YouTube-AdSense Accounts and How to Add a Website

Most new YouTube partners who don't already have an AdSense account will find that their new AdSense account will have a UI that's different than other YT partners. The new UI shows only that it's a YouTube AdSense account (AdSense for YouTube), along with minimal options in the left menu - blocking controls, payments, account, and feedback.

The homepage may show sections such as: Performance or earnings, but these will all be blank, and they'll be blank (or show 0) all the time. At some point in time, all YT-AdSense will probably have the same UI, unless they've upgraded (see information below on upgrading an account).

AdSense stopped showing any reporting from YouTube quite a while ago. Now, the only thing that will be available in AdSense is the "Balance" on the Payments page. The "Balance" will show earnings up to and including the previous month.

As an example, for the month of October, any income a YouTube partner earned during the month of October will be finalized during early November, and then transferred directly to the payments page in AdSense. That usually happens beginning around the 7th of the month, but it can take up to the 12th of the month for some publishers. 

Not everyone's earnings will be transferred at the same time, some might see the transfer happen on the 7th, but some might not get that transfer until the 11th or 12th.

What you see in the AdSense account are the earnings YouTube transferred to AdSense, but not any estimated earnings, and not any statics.

To find your statistics for your YouTube earnings, you'll need to look in the YouTube Analytics section of your YT Studio. 

The AdSense question I'm seeing most frequently (apart from the statistics questions) are how a YouTube partner can monetize their website.  Since YT-AdSense accounts can only monetize a channel, a YT Partner will have to apply to "upgrade" their AdSense account in order to even be able to add a website.

The "old" instructions told publishers to login to their AdSense account, go to the "Sites" tab and add their website.  Apparently, there are a lot of videos on YT about this old method.

Since new YT-AdSense accounts don't have a sites tab, those old instructions will no longer work.  Some things, however, remain the same - you still need to apply for the upgrade with a domain (not a blogspot URL or other subdomain URL); and as far as I know, you would have had to already enter your PIN.  Whether or not you are required to have already verified your ID in AdSense is something I don't know as well. ID verification is a process that hasn't been around very long yet.

The PIN requirement may or may not still be an active requirement - that's something I haven't figured out yet either since I don't monetize on YouTube myself.  It has always been required for upgrading an account in the past, so ... if you aren't able to request the upgrade using the new instructions and haven't received your PIN, that may be why you can't upgrade yet.

To submit a request (or to try and submit a request) to upgrade a YouTube-AdSense account that has never previously been used with a website, try following the instructions on this page in the AdSense Help Center: 

AdMob, YouTube, and Blogger - Upgrade the AdSense account that's linked to your YouTube channel to show ads on your own site

posted by J.Gracey Stinson