Want to make money on YouTube? Now they have introduced even stricter rules

New, twice higher thresholds for earnings

According to the new rules, creators who want to start earning through ad revenue sharing will have to have at least a thousand subscribers and meet one of two additional conditions: achieve eight thousand hours of viewing in the last year or collect 20 million views on their shorts (Shorts) in the last 90 days. Until now, for the same status, it was necessary to collect four thousand hours of viewing or ten million views of Shorts videos, which means that the threshold for entry has practically doubled.

The company owned by Google points out that these changes will not affect creators who are older. part of the Partner Program. However, an additional condition is introduced for earning from short videos. Creators who are moreć in the program, they will have to maintain the threshold of ten million views of Shorts videos within a period of 90 days in order to continuously generate income from the so-called “Shorts Creators Pool”. If they fall below that threshold, they will still remain in the program and earn from long video formats, and earnings from Shorts will be reactivated when they cross the threshold again.

The reasons behind the arrangement of the rules

YouTube says the changes are being made to “keep pace with the growth of the platform, which now records over 200 billion daily views on Shorts and over a billion hours watched on television screens” each day. Increasing the thresholds will make it more difficult to enter and stay in the monetization program, especially for new creators. The move puts more pressure on creators’ ability to consistently attract large audiences before they can monetize, which could reduce the number of new channels that manage to monetize their content.

This move can also be interpreted as an attempt by YouTube to maintain the quality of the content and reward more serious creators in an increasingly crowded ecosystem that has over three million members in the Partner Program. At the same time, the platform is struggling with the mass production of content generated by artificial intelligence and recently implemented rules against “inauthentic content”, targeting channels that use templates or produce content with minimal effort.

The low threshold for donations remains unchanged

It is important to point out that these changes refer exclusively to the higher level of the Partner Program, which enables the sharing of advertising revenue. The lower tier, introduced in 2023 to give creators earlier access to monetization features through audience support, remains unchanged.

For this first level, known as “fan funding”, the conditions are still 500 subscribers, three public announcements in the last 90 days and three thousand hours of viewing in the last year or three million views of Shorts videos in 90 days. Creators who meet these conditions can make money through donations (Super Chat, Super Thanks), channel memberships (Channel Memberships) and product sales (YouTube Shopping), but not from ads.

Expansion of Premium subscriptions and market trends

Along with the announcement of the new rules, YouTube also confirmed the expansion of its cheaper Premium Lite subscription to all countries where the standard Premium option is also available. Creators receive a share of subscription revenue based on watch time, with 55 percent of revenue going to creators of long videos and 45 percent to creators of shorts videos.

“With these additional subscribers, creators can expect higher earnings: when a user signs up for Premium, partners earn more on average than when the same user watched ads,” the company said in a blog post. Premium Lite offers an ad-free viewing experience on most videos, downloads for offline viewing, and background playback.

YouTube isn’t the only platform revising its creator rewards programs. Recently, Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) also changed its payout rules to reward exclusively original content, while Facebook launched a new monetization program earlier this year to attract creators from TikTok and YouTube.