YouTube now requires creators to have twice as many watch hours to start earning money
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/10/youtube-now-requires-creators-to-have-twice-as-many-watch-hours-to-start-earning-money/Open linkView original on lemmy.worldSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on lemmy.worldhttps://techcrunch.com/2026/08/10/youtube-now-requires-creators-to-have-twice-as-many-watch-hours-to-start-earning-money/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
148 replies
Then they removed their ads from all channels below 8,000 hours, right?... Right?!
No, AFAIK they still push ads on you whether you're monetized or not.
I got "removed" from adsense around 2005. There had better not be ads on my vids.
Reminds me of that woman who made science videos on both YouTube and Pornhub and she makes more money on Pornhub.
If I'm remembering correctly it was more money per view on pornhub but she had significantly more views on YouTube so the total amount per platform was still significantly in YouTube favor.
Still wild that a porn site theoretically pays better than Google.
Context: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zaradar_people-may-not-know-this-but-i-publish-the-activity-7283930698137141250-50_U
I have no clue how common adblock is among YouTube users, but there's probably a bigger chunk of pornhub viewers on mobile.
Pornhub is also in an unique place, given a lot of advertisers won't advertise there. Pushing prices down, but simultaneously a different set of advertisers can only advertise there. Pushing the price up. I have absolutely no clue whether or not pornhub charge more per ad view than Google ad services on average
the porn hub ones nude ? like getting undressed as she's explaining a black hole.
Have a channel url ? asking for a friend
Yeh, that's why I love pornhub. The science is on point.
idk, pornhub brings google into your porn habits, I don't want to deal with google at all.
That is actually interesting to know. Makes a person wonder what is the demographic watching the videos and why.
The end result is that channels will just post twice as much slop to get to those hours and actually human creators give up, meaning YouTube becomes even more sloppified.
As Google intended.
SlopTube powered by Sloople 🤭
Slop doesn't get return viewers, which is counter-productive to reaching a watch hours (or subscribers) threshold.
I used to display Google ad links on my site, they accumulated value - slowly, but Google would only cut a check when you reach $100 worth of ads shown. My earnings approached $100 like an asymptote, halfway there in the first 6 months, 3/4 in the first year, 7/8 in the second year, 15/16 in the third... never did quite reach $100, and so my payout for all my effort and showing of their ads remains to this day $0.
I think it would be super easy for them to fudge the numbers on their side.
And when you have "proof" they fudged their numbers, how exactly do you make the monster pay? It's definitely a rigged game.
And they will never stop extracting more value. I just want to prop nebula here, it's great for creators and there's a lot of them already on there.
The only thing 'missing' is the commenting system, but to me that's an upgrade.
Comm Systems is essential for the community pointing out mistakes or wrong doings
Nebula is awesome. I took a gamble with them and bought lifetime during their second round two years ago and never regretted it. It has only been getting better, here’s to hope that they keep direction.
And if you want comedy, Dropout (formerly College Humor) is a great service that openly encourages you sharing your account with your friends.
The only streaming platform I sub to is Dropout and I happily do it. I believe I stumbled upon Breaking News first, watched first season or so on the high seas. I was in tears from laughing and I've been subbed ever since. Great value for the money, imo.
Don't worry, guys. After creators eat THIS shit sandwich it'll stop getting worse and everything will be great.
Keep moving the goalposts so YT can just keep more of the ad money for themselves and the line moving up. More enshittification, nothing new is created but the service gets worse in the name of profitability.
At this point I'm convinced that yt just hates smaller creators.
Nah, they hate signing checks. Not that long ago, they had a push to bring views to smaller creators, and my algorithm definitely shifted to people with hundreds to thousands of subs, instead of the hundreds of thousands to millions folks.
Now they raise the payment threshold.
Result: big creators get less traffic (money) to "boost small creators", small creators get less money because they're too small. YouTube gets to keep more cash.
Always has been
Makes total sense for them. Videos made by small creators take just as much drive space and require just as much CDN distribution, but don't give nearly as much profit or user engagement.
In essence, YouTube exists specifically because of big channels, and smaller ones are a burden to them.
It doesn't make long term sense, they are driving away the new big content creators, and will lose market share.
They have no competition to speak of so they feel comfortable squeezing their creators, this is only the start.
