From the official YouTube FAQ:
If you have AdSense earnings but your current balance doesn't meet the payment threshhold, you can follow the steps to permanently cancel your AdSense account. As long as your current balance meets the cancellation threshhold, you'll be paid your full AdSense balance in the next payment cycle. [bolding is mine in this last sentence...see comments at end]
If you think you’ll reach the YPP threshold soon, we suggest waiting until your channel is eligible for the program again so that you don’t have to open a newAdSense account to start earning money.
Before canceling your account: If you have never received a payment from AdSense before, make sure to follow all the steps to getting paid, including:
- Provide your tax information, if necessary
- Confirm your payee name and address
- Set up how you want to receive your payment
- Verify your address with a PIN that's mailed to you (if you don't already have a PIN, this may take 2-4 weeks)
If you'd like to participate in AdSense again in the future, you'll need to submit a new application using an email address that's not associated with any previous AdSense account.
So what I'm seeing here is that if you've reached over $100.00 in the last payment cycle, you'll get every penny that you're owed by Adsense. If not, it will sit there until you again become eligible for YPP. OR, you can just completely shut down your Adsense account and they'll pay you the balance, regardless of the amount: $0.01 to $99.99 (unless I'm misunderstanding what "cancellation threshhold" means.
The reality: If you're a small channel, just starting out, we're probably talking about dollars and cents here. If you want to give up completely on ever getting revenue, shut it down and get your few dollars. If not, let it sit and grow your channel. Be sure you've completed steps 1, 2 and 3 at our favorite video sharing site with a slash and then account_monetization (sorry, forum won't let me post the link) regardless of how close you are. I waited 14 months for my first $100, and then 5 months, and then 3 months, and now 2 months. If you produce interesting content on a regular basis, subscriber growth comes on an upward curve. You may start out with 5 subscribers a month, then 15, then 30, then 60, then 120, etc. The curve didn't start moving upward for me until about a year and a half in, but I can see it now. I had just over 600 subscribers on January 8 (two year anniversary), and will probably hit 800 by tomorrow.
If you're on the higher end, and close, my advice is to wait it out. Don't get discouraged. I strongly suspect that starting tomorrow, YouTube ad views are going to be worth a LOT more than they were yesterday. Since there will be fewer channels to run ads on, the monetized channels will get more ads, and therefore, will make more money.
In my case, I produce content that gets a lot of views from searches, and because so many searches hit my videos, they get on the "recommended" list a lot. I never pushed subscriptions, except for a "please subscribe" at the very end of the video, and I'm guessing that very few people reach that last 20 seconds of the video for that reminder. I also feel that most YouTube viewers don't properly utilize the subscription list, and just watch recommended or trending videos. So, in looking at that Account Monetization page I linked above, I have 13,557 watchtime hours, but only 797 subscribers. Based on my channel's recent growth, I should hit 1000 in the next 4-6 weeks. I'll wait it out. Tomorrow, I should be getting a payment of around $115.00. Then I'll have around $60.00 left in my account. I'll lose around $100 in revenue if I have to wait 6 weeks to get back into YPP, but I think the reward of better ad revenue will be worth it once I get back in.
(To the mods of yttalk, I fully understand the inability to post video and channel links, and third party website spam to the forum, but certain YouTube URLs should be whitelisted, as important information can be found at these links).
