In conclusion, if Google's policies were really transparent, everyone who buys & sells Adsense monetized websites on flippa.com would be multi-millionaires by now :-)

F... I cash out today .... omg the joy is overwhelming

Make sure you have decent traffic as well, like a few hundred views a month. This is just a figure I pulled from the air but think of it. If you get accepted into Adsense and you are not even getting a hundred views a month, what's the point? On good months, my RPM is about US$2-3. That means that on average, I earn $2-3 for every 1000 views. Depending on your site content you may have a higher RPM but at the end of the day it is a numbers game.

Another reason I would advise against registering for an account until you have decent traffic is that it is very easy for you to get click-bombed. A click bomb is where someone repeatedly clicks on an ad from the same IP. Google detects such clicks as fraudulent and holds you responsible even though you were not responsible for the clicks. There are ways to prevent this of course but if you have very little traffic, the effect gets magnified and you may get yourself banned.

For those who have good traffic like in the tens of thousands per month, I would suggest replacing or supplementing Adsense with an ad network like Monumetric (formerly Blogger Network). Monumetric serves the same ads but they give out a much higher RPM. I easily doubled my earnings by switching to Monumetric.

For website, you will need at least 600 clicks a day to make decent money, depend on country. Youtube views I'm not sure.