You're thinking long term strategy, YT is owned by Alphabet, a publicly traded company, they are only able to think in quarters. All that matters is short term gains for investors, and besides once the short term gains run out the investors will just dump the stock and move on to extracting what they can from the next company.
Very true, public firms can't see past their next few sets of financial statements.
makes total sense short term. makes little sense long term.
I’m honestly surprised they don’t charge for cloud storage for YouTube. Yea, they suck, but also who needs every piece of garbage uploaded in 4k?
likely because they know no one would pay for it. YouTube would die overnight(in terms of content creation). The only people remaining would be the people like Markiplier or the huge content creators that made it big way early on, and even then, I think you would expect heavy resistance against the big content creators just because they're gonna be the ones that are fronting the majority of the bill just due to how many videos they have uploaded.
YouTube would have better chance of survival requiring a subscription to watch the platform than if they were to try to get content creators to pay for storage, it would be content source suicide.
That's more how Vimeo works. The creators pay a monthly fee (for uploads over a very small threshold of storage) and have the option to PPV paywall their videos.
No. This is just how capitalism works; you steal from the smaller ones while allowing the bigger ones to be the “draw”.
Small creators cost youtube more than they earn.
Youtube ads are sold by auction, and there is very little bidding interest in small channels with small audiences. The advertisers want as many eyeballs as possible.
But a small channel's videos cost youtube the same amount to store as a big channel's videos.
Why I just push Patreon or another platform fuck trying to earn money through YouTube that worthless.
There is peertube as well, but it lacks monetization. And Patreon is not the answer because not many will bother paying each creator separately (it at all). To me subscription sounds like an ideal solution, but of course, not YouTube.
Nebula exists but I subscribed to it like during COVID with Curiosity Stream bundle, however, I find their UI confusing and content discovery was very hard.
Right. I wish more people who post on YouTube would post also on alternatives such as Nebula. I mean it's only profit for them, isn't it?
Nebula tightly currates which creators they accept onto their platform. Nobody who doesn't already have a long track record of creating and publishing quality videos is going to be accepted.
Which is good for viewers - less slop to wade through. But it's hard for creators to break into.
They should allow quick unpolished genuine videos. I watch them all the time.
What, they are picky? 👀 They could curate the content, not denying it.
Back when they had the Curiosity Stream bundle content discovery basically didn't matter, because they barely had any content. You could check the site like two or three times a week and there'd be like 4 or 5 new videos each time.
It's expanded a huge amount since then. And they've added a larger degree of content discovery stuff. Personally I mostly just go straight to the "Latest Videos" section (which, unlike the confusingly-similarly-named "New Releases" section, only shows the latest videos from channels you follow), but there are a bunch of other ways you can let it suggest content to you.
Especially as someone paid in a currency weaker than the dollar with a lower salary than I'd have in the US, I can't even afford to do this if I wanted to. I do still subscribe to Nebula which has many creators I like
It also lacks an audience at any sort of scale.
I publish on both YouTube and peertube. 3-4000 views on youtube, 10-30 on peertube.
Also published on odysee for a while, with similarly 2 digit views.
I applaud your for posting on peertube. And yes, you are right, peertube is at early stages, it lacks discoverability, apps (that'd run on chromecast and TVs in general) and monetization as mentioned. But it's also a chicken and egg situation. I really do hope it takes off for good.
A lot of YT creators are moving to OnlyFans.
I've seen this, I saw a hard ensure racer with an onlyfans decal on her bike. Her page didn't have anything sexual on it, I was surprised and relieved.
Yeah, this unfortunately
Honestly that’s why I support YouTube creators on patreon and subscribe star
I subscribed to YouTube Red back in the day, when that’s what it was called.
Then circa early 2018 they changed the rules for monetisation from the previous 10k lifetime views to 1k subs & 4k watch hours over 12 months. That was when I unsubscribed from Red and installed an ad blocker. I had always been anti ad-blocker because my view was that people creating content deserve to get paid for it. That’s still my view in principle, but the increasing enshittification of the web thanks in no small part to shit like this from Google has meant I weigh the pros & cons differently. YouTube showed me very directly that they don’t care about supporting their creators. So I decided I didn’t want to support them anymore. It’s not like this was the first problem…the whole “where’s the fair use” thing came before that, and many other events besides. But cutting off small creators like that, without even grandfathering in existing creators who had been monetised with that threshold, was the last straw for me.
