How to start a YouTube channel, step by step

A Google Account lets you watch, like and subscribe, but to upload videos, comment or make playlists you need a YouTube channel. Making one takes a few minutes, on a computer or on YouTube's mobile site:

1. Sign in to YouTube with your Google Account (create one first if you don't have one).
2. Click your profile picture, then Settings.
3. In the Account section, select Add or manage channel(s).
4. Click Create a channel.
5. Choose a profile picture, type the name and handle, and click Create channel.

That makes a personal channel, which only you can manage. If the channel needs a different name from your Google Account, or more than one person running it, make it with a Brand Account instead: go to your channel list, click Create a new channel, choose a picture, name and handle, and click Create channel. That creates a new Brand Account, and you can add owners and managers to it. Its primary owner can also give people roles through channel permissions in YouTube Studio, so nobody has to share a password. (If you use YouTube with a supervised experience, you may not be able to create a channel at all.)

The name and the handle. Your channel name is what people see on your videos. Your handle is your @name: unique to you, shown in comments, mentions, live chat and Shorts, and your channel's address, as youtube.com/@yourhandle. YouTube's rules for handles:

• 3 to 30 characters in most languages (some scripts have other limits), using letters or numbers from one of YouTube's 75 supported languages.
• Underscores, hyphens, periods and Latin middle dots are allowed, but not at the start or the end.
• Not already taken, and not like a web address or a phone number. Handles aren't case-sensitive.

You can change the name, and the handle, 2 times in 14 days each, so you're not stuck with your first try. Still, pick well: a name that says what the channel is (“Bike Fixes at Home”) tells a stranger more than a nickname (“SamTV”), and your own name works when you are the show. Make it easy to say and spell, and check the same handle is free on TikTok and Instagram, so your clips point to one name everywhere.

A new channel starts with limits: uploads of up to 15 minutes, and thumbnails picked from YouTube's suggestions rather than your own. Verifying with a phone number lifts both:

1. Sign in to YouTube Studio on a computer.
2. Go to Settings, then Channel, then Feature eligibility.
3. Under Intermediate features, choose to verify your phone number, and enter the code YouTube sends by text or voice call.

Once your account is verified, you can:

• Upload videos longer than 15 minutes.
• Add custom thumbnails.
• Live stream.
• Appeal copyright claims.

One phone number can verify 2 channels a year. Verified or not, the biggest file YouTube takes is 256 GB or 12 hours, whichever is less.

A few features need more: advanced features, which include pinned comments, higher daily upload limits, video chapters and a link from a Short to a related video. Phone verification comes first; then you get them by building channel history (uploads, live streams, audience engagement, and the account's age and use), or, where YouTube offers it, by verifying with an ID or a short video of your face. YouTube says either check usually takes about 24 hours.

All of this is in YouTube Studio under Customization, then Profile, and each change goes live when you click Publish. What YouTube asks for:

The banner is the one that catches people out. YouTube uses the same image on computers, phones and TVs and crops it differently on each, so anything outside the middle 1235 × 338 may be cut off; don't add borders or shadows to it either. The trailer and the sections of your Home tab are under Customization, then Home tab.

Set your audience too. YouTube requires every channel to say whether its videos are made for kids, wherever you live, to comply with the US Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and other laws. In YouTube Studio on a computer, go to Settings, then Channel, then Advanced settings, and choose under Audience. Setting a channel as made for kids restricts some of its features, so set it to what you actually make.

A channel about one thing grows more easily than a channel about everything, because a viewer who liked one video knows what the next one will be. Three questions narrow it down:

1. What could you make a video about every week for a year? Write down 20 video ideas. If you run dry at 8, the topic is too narrow; if you could keep going past 50, you've found one.
2. What do you know, or what are you learning, that someone else wants to know? Being a few steps ahead of a beginner is enough to teach them.
3. Who is it for? “People fixing their first bike” gives you titles, thumbnails and a tone of voice. “Everyone” gives you none of them.

Then write the channel's promise in one sentence, like “Bike repairs you can do at home, every Thursday”, and put it in your description and on your banner. It also tells you what not to post.

