Share of monetized YouTube channels by country

Rows come from three places, and the split is published above: channels somebody looked up on MonetizationKit, channels we sampled systematically, and a dozen well-known channels checked on a schedule to keep the cache warm. One row per channel, so a channel checked a hundred times still counts once.

In September 2026 we took the most popular videos in each country from the YouTube Data API's charts, took the channels behind them, and checked every one. That is why the channels here skew big and currently in front of people. We have since stopped using the API, so that sampling list is not kept and is not repeated as-is.

The country is the one the channel lists on its own About page. It is the creator's country, not where the audience watches from, and channels that leave it blank are excluded entirely. Whether the Partner Program is open in a country at all is a separate question — YouTube publishes that list, and a few countries in this table are not on it.

Verdicts use the same four tiers as the checker: Likely Monetized, Possibly Monetized, Likely Not Monetized, and Unable to Determine. The signal rules behind each tier are public, and a verdict is an inference from public signals, not a statement from YouTube.

Since 29 September 2026, a channel with enough subscribers and ads on its recent long-form videos also counts as Likely Monetized when it has a store on the channel or 100,000 or more subscribers, not only when it offers memberships. Earlier checks were re-scored under the same rule, so every row uses one definition; the Likely share rose as a result. Since 1 October 2026 we also recognise a channel's Store tab: YouTube had moved merch there from the channel home page, so checks before that date could miss it.

Also since 1 October 2026, the ad signal counts videos with ads instead of a share. It is positive with ads on two or more sampled long videos, or on every one we could sample, and negative only when none of at least three had any. Ads on one video out of three, or too few videos to judge, leave the ad signal unknown: a single video can lose its ads to a copyright claim, while a channel outside the program almost never shows ads at all. The verdict still weighs that alongside subscribers, memberships and the store. Channels set as made for kids are no longer marked down for having no memberships or store, since YouTube switches both off for them. Earlier checks were re-scored under these rules too.

Figures are recomputed every Monday, whether or not new checks arrived that week; the "Recomputed" date above is that run, and the check window is when the underlying checks happened.

These are trending channels, not typical ones. Most of them have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, so a low share here does not mean creators in that country rarely get monetized — it means the big channels we checked showed fewer public signals.

Read a row as: of the channels we checked in this country, this many showed the signals. Do not read it as the country's monetization rate. The Checked column gives the sample size for every row, so you can judge how much weight a figure carries.

A country-level share also says nothing about any one channel. If that is what you came for, the checker runs the same signals on a single channel, and the Partner Program requirements explain the thresholds a channel has to clear first.

The dataset is free to reuse, including commercially, under CC BY 4.0. Republish the table, chart it, or build on it — just credit MonetizationKit and link back to this page.

Download the CSV for the published countries, with the same columns as the table above.