Why I Lost My YouTube Monetization (And You Should Never Do This)

If you’re striving to get monetized on YouTube, then bookmark this article for the future!

It was 2020.

My YouTube channel got monetized.

A few bucks started rolling in every week. I received a couple of YouTube payments.

Then came 2021.

I got busy with some writing gigs and kept ignoring my YouTube channel.

Even though I was uploading two to three videos every month, those still weren’t good enough for making loads of money.

It was 2022 when YouTube noticed that I’m not as active on YouTube as I used to be.

They sent me an email saying that it’s good to take a break from content creation, but you could lose your YPP eligibility if your watch hours don’t keep up.

I did pay attention to that warning and tried to get back to YouTube content creation.

But I couldn’t bring the same old pace back.

Do You Know Why I Lost My YouTube Monetization?

I got lazy.

I took YouTube monetization for granted.

I thought I’d get that momentum back as soon as I start uploading regularly.

That’s where I was wrong.

In my experience, YouTube was a simpler and easier playground between 2016 and 2020 — it got completely changed between 2021 and 2025.

Do you know what happened?

• New creators came running
• New audiences discovered YouTube
• Competition got fierce on the platform
• Viewers have had more choices than ever before
• I unintentionally chose the wrong time to get lazy as a YouTube creator.

Procrastination took over.

Overall channel performance went down from 2021 to 2025

That was the reason why I lost my YouTube monetization.

If I had continued creating videos in 2023, things would have been so much different now.

I probably uploaded four videos in 2023 and 2024 in total — two videos each year.

In September 2025, I realized that I should get serious about YouTube and sort of revive my dead channel.

It was too late then.

I uploaded perhaps 6 or 7 videos in the next two months, but the needle didn’t move much.

It was a difficult time — I wanted to create videos passionately, but my channel was dead.

So, I had to start over in Q4 of 2025 — I made a new YouTube channel because the older one was looking dormant.

Subscribe to me wherever you’re reading this. I’ll tell you what happened to my older channel after I switched over to a new one.

Anyway, that was one hell of a mistake. The reason I’m publishing this blog post is to share my biggest YouTube mistake.

If you’re struggling to monetize your YouTube channel, then don’t make the mistake that I made.

Now, this is the most important part:

YouTube Partner Programme isn’t the only way to monetize a YouTube channel. I learned this lesson the hard way.

Do you know when I lost my YPP enrollment? I started looking for YouTube Partner Programme alternatives to survive.

In fact, I found a few methods, tested some, and started using the ones that worked.

I shared 30+ YouTube monetization methods in my ebook:

**How to Make Money on YouTube Without the Partner Program**

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