Step 1) Upload Your YouTube Video

Open a web browser (i.e. Firefox) and provide the following URL:

http://www.youtube.com/upload

Log on with your username and password.

Click Sign in.

After you successfully signing in with your YouTube account:

Click Select files to browse and select the video that you want to upload.

Step 2) Basic Settings – Disable YouTube Video Monetization

While the video is uploading provide the following information

Basic Info tab:

Title: The
Description: Leave blank
Tags: Leave blank
Privacy settings: Unlisted

Category: Your choice

Monetization tab:

Uncheck “Monetize with Ads“

Advanced settings tab:

Video location: Your choice
Recording date: Your choice
Leave all other settings as default

Step 3) Wait for YouTube Thumbnail to Appear

Once the video has been uploaded allow the rendering process to be finished. Click on VIDEO MANAGER > Uploads and wait for the YouTube thumbnail to appear next to your uploaded video. If it doesn’t show up yet, give it a couple of more minutes and refresh your web browser (F5 or CTRL F5).

Step 4) Enable YouTube Video Monetization

When you you see the YouTube thumbnail next to your video you can start monetizing your video. Check the box next to your YouTube video that you want to monetize and select Actions > Monetize.

In the window that pops up do not modify anything and click Monetize.

Step 5) Video “Under Review”

After monetizing your video you will see a message “Monetization settings updated for 1 video.” Your video shows up now with a green question mark flagged as “Under review“. At this moment there is nothing that you can do except for waiting and hopefully your video will show up as monetized soon. The time you have to wait can range from 1 minute to several hours. Possibly it depends on how many videos are currently under review on YouTube. If it hasn’t been monetized yet simply try in a couple of minutes or hours again and refresh your web browser.

Step 6) Video Now “Monetized”

In case your video doesn’t show up as monetized at this stage I would suggest to delete the video and eventually make some small modifications (video editing) to the video and start over with Step 1 (upload video) from above. As we don’t know exactly what caused the problem for the video not to be monetized this seems to be the best solution. When uploading the modified video again, YouTube should recognize it as a new video without any association to the previous upload. As the video was not listed, nobody except for yourself was able to watch the video nor to comment on it. So you don’t lose a lot if you delete it assuming you have got a reasonable internet connection. Otherwise it could be a little bit time consuming.

Assuming your video now shows up with the desired green $ sign indicating that your YouTube video is now “Monetized“.

You can now modify the title, description, tags, privacy settings, category and other settings as desired and assign the video to your play lists and start addingannotations if you wish.

For me the method described above has been 100% successful for the last 8 videos or so that I uploaded to my YouTube Channel UL360. For the monetization of your video to be successful in the first attempt it seems to be important that when you first upload it to KISS (Keep It Simple Straight). Yes, first KISS your video. Keep everything as simple as possible and start “decorating” your video(s) with all the desired information (description, tags, etc.) after successful monetization.