Two other checkers we tested are offline
On 9 September 2026, Is This Channel Monetized returned a suspension notice from its host, and Monetization Checker returned a Cloudflare 523 error. Sites come back, so treat this as a snapshot with a date on it rather than an obituary.
It is worth knowing because both still rank for their own names, so you can search one, click through, and find nothing. If that is how you got here, the short version is that any of the working tools below — including this one — answers the same question.
YTLarge: more detail on a single video
YTLarge goes wider on a single video than we do. Alongside ad types and break timestamps — which our result card also shows — it reports playlist breakdowns, region restrictions, shadowban checks and thumbnail downloads. If you are studying one video rather than asking whether a channel is monetized, it gives you more to look at.
It also publishes the caveat that matters: the presence of the yt_ad string “alone isn't definitive proof of monetization” . YouTube Toolkit says the same thing in its FAQ — “ seeing an ad is not proof that the creator is earning money” — so on this point the category is more careful than its marketing suggests.
YouTube Toolkit: one screen with everything on it
YouTube Toolkit covers more ground in one result than we do: authenticity scoring, shadowban checks, strike history and an earnings matrix. If you want one screen with everything on it, that is the one.
Checkmonetization: Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, not YouTube
Checkmonetization is not a YouTube tool at all — it covers Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, and takes a page URL or username. On 10 September 2026 we pasted a link to a page that doesn't exist and it still returned a “generated page ID” and an eligibility score, and a real page with under 2,000 followers came back as eligible at 82%. Our Facebook checker reads the page's public follower count and shows a dash for what it can't see; the TikTok one works from published thresholds.
What we do differently
We do not publish an accuracy percentage. YouTube Toolkit states “approximately 95 percent plus accuracy in testing”; we could not find the test behind that number, and we are not going to print one of our own that you would have the same problem with.
Instead every verdict comes with the signals it was built from, each marked found, absent or unreadable, so you can disagree with the conclusion and still use the evidence. The evidence is weighted rather than counted: a membership button outranks a subscriber count, so a channel under the threshold that still shows one reads as Possibly Monetized instead of being ruled out. When the signals we rely on cannot be read at all, the verdict is Unable to Determine rather than a guess dressed up as an answer.
The honest limit applies to all of us equally: nobody outside YouTube can read a channel's real monetization status. Every tool on this page, ours included, is inferring from what is publicly visible. The only authoritative answer is in the channel owner's own YouTube Studio.
We also publish what our own checks add up to: the full dataset by country is free to download and reuse, sampling method included. It is the same evidence we would want from anyone making claims about detection.
No ads, no account, no usage cap for anonymous checks beyond a daily limit that exists to keep the service up. The signal rules are written out if you want to audit the method before trusting it.