Five years ago, YouTube opened their partner program to everyone. This was a really big deal: it meant anyone could sign up for the service, start uploading videos, and immediately begin making money. This model helped YouTube grow into the web’s biggest video platform.
Today YouTube has announced, that new channels will have to work a bit harder for monetization privileges, and current Partner channels will have to maintain high viewership in order to stay profitable. To be specific, channels will now need to have 4,000 total viewing hours in a rolling 12-month period, along with at least 1,000 subscribers. New channels must hit these metrics in order to monetize, and existing channels that meet the old requirement of 10,000 cumulative views will have a 30 day grace period to get in compliance or be dropped. Dropped channels will be paid out any remaining AdSense balance due to them.
YouTube believes that this threshold will give them a chance to gather enough information on a channel to know if it’s legit. And it won’t be so high as to discourage new independent creators from signing up for the service.
The blog post outing the new rules went live earlier today, and the comments section is already above 200 comments, with the mass consensus being that this move has questionable benefit given the challenges currently facing the platform, and will significantly harm smaller channels. Commenters predict a mass increase in smaller channels subscribing to one another in order to help get their sub count up, as well as using paid subscriber services.
The viewing hours requirement can also be faked, but would require more than creators would likely get out of it. Larger creators would be largely unaffected, commenters argue, though it’s quite feasible that a public outcry that causes a creator’s fan base to drop off could end up dipping their viewing hours below the requirement. 4,000 hours in a 12 month period essentially equates to about 340 hours per month. This means that the output of the average large creator, a single 30-minute video per day, would require each video to have at least 12 unique viewers. That does not sound like a hefty feat, but for smaller creators, who may upload once a week or even more seldom, it all but locks them out of the ecosystem.
As it moves ever closer to parity with the world of prime-time television, YouTube is sensibly taking steps to police how business is done on its service. Time will tell how a rising generation of creators respond to these new limitations.