It was also Google’s fault that I moved from Ad Block Plus, which I chose specifically because of its “acceptable ads” policy (basically: let through ads that aren’t obnoxious), to uBlock Origin, which lacked such a policy, after YouTube tried blocking ad blockers from YouTube, and UBO was quicker to adapt.
That’s twice now that Google’s own actions have directly led to me supporting them less than I used to. This won’t be the third time, but only because I have no more cuts to give.
YouTube became evil the moment we all dislike-bombed their year in review video and they never made another one.
YouTube became evil when google ditched their slogan "don't be evil!".
So, it was evil from the start. It just needed to lure enough uncritical consumers in before enshittification started. Piece by piece.
YouTube became evil the moment Google got involved.
Maybe but YouTube wouldn't have existed if it wasn't for the years Google paid for it with no monetization in sight.
It was doing just fine until Google bought it.
Uh. No it wasn't. Google footed the bill for years until they were able to make money on it. I'm not saying poor Google but to assume youtube would still exist without Google's cash is very unlikely.
YouTube wasn't created or owned by Google, originally.
This reminds me of some past employment positions I had with extremely lucrative companies that, upon several employees having pushed and developed their skills to be able to reach production quotas (despite increasing safety hazards), simply raised production standards to avoid paying what was promised (certainly not meeting the threshold of what workers are worth).
In short, if you are a content creator on YouTube, do it for the love of your hobby and make money with your day job.
The problem with this is that if you want to get any exposure you have to keep the algorithm happy and the algorithm wants consistent release schedules which means you'll always have that hanging over your shoulder and fucking up once means nobody will ever see your video in the sea of millions of other videos. It's an absolute meat grinder which is why so many channels fade out and why people try to do it full time.
Sure you can upload as a hobby but if people aren't watching it, why go through all the trouble?
All creators start out with zero viewers. That’s just something you have to do until you get traction
The same goes for bands and whatever else
If you can’t deal with that then don’t try
Yeah almost everybody starts from zero but the thing that boosts them up from that is typically the algorithm or 'winning the lottery' with some video that goes viral on other platforms. Imagine starting a band with your buddies for fun but you're forced to play shows every week at the local bar for no pay. If you don't see a return from that at some point, most would give up before long. I watch a lot of automotive youtubers who start out working on cars in their garage and a few have blown up big while most, at a certain point, just stop uploading or maybe upload once every 6 months before trying again and quitting again. Even ChrisFix with his tens of millions of subs has basically given up (though I think his situation is different where he can just coast off merch sales and revenue from past videos).
Very few experience a sudden burst I think. Most just grind untill one day they have a solid base
Of course most just give up at some point where they can’t tank it financially or mentally anymore
I think it's called vlogging. Like journaling, it can help yo look back at what worked for you and didn't, perhaps one day what didn't work will, when you catch something you missed, before. And there are legitimate other platforms, like PeerTube, but you're not guaranteed views there either, so again, for the love of your hobby.
More adds and less money for creators.... Where is money going? We all know.
On the flip side, I am genuinely curious how much storage and processing time all the AI slop being uploaded is costing them. Some of that stuff is hours long, and like most videos on YouTube, most people aren't watching it.
Why do so many people abbreviate adverts/advertisements to "adds".. where is the extra d coming from ?
If you watch adds, advertisers put their D where they want.
I'm with you there. When I see "adds", I want to know where they're coming from and who's going to tank them.
Ads, on the other hand, those I'm content with knowing my adblocker is taking care of it.
Today I went on shorts and the first video was tucker carlson dropping antisemtic slurs while he cried about ben shapiro. I'm a lib. I don't watch that garbage. straight up shithole company.
You're going to need to specify the alleged slurs. Too many people chalk shit like "Israel shouldn't get to murder children" as anti-semitism.
Tucker Carlson is a genuine old school European Nazi type anti-Semite.
He is a white supermaist so Jews are not the only group he want to supress. Muslims are the biggest target of remigration calls
Yes sure but the point is the way in which Carlson does antisemitism is the very traditional style, with the conspiracy theories about jews running the world and the charicatures and so on. Nazis famously didn't love other non white people either, I understand he has plenty of hate to go around. But he is a legit antisemite unlike most people who get called that these days.
Just like tucker spread conspiracies against Jews, he spread conspiracies against Muslims and other group. Can we stop putting a ranking on which type of racism is more important?
