YouTube changes creator program requirements


YouTube announced it is changing the minimum requirements for earning review on videos. The new threshold is to address issues over the past year.

we’re making changes to address the issues that affected our community in 2017 so we can prevent bad actors from harming the inspiring and original creators around the world who make their living on YouTube. 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.

The new threshold requires creators to have at least 1,000 subscribers and clocked over 4,000 hours of watch time over the past 12 months. YouTube didn't indicate how many channels will be affected, but they did state said that 90% of those affected made less than $2.50 in the past month.

With the volume of content uploaded every minute, YouTube struggles to monitor content. Applying arbitrary cutoffs should help, but likely people will game the system like previous efforts and these thresholds will have to be revisited again.