How to Fix Youtube "This feature is currently not available in your country." Monetization Error.

So I went to monetize my personal YouTube account today only to be greeted with a strange "This feature is currently not available in your country. Learn more." error.

After searching google and the YouTube forums fruitlessly for a solution I think I finally found the reason why I was getting this error.

The possible solution was buried deep in a very unintuitive place inside of YouTube's settings. Read on past the jump for the solution.

The Solution

Update 2: Commenter Paul provided a possible updated way to solve this:

"You all need to go to here:

https://www.youtube.com/account_channel_advanced

Then change your country. Took me ages to find it. But mine was set to afghanistan, changed it to UK, BOOM!"


Update: Commenter Rich let us know in a video that due to a change in YouTube's layout some people might not be seeing the options outlined below. To get the old options back go to http://www.youtube.com/onechannel, scroll down and choose the "Switch Back" button. Hopefully this will help people with issues but I'm not guaranteeing this will work forever. Gotta love change. (Thanks Rich!)

In short you have to:

• Be signed in to YouTube account.
• Click your name to bring up the menu that shows up below your name.
• Select "My Channel" in the menu.
• Look for "About (Your Name) on YouTube    Edit" in your channel layout. (Mine was in the upper left area.)
• Click the small "Edit" link mentioned above.
• Clicking the "Edit" link drops down a menu that has sections called "Country". (My country was set to "Afghanistan" which wasn't correct at all.)
• Change the "Country" setting to the proper country. (I changed the 'Country" to my county of "United States" and I was able to get to the "Monetization" settings properly.)
• Click "Apply".
• If your country is allowed to monetize videos you should now have a 'Monetization" link in your Settings > Channel Settings section.

YouTube > My Channel

About (Name) On YouTube > Edit

YouTube Channel Country Options

Channel Settings > Monetization Showing Properly

A Few Notes

I should say that I couldn't even see the "Monetization" option in my YouTube Channel Settings until I had my country set properly. If you're looking for the "Monetization"link and you don't see it under "Channel Settings" then this may be why.

I had been using what I like to call "rat trails" of various YouTube links (Creators & Partners > Become a Partner > Get Started) to try to simply find the Monetization settings because I had easily set up monetization on other accounts.

The fact that there was no way (at least that I could find to designate your country right on any of your actual proper "Settings" pages is just dumb-founding. I'm not a tech-illiterate but the fact it took me this long to find out how to do something like make sure my YouTube account listed me as in the right country is crazy.

Also a noted from a few of the YouTube forum posts that users in some countries are required to apply for partnership via the normal Partner Application process. This solution is only what worked for me as an American that had my country wrongly listed as "Afghanistan".

Conclusion

So there you go. I hope this post find any of you out there that are struggling with getting the "This feature is currently not available in your country. Learn more." error when working on getting monetization set up.

I think your country setting should be in a far more obvious location, perhaps right in the Channel Settings section? It makes even more sense to have your country be part of your "Account Information". That's where I'd look for it.

Perhaps even instead of simply "This feature is currently not available in your country. Learn more." how about "This feature is currently not available in your country of Afghanistan. (Not correct? Click here to review your country setting.)"

In the end I was just happy my 3 hour search down this technological "rat hole" was finally over and I can properly monetize my channel.