Checking that people search for your topic is the next step, and it's about growth: see how to get 1,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Less than you think. A recent phone records sharper video than most viewers will notice. What makes a first video look amateur is usually the sound and the light, not the camera:

• Camera: your phone. Use the back camera, which is usually the better one, film long videos in landscape (16:9), and wipe the lens. A stand or a small tripod keeps it steady at eye level.
• Microphone: the one thing worth buying first. A clip-on (lavalier) mic, or a USB mic on your desk, close to your mouth. Close beats expensive: the nearer the mic, the less of the room it hears.
• Light: a window, or one soft lamp. Face the window; never sit with it behind you. After dark, one lamp through a shade or a diffuser, in front of you and a little to one side.
• A quiet room with soft things in it (a sofa, curtains, a rug) echoes far less than an empty one. If it hums or the street is loud, the free background noise remover cleans up voices in your browser.
• Editing: a free editor, on your phone or computer, is enough for cutting, titles and music.

Your first videos won't be your best, and that's what they're for: each one teaches you something the next one uses. For each video:

1. Plan. One question or one idea per video. Write the first 15 seconds word for word (what the video is, and why to stay), then bullet-point the rest.
2. Record in short sections, and redo a bad take straight away rather than planning to fix it later.
3. Edit. Cut the slow start, the pauses and anything that isn't the point. The free silence remover takes the gaps out of a talking video.
4. Title and thumbnail. Say plainly what the video is. Custom thumbnails need a verified account; YouTube recommends 3840 × 2160 pixels for videos (at least 640 wide), as a JPG or PNG, up to 50 MB from a computer or 2 MB from a phone. A Short's cover is 9:16, added in YouTube Studio on a computer: make one from a frame of the video with the Shorts thumbnail maker.
5. Chapters. On anything longer than a few minutes, add chapters: a list of times and titles in the description, starting at 00:00, with at least 3 in order and each at least 10 seconds long. They need advanced features. The free YouTube timestamp generator makes the list as you watch, or from the transcript, and checks it against those rules.
6. Publish with a description that says in a sentence or two what the video answers, and set whether it's made for kids.

Shorts are vertical or square videos of up to 3 minutes, and the Shorts feed shows them to people who've never heard of you. Search brings people looking for an answer; Shorts bring people who weren't looking for you at all.

You don't have to film them separately. Every long video holds moments that work on their own: a tip, a result, a strong line. Cut each as a Short, and one long video becomes several posts across the week. Then send viewers back: in YouTube Studio, open the Short from Content and select a related video from your channel, and a link to it shows below your handle in the Shorts player. That needs advanced features, and the video has to be public or unlisted.

YouTube Studio has a Clips and Shorts tool for cutting a Short from your own long video, and YouTube says you won't be penalized for using your own content in one. The same vertical clips work on TikTok and Reels too: see how to post YouTube videos on TikTok. For filming Shorts on their own, see how to make YouTube Shorts.

By hand, that means watching your own video again for the moments, then trimming, reframing and captioning each one, which adds hours to every upload. Clyper takes the YouTube link and does those steps: it reads the transcript, chooses moments that make sense on their own, cuts each where a sentence ends, keeps whoever's talking in the 9:16 frame and captions each word. You pick how many clips, up to one per 2 minutes of video; posting them and setting each one's related video stay with you. More on YouTube to Shorts.

Pick a pace you can keep for months, not one you can keep for two weeks. Alongside a job or school, that's often one long video a week, or every two weeks, with Shorts cut from it in between. Here's a first month at one long video a week. That pace is an assumption: change it to fit your time.

By the end of the month you have 4 long videos and 6 to 8 Shorts: enough to start seeing what works. Growing from there is its own job, covered in how to get your first 1,000 subscribers.

When the money comes. YouTube pays creators through the YouTube Partner Program, and a channel has to reach a threshold to join:

• Fan funding and Shopping: 500 subscribers and 3 public uploads in the last 90 days, plus 3,000 watch hours in the last 12 months or 3 million Shorts views in the last 90 days, in the countries where this tier is offered.
• Ad revenue: 1,000 subscribers, plus 4,000 watch hours in the last 12 months or 10 million Shorts views in the last 90 days. From February 1, 2027, new applicants need 8,000 watch hours in 365 days or 20 million Shorts views in 90 days.

Watch time in the Shorts feed doesn't count toward the hours, and you also need 2-Step Verification on your Google Account, advanced features and no active Community Guidelines strikes. See how far you have to go with the YouTube watch hours calculator and what views might pay with the YouTube money calculator, then read how to get monetized on YouTube and how much YouTube pays.