Do you plan to start getting some royalties on Youtube?

The most popular video website is perfect for those who want to earn some extra cash while doing what they enjoy. We have music channels, gaming channels, vlog channels, news channels, and everything you can imagine. But if you still haven't created your channel, you better run for it, because things are about to get much harder for small channels.

That's because in order to get monetization on your channel, you need 1.000 subscribers, and 4.000 qualified watch hours over the past 365 days, or 10 million short views over the past 90 days. Sounds tough, yeah, but it will get even worse: By February 1st 2027, those requirements are going to change to 1.000 subscribers, and 8.000 qualified watch hours over the past 365 days, or 20 million short views over the past 90 days.

According to YouTube, the new requirements are due to the rise of "low quality" channels at the platform, so they want to "filter" those content. But of course, this will have a direct impact on those who are trying to get some earnings with good quality content.

There's quite a bit of outrage from creators who are starting now to chase their dream, but it doesn't look like the platform will change their mind.

So, yeah, for those who want it... You better rush, or you'll need to double your efforts very soon. 6 months isn't that far away.

Yeah they just doubled it and called a day.

Does it affect your channel?

A threshold is fairly normal in content creation platforms (Medium did it like a half a decade ago). And to be fair, the income is negligible before a certain point anyway.

There is a big problem on YouTube this threshold might remove or at least cut down on. That is the loads of channels that repost stolen content. These channels often go unnoticed until they get bigger. But, by that point these unauthorized parasites have made money off of someone else’s work. While these channels are small and don’t make a lot of money before they are shut down, this stolen content channel model is scalable, so a parasite with a proper macro-setup can mostly automate account creation, make loads of these channels and farm large amounts of revenue just by grinding out stolen content channels. I would love to see these sorts of channels go extinct, or at least become far rarer and no longer feasible as a scam.

I will most likely meet the current requirements until February.

But I'm really sad for those who are starting now. 4.000 Hours is a very tough road already, 8.000 looks impossible for channels with 1k subscribers. 20 million short views is even worse.

I believe if you are already monetized all you need are the previous requirements. So it will only effects newly monetized channels. I believe this is being done due the number of AI channels and channels stealing other peoples content popping up.

I understand they wanting to be harsher towards those kind of channels, but still it feels really unfair for those who are planning to have a decent and family friendly channel.

Back in the days nothing of this was necessary, right? I think I made a couple of dollars with some videos back in the early 2010s, without having to meet any requirements. Too bad I only started to focus on my channel for real last year.

Yeah the requirements were VERY low originally. The thing is even channels that aren't monetized still have ads, so YouTube gets 100% of the ad revenue.

I remember getting monetized on Twitch was really easy, barely anyone watched my livestreams back at the pandemic when I was doing it and I still got it, tho I never kept for long enough to get the dolar value necessary to actually get a payment lol.

Twitch requirements are still really easy to become an Affiliate. All you need are 25 followers, stream for 4 hours on 4 different days, and average at least 3 viewers 4 different days in the last 30 days. Very easy to hit. 

To become Twitch Partner requires an average of 75 viewers or more over the course of 6 streams in a 30 day period. 

I'm a Twitch Affiliate, but only get a handful of viewers per stream. I just do it for the fun of it and what little I make goes towards buying games. 

I'm affiliate as well (or was, dunno if they take it back for innactivity) and yeah it was really easy.

I actually made some friends back then on Twitch because of that so it was a really fun time, even as I don't really talk to any of them since I dropped Instagram for good 20 months ago lol.

I imagine streaming in english makes things a lot easier too, one of the first people that ever came to my streams was speaking english but I didn't have a mic yet so we just typed in english while I played xD