Paste a channel or a video and see which monetization signals YouTube shows in public, read across the channel’s latest uploads.
The box takes a channel link, an @handle, a channel ID or a link to a single video, including Shorts and youtu.be links. A channel goes through its newest uploads, sets Shorts aside and reads up to five long videos one after another, so the line under the box counts them off as they come in. A video link reads that one upload first and then offers a button to run the same check on the channel behind it. Every page is read as a viewer in the United States, because the Join button isn’t shown to viewers in every country and a check from somewhere else could miss it.
A coin drops in above the result and takes its look from what was found: green with a burst of sparks when the channel offers memberships, amber with a pulsing ring when only ads turned up, black when nothing did, and grey with a question mark when the check couldn’t finish. Black is not a verdict that the channel earns nothing, since a missing signal proves nothing either way. The headline under it lands in one of four states instead of a yes or a no. Partner feature observed means the owner block next to Subscribe carried a Join button. Ads observed means ad slots turned up in the player data while the channel offers no memberships. No public signals found and Unable to check say what they mean, and the small line beneath gives how many videos were read out of how many were tried, with the check time and how many results came from the 24-hour cache, so three videos out of five never passes for a full sample.
The cards split that evidence apart. Channel memberships carries the most weight, since YouTube lists them among the features a channel can switch on once it’s in the Partner Program, though a missing button proves nothing because plenty of monetized channels never turn memberships on. Ad placements counts the videos whose player data held at least one ad slot, and it stays tagged as not proof on its own: YouTube can place ads on channels outside the program, and a rights holder can claim an upload and run ads on it. Mid-roll breaks counts breaks inside the checked videos without naming who set them, because a creator can mark breaks by hand, let YouTube choose them, or mix both, and the data reads the same either way. Each card opens with What this means and links the help page it rests on.
The ad map draws every checked video as a track scaled to its own length, so a break two thirds of the way into a twelve-minute video sits two thirds of the way along its track. A diamond at the start marks a pre-roll, thin bars mark mid-roll positions with their times, and a ring at the end marks a post-roll. A four-and-a-half-minute music upload read while the tool was being built came back with a single pre-roll at 0:00 and nothing else, which is all a video that short can carry since mid-roll needs eight minutes or more, and its headline still read Partner feature observed because the channel’s owner block offered memberships. Hatched tracks are videos YouTube didn’t hand over, such as a sign-in check, a stream that’s live right now or a page that wouldn’t load, and none of them is counted as a video without ads.
Shorts stay out of the ad count, since their ads play between videos in the Shorts feed and never sit inside a single Short’s player data, so a channel that only posts Shorts is judged on memberships alone. A video result is kept for up to 24 hours, which means a channel that switched memberships on this morning can take a day to show it. Copy report puts the headline, the cards and every video with its placements into plain text along with the check time and a link back to this page.