How to start a YouTube channel: the steps and the catch
Creating the channel takes about two minutes inside your Google account. Getting paid takes 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 qualified watch hours in 365 days, and that second part is where almost everyone stops.
Making the channel takes about two minutes
You need a Google account and nothing else. Sign in to YouTube, click your profile picture, open Settings, then Add or manage channel(s), then Create a channel, then choose a name and a photo. That is the whole setup, and it is what YouTube itself describes on its page on creating a YouTube channel and on its get started guide.
Two small things are worth doing the same day. Turn on two-step verification for the Google account, because the Partner Program will require it later anyway. And if you think you might ever stream, switch live streaming on now: a thread in Reddit's r/NewTubers points out that the feature takes 24 hours to turn on the first time you enable it.
After that the setup is finished and nothing about it matters very much. The name, the banner and the profile picture are not what decides anything.
Nothing pays until 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours
A new channel earns nothing. Ad money starts only inside the YouTube Partner Program, and the level that pays ad revenue needs 1,000 subscribers plus 4,000 qualified watch hours on long-form videos in the last 365 days, or 10 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days.
There is an earlier door. YouTube's first level of the Partner Program opens at 500 subscribers, 3 qualified uploads in the last 90 days, and either 3,000 qualified watch hours in 365 days or 3 million Shorts views in 90 days. It gives you channel memberships, gifts, Supers, Shopping and Creator Partnerships. It does not give you ad revenue. Ads and YouTube Premium money start at the second level.
Every level also requires that you follow YouTube's monetization policies, live in a region where the program runs, carry no active Community Guidelines strikes, have two-step verification on, and link an AdSense for YouTube account.
Watch hours are counted narrowly. Qualified watch hours are hours watched on long-form videos you have set public; hours watched on Shorts in the Shorts Feed do not count toward the 4,000. If you are weighing which format to make, that line is the whole argument. The full checklist is in our guide to YouTube monetization requirements.
What 4,000 watch hours looks like in views
Four thousand hours is 240,000 minutes watched in a year. That number is easier to plan against than the hours, because you can divide it by the length of a view.
Suppose your videos are 10 minutes long and the average person watches 3 minutes. Then 240,000 ÷ 3 = 80,000 views in 365 days. Post weekly and that is 52 videos, so about 1,540 views per video, every video, for a year.
Now make the videos better rather than shorter. If the average view runs 6 minutes instead of 3, you need 40,000 views, or about 770 per video. Same channel, half the audience, because people stayed twice as long.
Watch time, not view count, is the thing you are actually accumulating.
And then the money. Say you reach 80,000 views in that first qualifying year and your revenue per thousand views is $4, a figure picked here only as an example: 80 × $4 = $320 for twelve months of work. That is the honest shape of year one for most channels. You can run your own version in the free YouTube money calculator, or read why the per-view number swings so hard in how much YouTube pays per view.
YouTube's own help pages are blunt about this: there are no guarantees under the partner agreement about how much, or whether, you get paid. When you are paid, partners get 55% of net ad revenue on the watch page, 45% of the Shorts Creator Pool revenue allocated to them, and 70% of net revenue from memberships, Super Chat, Super Stickers and Super Thanks.
Pick a format you can repeat fifty times
Shopify's beginner's guide starts where most of them start, with finding a niche and identifying an audience. That is not wrong, but it is not the binding constraint. The binding constraint is repetition.
You are going to make roughly 50 videos before you know anything. So the question is not "what subject do I like", it is "what shape of video can I still make on a Tuesday in March when I am tired and nothing has worked yet".
A format is a repeatable promise: the same kind of question, answered the same way, at roughly the same length. A channel that explains one failed product per episode has a format. A channel that posts whatever occurred to its owner that week does not, and it will stall around video twelve.
Write your format as one sentence before you write your first script. If you cannot list ten episode titles that fit it, the format is too narrow or too vague. Our notes on YouTube video ideas and on ideas that survive are about exactly this test.
You also do not need to be on camera. Plenty of durable channels are narration over footage, maps, archive stills or animation. What that choice costs and what it does not solve is in our piece on faceless YouTube channels.
The rules that decide whether you get paid
Most beginners are refused monetization for one of two reasons, and both are written down.
On July 15, 2025, YouTube renamed its repetitious content policy to inauthentic content. It does not monetize content that is repetitive or mass-produced: similar videos with minimal variation, the same character in the same situation over and over, image slideshows or scrolling text with minimal narrative, and AI-generated content made with generic or unoriginal templates. The same policy explicitly allows a fixed intro and outro when the bulk of each video differs, and a series with recurring characters where each episode has its own storyline.
The reused content policy is the other one. It does not monetize clips from a show cut together with little narrative, material downloaded or copied from elsewhere without substantive change, or videos that only read out text you did not write. It does allow clips used for a critical review, reactions with your own commentary, and other creators' footage edited into your own storyline.
Two more dates to keep. A channel that has not uploaded a video or posted to its Posts tab for six months or more can lose monetization. And YouTube has announced Partner Program updates starting February 1, 2027, with creators required to review and accept the updated terms in YouTube Studio by January 31, 2027.
What to watch in your first 90 days
Subscribers are the worst early signal, because they lag everything. The numbers that tell you something are how many people clicked, and how long they stayed.
Use the arithmetic above as a dashboard. Take your total watch time and divide by views to get the average view length. If it is a third of your video length, your videos are too long or your opening is making a promise the middle does not keep. Fix one of those at a time so you know which one moved.
Revenue per thousand views, RPM, only appears once you are earning. It counts every revenue type after YouTube's share, which is why it is lower than the CPM advertisers pay; YouTube explains the difference on its own help page. Before then, you are watching watch time and nothing else.
Publishing time matters far less than people hope, which we worked through in best time to post on YouTube.
What it costs in hours
A ten-minute researched, narrated, edited video is not a two-hour job for a beginner. Research, script, record, cut, thumbnail: it is a working day, often two, and it stays slow for the first dozen because every step is new.
Multiply that by the 52 uploads in the arithmetic above and you have the real price of the 4,000 hours. Money is the easy part of this to estimate; time is the part people get wrong.
That is the problem AutomationChannels exists for: you name a channel whose format you admire, and we research, write, narrate, illustrate, score, edit and schedule original videos in that style on your own channel, from $99 a month. It is a production answer, not a growth promise. If your format is weak, faster production just produces more of the wrong thing.
Who should not start a YouTube channel
Do not start if you need income inside six months. The threshold is a year of watch hours in most cases, and the first payments after it are small.
Do not start if you have exactly one video in you. One good video and no format is a post, not a channel, and the Partner Program's first level alone asks for 3 qualified uploads in the last 90 days.
Do not start if your plan is to re-edit other people's footage, read out articles you did not write, or run a template across a hundred near-identical uploads. The policies above exist specifically to refuse that, and they are enforced at the point where you apply, which is also the point where you have already done a year of work.
Start if you have a subject you can keep answering, a format you can repeat when you are bored of it, and twelve months of patience. That is the entire entry requirement, and it has not changed.