Paste a video or channel and see whether ads are set to run on it — read from what YouTube declares publicly, not guessed from subscriber counts.
The link is sent to our server, which reads the public YouTube page the way a browser would. A channel check samples its latest uploads. Nothing is stored.
How it works
How to check if a YouTube channel is monetized?
01
Paste a video or channel link
youtube.com/watch, youtu.be, a Short, a channel URL or just the @handle.
02
We read the public page
The same page a browser loads — no login, no Studio access, no guessing from subscriber counts.
03
See whether ads are set to run
A video: its ad breaks. A channel: how many of its latest uploads carry ads.
04
Read the facts alongside
Views, length, category, subscribers, availability — and a plain-words verdict you can copy.
The result names what was actually seen — ad breaks declared or not, on which uploads — and the verdict says what that does and does not prove. No earnings estimate, no “authenticity score”, nothing invented — those cannot be read from outside YouTube Studio, and a number that looks precise but is not would only mislead.
Where it pays off
When does a monetization check matter?
🤝
Before a sponsorship or collab
A monetized channel has cleared the Partner Program bar — a quick sanity check on a pitch.
🛒
Buying or valuing a channel
Ads on the recent uploads is the first thing to verify before the numbers in the listing.
🔍
Sizing up a competitor
See which channels in your niche are earning from ads and which are running on sponsors alone.
🧭
Your own channel, from outside
Confirm what viewers actually get: ads on, ads off, or something between the two.
The signal
What can and cannot be read from outside?
Readable
Whether ad breaks are declared on a video, and how many
Which of a channel’s recent uploads carry ads
Views, length, publish date, category, family-safe flag
Subscribers and video count as YouTube rounds them
How many countries a video or channel is available in
Not readable by anyone
Actual revenue, RPM or CPM
Watch hours toward the Partner Program threshold
Strikes, limited-ads (“yellow icon”) status, or reviews
Whether a channel was accepted but has ads switched off
Anything about a private or unlisted video
Questions
Frequently asked questions
How does this work?
Before a video starts, YouTube tells its own player where the ad breaks are — a pre-roll, mid-rolls at certain seconds, a post-roll. That declaration is in the public watch page for anyone to read, logged in or not. This tool reads it. If ad breaks are declared, ads are set to run on the video; if none are, they are not. For a channel it does the same for the latest uploads and counts them.
Is “ads set to run” the same as monetized?
Nearly. Only channels accepted into the YouTube Partner Program can have ads run on their own videos with the revenue going to them, so ads on a video is strong evidence the channel is monetized. The reverse is weaker: a Partner Program channel can switch ads off for a video or for everything — Google’s own channels and many educational and brand channels do exactly that — so “no ads” means not monetized or ads turned off, and the two look identical from outside.
What about the “yt_ad” trick people search the page source for?
It is folklore. That token is a logging flag present on every YouTube watch page, monetized or not — including the very first video ever uploaded. Any checker built on it is guessing. This tool reads the ad-break declaration instead, which is either there or not.
Can it show how much a video or channel earns?
No, and neither can any tool that is not YouTube Studio. Earnings depend on which ads actually served, to whom, in which country, at what CPM — none of it is public. Sites that print an earnings figure multiply views by a made-up rate. We would rather show you the one thing that can be read than invent the thing that cannot.
Why does a channel check only look at recent uploads?
Because that is what tells you the current state. Ads on the last eight long-form videos means the channel is monetized now; ads on a three-year-old upload does not. Eight is enough to see the pattern without reading a channel’s whole back catalogue.
What does the “Family safe” or “Available in” line mean?
Both are also read straight from the page. Family safe is YouTube’s own flag for whether the content is suitable for a general audience; available in is how many countries the video or channel is viewable in — everywhere for most, fewer when there is a block or a licensing limit.
Do you store the links I check?
The link is sent to our server so it can fetch the YouTube page for you (browsers cannot fetch YouTube directly). The result is cached for a few hours so a popular channel is not re-read every time; the link itself is not tied to you or kept beyond that.
