music partners, two tracks sends two thirds. What is left is the Creator Pool. Your allocation is your share of total engaged views from monetising creators in each country. Then the 45% share is applied to your allocation.

YouTube publishes a worked example, which is the fastest way to see the scale. Take a country with 100 million engaged Shorts views in a month and $100,000 of Shorts feed ad revenue. If 20% of those Shorts use one music track, the Creator Pool is $90,000. A creator with 1 million engaged views has 1% of the pool, so $900 is allocated to them, and the 45% share leaves $405.

Two rules apply specifically to stream clips. Shorts views only count from the date you accept the Shorts Monetization Module, so accepting it early costs nothing and delaying it costs everything you posted in the meantime. And non-original Shorts, which YouTube defines to include unedited clips of other people's content and compilations with nothing original added, are not eligible for revenue sharing. Clipping your own broadcast is fine. Building a channel from other streamers' clips is not.

YouTube publishes nothing about who earns from a Clip made by a viewer, or from a Short cut out of someone else's live stream. Structurally a Clip is a pointer into the original video rather than a new upload, so there is probably no separate revenue event, but that is my inference and not documentation. Treat any article that gives you a clipper revenue split as invented.

One useful mechanic: when you end a mobile live stream, YouTube offers to save a Short highlight pulled automatically from the broadcast. It saves as private by default, so it is a free first draft rather than something that publishes itself.

Shopping and the affiliate program

Shopping arrives with the expanded 500 subscriber tier, which makes it one of the earliest real revenue options on the platform.

Shopping has two halves that work differently. You can connect your own store and tag your products, in which case the sales are paid to you by your retailer or platform rather than by YouTube. Or you can join the YouTube Shopping affiliate program and earn commission on other brands' products featured in your content. Each brand sets its own commission rate and attribution window, and affiliate commission is paid through AdSense for YouTube 60 to 120 days after the purchase to allow for returns. The affiliate program runs in a shorter list of countries than the Partner Program itself, and two Google pages currently give slightly different lists, so check the Shopping card in Studio rather than a blog post.

During a live stream you can pin featured products to highlight them, and multiple products can be pinned. YouTube asks that you finish removing and rearranging products at least 30 minutes before the stream begins, which is not the sort of instruction you want to discover five minutes before you go live.

Shopify is a supported store platform and one of the few that reports sales data back into YouTube Analytics. The connection requires the same email address on both YouTube and Shopify, with admin access on each. Shopify's own documentation adds a 1,000 subscriber minimum for the integration, which is Shopify's number rather than Google's, so check it against your own account before you plan around it.

There is no published rate per thousand views

Every "$3 to $5 per 1,000 views" figure you have read, including the one that used to be in this article, is a third-party estimate. Google publishes no rate card. What it does publish is the opposite: "There are no guarantees under the YouTube partner agreement about how much or whether you'll be paid."

The reason is that ad revenue is a share of what advertisers actually paid to reach your specific audience in their specific country in that specific month. Two channels with identical view counts can be an order of magnitude apart. Anyone quoting you a per-thousand figure is quoting an average of other people's channels, which tells you very little about yours.

The numbers that are real, and that you can plan against, are the shares. 70% of net revenue on memberships, Super Chat, Super Stickers and Super Thanks. 55% on watch page ads. 45% on your allocation from the Shorts Creator Pool. Those three come straight from YouTube's partner earnings page and they apply to everyone.

Getting paid

Payment runs through AdSense for YouTube on a fixed monthly cycle. Finalised earnings for the previous month land in your balance between the 7th and the 12th, and payment goes out between the 21st and the 26th, provided your balance has cleared the threshold and there are no holds.

In US dollars the payment threshold is $100. Two smaller thresholds come first: at $10 you are asked to verify your identity and address, and at $10 you can select a payment method. Address verification is done by post, which can take two to three weeks, so start it the moment you are prompted rather than the month you expect to be paid.

US tax information is required from every monetising creator regardless of where in the world they live, and it has to be on file before a new partner gets a first payment. Google withholds US tax on earnings from US viewers, and withholds at the maximum rate if the information is missing.

What this looks like next to Twitch

Twitch measures its entry bar over a rolling 30 day window of followers and hours streamed. YouTube measures in subscribers and watch hours over twelve months, so the clock is slower to start and slower to lose. If you are already streaming regularly, YouTube's threshold is the more forgiving of the two, because your VODs keep contributing for a year after the broadcast.

