YouTube Raises Its Monetization Bar for New Channels, Doubling Required Watch Hours
YouTube’s partner programme is changing its rules again in February. The numbers from the last big change in 2018 explain why so many personalities no longer rely on a single platform’s terms.
In August YouTube announced the first significant changes to its Partner Program since 2018. The programme, which now has over 3 million creators, is the route through which channels share in advertising and Premium revenue.
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The headline change is for newcomers. New creators applying for the programme will need 8,000 qualified watch hours in the past 365 days, or 20 million qualified Shorts views in the past 90 days. YouTube stressed that this does not affect creators who are already in the programme.
What changes for existing channels
Existing partners are not untouched, though. From 1 February 2027, only creators with 10 million qualified Shorts views over the previous 90 days will be eligible for ads and subscription revenue sharing on Shorts. Channels below that line stay in the programme and keep earning on long-form videos.
There is paperwork too. According to Search Engine Journal, the current entry requirement is 1,000 subscribers plus either 4,000 watch hours over 12 months or 10 million Shorts views in 90 days, and current partners have until 31 January 2027 to accept three new sets of terms in YouTube Studio.
From February, a channel also counts as active only if it reaches 1,000 watch hours in a year, 1 million Shorts views in 90 days, or uploads two long-form videos or five Shorts every 90 days.
For the record, YouTube says creators receive 55% of the relevant revenue pool for long-form videos and 45% for Shorts.
The last time the bar went up
The best guide to what these thresholds mean comes from the previous change. In January 2018 YouTube moved its monetisation requirement to 4,000 hours of watch time within 12 months and 1,000 subscribers, and applied it to existing channels as well.
YouTube was candid about who would lose out. It said that 99% of those affected were making less than $100 per year, with 90% earning less than $2.50 in the previous month. In other words, the platform removed monetisation from a huge number of small channels, and for almost all of them the money at stake was tiny.
That is also the uncomfortable lesson. For a small creator, the rules of a large platform are not a negotiation. They arrive by blog post, with a date attached.
Why personalities spread out
Bigger names learned the same lesson in a different way. Over the past decade, YouTube personalities have faced demonetised videos, advertiser pullbacks and changes to how revenue is shared, often with little warning. None of that is unusual for a platform that has to balance advertisers, viewers and millions of channels at once. But it makes a single income stream risky.
So many creators now treat their channel as the front of the shop rather than the whole business: merchandise, memberships, brand deals and, for some, a paid page they control themselves. The appeal is simple.
On a subscription page, the creator sets the price and speaks directly to the fans who chose to pay, and a change in ad policy does not switch the income off.
Where the crossover shows
That crossover is now visible enough to be catalogued. On OnlyFans, a list of YouTubers who already run a paid page alongside their channel shows which personalities have taken that route: people whose subscribers mostly arrive from an existing YouTube audience and come for behind-the-scenes material, direct chat and content the main channel could never host. Such a list records who has a page. How much any of them earn from it, or whether it replaces their channel income, is another matter.
February, again
New rules take effect on 1 February 2027, and the deadline to accept them falls the day before. Most viewers will never notice.
For creators, though, it is one more reminder of 2018: the platform decides where the bar sits, and the smart move is not to depend on any single bar.
