Payments from YouTube are split into 2 categories:
- Subscription streaming on YouTube Premium and YouTube Music App
- Regular YouTube site streaming / non-subscription YouTube Music App Streaming
Here’s how it works:
Subscription streaming on YouTube Premium and YouTube Music App:
- Streams in-app are paid like any other streaming service where your tracks are monetized per play. The rate may vary based on listening time and territory.
Regular YouTube site streaming / non-subscription YouTube Music App Streaming:
- Streams from your YouTube topic channel on the YouTube site and streaming by people who are not subscribed to YouTube Music are monetized differently. Like a regular YouTube video, your rate is based on whether an ad is placed on your video on a specific listen. All tracks have the potential to be monetized or unmonetized depending on the listener. For this reason, you may see unmonetized and monetized plays for the same track in the same territory.
The Benefits of delivering your content to YouTube
- Robust, clean/consistent metadata:
- Metadata from your YouTube Music deliveries help search results and recommendations.
- Without an art track, YouTube won't know the order the video appears in an album.
- The video can't appear as part of an album on the artist's page or in new releases.
- YouTube can't display album art on videos.
- YouTube can't provide album-level stats in YouTube for Artists.
- Its views won't contribute to the future albums chart.
- Preference in the YouTube Music app:
- The YouTube Music app plays audio tracks, so if there's only a video, it will not appear on all YouTube Music surfaces that it could if it had an AT (such as full album playing and searching by song.)
- Higher quality audio delivery: Our YouTube Music deliveries provide high-quality audio files not supported by regular YouTube upload.