The second difference is where the money sits. On YouTube a broadcast keeps earning after it ends, through ads on the replay, Super Thanks on the archive and watch hours that count for twelve months. That changes what a stream is worth and it changes what you should do with your archive. Our comparison of Twitch and YouTube for streamers covers discoverability and community differences, and the Twitch Affiliate requirements are written up separately with current numbers.

You do not necessarily have to choose. Sending one broadcast to both platforms is a solved problem, and our multistreaming guide covers the software and the restrictions that apply on each side.

Making the channel look like it earns

Two of the products above are graphics work rather than settings work. Memberships need badge and emoji artwork at YouTube's pixel sizes. Take a Break needs an away slate, and the good version is a browser source overlay in your encoder rather than YouTube's default card.

Both are the same job as the rest of your stream design. If you are already streaming, the alert overlays, screens and webcam frames you use on Twitch work unchanged on YouTube Live, because your encoder is sending the same canvas either way. If you are starting on YouTube, a full pack gives you the starting screen, the be right back screen, the ending screen and the alerts in one consistent set instead of six mismatched downloads.

If you would rather see the full range, including animated packs built for a specific game or a specific look, the full range of stream overlay packages is worth a look before you settle on a set. Matching your away slate, your alerts and your membership badges to one design is the cheapest thing you can do to make a channel look like it has been running longer than it has.

If you have not gone live on the platform yet, our guide to live streaming on YouTube covers channel verification, the encoder setup and the Live Control Room. The best OBS Studio settings are written up separately, including how to add a browser source for an away slate.

Frequently asked questions

Can you make money on YouTube with 500 subscribers?

Yes, if you also have 3,000 qualified public watch hours in the last 12 months or 3 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days, plus three valid public uploads in the last 90 days. That combination lets you apply for the expanded Partner Program, which turns on channel memberships, Super Chat, Super Stickers, Super Thanks, gifts and Shopping. Ad revenue still needs 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours.

Do live streams count toward the 4,000 watch hours?

Public live streams that are archived as VODs do. YouTube lists "livestreams that are unlisted, deleted, or not converted to VOD" among the watch time that does not count, which means the archive setting on your channel decides whether the hours you streamed were banked or lost.

How much does YouTube take from Super Chat?

Creators receive 70% of Supers revenue, calculated after local sales tax and Apple App Store fees on iOS are deducted. YouTube covers credit card and other transaction costs. The same 70% applies to Super Stickers, Super Thanks and channel memberships. YouTube does not document how Google Play purchases are treated.

How much is a gift worth on a YouTube live stream?

Two Jewels redeemed for gifts earn you one Ruby, and YouTube pays $0.01 per Ruby. What a Jewel costs the viewer is not published, and YouTube reserves the right to change bundle prices and how many Jewels a given gift needs, so the effective share cannot be calculated from public information.

How many subscribers do you need to live stream on YouTube?

None, if you are streaming from a desktop encoder such as OBS. You need a verified channel and you may have to wait up to 24 hours before the first broadcast. Streaming from the YouTube mobile app needs 50 subscribers and no live streaming restrictions in the previous 90 days.

Should I run automatic or manual mid-roll ads on a live stream?

Automatic, on the evidence YouTube publishes. Channels that switched to automatic live mid-rolls saw on average over 20% more instream ad revenue per hour, measured across 207 countries in January 2024. Automatic mode also pauses ads for viewers who just sent a gift or a Super Chat and reduces interruptions for members, neither of which manual placement does.

Why is the Shorts revenue share only 45%?

Because it is applied to a different base. Shorts feed ad revenue is pooled monthly, music licensing costs are removed from the pool first, and your slice of what remains is set by your share of engaged views in each country. The 45% is then applied to that allocation. Long form watch page ads are a straight 55% of net revenue on your own videos.

When does YouTube pay out?

Finalised earnings for the previous month appear in your AdSense for YouTube balance between the 7th and the 12th, and payment is issued between the 21st and the 26th if your balance has reached the threshold. In US dollars that threshold is $100. Identity and address verification are triggered at $10 and address verification is done by post, so it is worth completing early.