Access to YouTube tools and features

YouTube Studio offers many tools and features to help you make the most of your content. To get access to these tools and features, you can choose how to verify your identity. Verifying your identity helps us to reduce abuse and spam on YouTube.

You have a few options for accessing features:

• Standard features: Creating a channel gets you these features immediately as long as you have no active Community Guidelines strikes. Use these features to begin growing your audience and developing your channel.
• Intermediate features: If you want a wider set of tools to continue growing your audience, you can choose to access intermediate features. To do so, you must verify your phone number.
• Advanced features: Most active creators seeking to use advanced features for the first time will qualify automatically, having already established sufficient channel history.
  • Some new creators or those wanting to unlock advanced features straight away can choose to verify their identity with a valid ID or through video verification. Read more here about how the info from your ID or video verification is used.

	Features	No verification	Verification via phone number	Verification via channel history OR identity
Standard	Upload videos	Limited daily limit		Higher daily limit
	Create a playlist	Limited daily limit		Higher daily limit for public playlists
	Create a playlist in YouTube Music	Limited daily limit		Higher daily limit for public playlists
Intermediate	Longer videos (>15 mins)
	Live streaming on a computer		Limited daily limit	Higher daily limit
	Customised thumbnails		Limited daily limit	Higher daily limit
	Create a podcast
Advanced	Content ID appeal
	Embed live streams
	Apply for monetisation			+ Eligibility requirements
	Add clickable links to your long-form video description and Community posts
	Add a related video to your YouTube Short
	Pin comments on videos and Community posts
	RSS upload
	Add clickable links to your channel details on the watch page or posts
	Add chapters

Note: In addition to the above, make sure that you follow YouTube’s Community Guidelines. Violations of our policies may result in a strike or may restrict your access to features.

Daily limits

There's a limit to how many times you can use certain features each day. You can see which ones in the table above – they're labelled as having a 'limited daily limit' or a 'higher daily limit'.

If you hit a limit:

• Intermediate access: You might be able to verify your identity to upgrade to advanced access, which usually has higher limits.
• If you already have advanced feature access: You'll need to wait 24 hours before using that feature again.

See what features you have access to

You can see which features you currently have access to by following the instructions below.

1. On a computer, sign in to YouTube Studio.
2. Click Settings.
3. Click Channel.
4. Click Feature eligibility.

You'll see 'Enabled' next to the features that you have access to. Please note that not all YouTube features are managed from within the Feature eligibility tab and some features may have separate eligibility requirements. To learn more about other features, visit the status and features page.

Verify your identity to use features

For instructions about how to unlock intermediate and advanced features, take a look at this Help Centre article. Note that ID and video verification isn't available to all creators.