YouTube Revises Monetisation Rules, Doubles Minimum Watch Hours

YouTube has set new requirements for content creators seeking to earn revenue from advertising and subscriber counts starting 1 February.

According to a TechCrunch report on Monday (10/8) local time, new content creators who wish to earn income must accumulate at least 8,000 watch hours in the past year or 20 million Shorts views in the past 90 days.

The required watch hours are now higher than the previous provisions, which were 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in the past year, or 1,000 subscribers and 10 million Shorts views in the past 90 days.

In addition, creators must maintain at least 10 million Shorts views within a 90-day period to continue earning revenue through the Shorts Creators Pool programme.

Channels that have not yet met these requirements can still join the partner programme and earn revenue from long-form video content.

The change in monetisation terms is intended to align with YouTube’s growth, which now records more than 200 billion Shorts views every day and over 1 billion hours of watch time on television each day.

In the same announcement, YouTube also expanded its Premium Lite subscription service to all countries that already offer YouTube Premium.

Content creators will receive a share of revenue based on watch time and the number of views from subscribers. YouTube has set a 55% share for long-form video creators and 45% for Shorts creators.

YouTube said the presence of additional Premium subscribers has the potential to increase creator earnings because partners on average earn higher revenue when users subscribe to Premium compared to when users watch videos with advertisements.