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The New Changes to YouTube Monetization

YouTube has made A LOT of changes to their policies and monetization rules in the last year. They have continued working on the issues that advertisers have with creator content so YouTube have made changes that work best for their platform:

‘A big part of that effort will be strengthening our requirements for monetization so spammers, impersonators, and other bad actors can’t hurt our ecosystem or take advantage of you, while continuing to reward those who make our platform great.’

This week, YouTube announced a new way to decide who can monetize their video.

What are the new changes?

The main change is the requirement to be able to monetize. Up until now, creators simply needed a minimum of 10k views to be eligible to earn revenue through their videos. This allowed YouTube to determine if a channel was adhering to the community guidelines and policies.

As of Tuesday 16th of January, the eligibility requirement has changed to 1k subscribers and a minimum watch time of 4000 hours within the past 12 months. YouTube believes that this new standard will help them evaluate and identify creators who have a positive impact on the community, contribute and enrichen YouTube. The hope is that the changes will also prevent inappropriate content from being monetized which might affect everyone’s revenue in the long run.

In February, the new rules will come into effect for all existing channels. This will affect quite a lot of channels, but 99% of channels overall on YouTube made less than $100 a year and many more made less than $5 a month. Of course, any outstanding AdSense balances will be paid should your channel no longer be eligible for monetization. YouTube will also continue analysing channels and will keep using spam reports, strikes and abuse flags to ensure a smooth running of the video platform.

What does this mean for you?

New channels will have to grow organically until they reach the minimum requirements. Make sure to stick to the community guidelines and policies. If you are unsure about whether a video is suitable not, review it and err on the side of caution. For example, if you have a video of animals fighting in the wild but there is no blood, the video might still be demonetized to appease the advertisers.

For all the members of our network, we have already implemented these changes and will make sure that there is a smooth transition should there be a change in your monetization abilities.

How do I know if this will affect me?

The best way to find out if your monetization will stay the same or if you will just have to keep uploading great content for a while longer is to check your watch time and subscriber numbers. The subscriber numbers are of course easy to find. To find your watch time is also very easy.

  1. Log into your YouTube account and head to the Creator Studio
  2. Select Analytics in the left-hand side menu
  3. Now you can see a Watch time in the Overview section of the last 28 days
  4. To find more details and the total watch time, simply click on Watchtime and select last 365 days in the drop-down menu to get your total number.

If you have more questions, do not hesitate to get in touch, we are happy to answer them all.