Channel Settings to Avoid Demonetization

There are three settings buried in your channel that will cost you real money if you get them wrong, and all three take about four minutes to fix. Do them now, before there's a single video on the channel, because two of them are much more annoying to correct later.

The first one is the big one. Audience.

YouTube is going to ask you whether your channel is made for kids. Unless you are genuinely producing children's content, the answer is not made for kids, and you set it at the channel level so it's the default on everything you upload.

This isn't a technicality, it's the rate you get paid at. Kids content carries a much lower RPM than ordinary content, so the same views bring in a fraction of the money. You can do everything else in this course perfectly, build the library, get the volume in, and then watch the payout arrive at a fraction of what it should be because of one radio button you clicked in week one without reading it.

So read it. Not made for kids. Then check it again after you upload your first video, because the per-video setting exists too and it's worth confirming it inherited what you told it.

Second. Features.

When your channel is new, YouTube only turns on the Standard tier of features, and Standard is deliberately thin. There are two more tiers above it, Intermediate and Advanced, and neither of them is automatic. You go into the settings yourself and verify to switch them on.

Do it on day one, because until those tiers are on, you cannot upload a custom thumbnail and you cannot publish a video longer than fifteen minutes. Both of those are load-bearing for what we're building. A stock frame instead of a designed thumbnail costs you clicks on every upload, and a fifteen-minute ceiling quietly rules out the longer formats that earn the most.

Third one is smaller and newer, and most people don't know it's on.

YouTube will automatically dub your videos into other languages if you let it. Turn that off across the whole channel. What it produces is strange audience data: thousands of views arriving from a country you never targeted, watching a machine-translated version of your voice, behaving nothing like the audience the video was built for. You end up reading analytics that describe somebody else's viewers. Switch it off and keep your numbers honest.

None of this is interesting work. It's the kind of thing you do once, badly, on the day you're excited, and then pay for quietly for a year.

Go and check the boxes properly.