It's not about what racism is more important. Don't put words in my mouth. As if happens, in this moment anti Muslim hate is actually globally much more important than antisemitism but that has nothing to do with the point I'm making. Just talking about one thing doesn't mean it's more important than another thing. IMO it's quite meaningful to understand the various flavours of right-extremism, it explains a lot about the tensions between the various factions for example. There is currently substantial division on the right about whether to support Israel because they are killing Muslims or to hate them as well because they are Jews, and you may not care or want to think about that, it's perfectly valid, but the way it plays out will have serious political consequences and effects on the lives of many people
i don't even want to say it but I get ya and no, it was like a term nazis would use when referring to Jewish food. I just think it's so incredibly fucked up that the youtube's algorithm was pumping that vid while a million other vids exist. Unreal.
Big corp squeezing more money from people “because share holders want progress”. BS
Meanwhile, you set yourself up on PeerTube and add a Monero address to your tipping thing and people can tip you as soon as they want to, whether you have one view and less than a watch hour or billions of views and tons of watch hours.
and or Ethereum, Nano or XPR
Do you really want to use a surveillance chain though?
You can set up tipping links on youtube on day one as well.
And it has a much bigger pool of potential viewers.
Thank you for this suggestion.
I watch less YouTube than ever thanks to the sheerly ridiculous amount if ads.
Remember everybody. Get a vpn with a node in albania. Youtube cannot force a signin or display ads to people in albania.
Its really that simple.
Ads??
Yeah no kidding. Morphe is a blessing. Same with ublock.
Do you know where the option is in morphe to get the feed on the front page back? For some reason mine is blank suddenly and I don't know how to fix it
You should be browsing from your subscriptions. Youtube front page is just monetized slop, for discovery talk to your friends let them be the slop filter (or worst case reddit)
I don't have subs as I don't log into youtube, and it always just gave me an algo feed before based on what I usually watch. This happened once before but I don't remember how I fixed it. Maybe it just needs an update like armok suggested
Might I suggest trying to update the app, both the pre-patched one and the patches applied.
I think I did recently but I'll try again
I’m sure this will result in much less stupid useless shit on YouTube.
But stupid useless shit is also the most popular stuff on YT! 😔
Nice. Would be good to see youtube go away or go back to people making things for the love it.
Sadly, needing to regulate for CSA, etc. causes it all to get centralized. Also, it’d be great if everyone could self-host their content and then post the searchable in a fediverse indexing host or something?
Work for free before getting paid! There will still be ads on your videos, but they ain't sharing the attention money.
What is the best social media platform for niche content creators? I'm thinking of starting a small project for one of my hobbies but I'd hope to make at least enough to pay for my setup (mic, camera, etc.). Is that unrealistic?
I wouldn't count on it, my wife has been trying to the best of her abilities and at the limit of our financial reach...it's been 10 years so far, 20k on insta and recently picked up YouTube which was now getting close to getting paid pennies...but not anymore it seems.
You either have to get lucky or have the funds and means to keep pushing yourself into the system until you trip over success.
My wife had a single sponsor which paid her €20 per month but being sponsored by them led to her followers expecting her to behave like customer support 24/7.
She now has this co-op with a printer resin company where she gets a percentage of each sale...she made zero in the past 10 months of pushing the product.
At least she's happy for being able to share her interest and hobby with a fuckload of other people.
Like it or not, youtube still has the biggest audience and the best discovery algorithm (even with it's flaws).
And, even with this latest change, still pays better than other platforms.
Actually Nebula pays their creators better.
Sure but how do you get on Nebula?
As far as I know it comes from having an established YouTube presence first.
Yeah, unfortunately is the only way. If peertube worked with monetization it maybe would be a better place than youtube.
It's also a matter of audience. Part of what lets Nebula work at all is the built-in audience for the creators that are there. Same with droput.tv and c5.now and even means.tv.
Peertube will work better as more and bigger creators cross-post to it. Another challenge it faces though is scaling and yes, monetization since there's no subscription system through the platform by default.
Maybe peertube?
I mean, if you're not going to make any money, why not? At least you might get some patreon.
The problem is surfacing content. She's going to need to subtlely advertise on threads, insta and tt, but once their AI gets wind of that, they'll piledrive your engagement into the ground
Nothing.. I for some reason just simply don't think nowdays you can start out unless you want to make dogshit ragebait content that acts on the emotion of others..
If youre doing niche hobby stuff why are you even talking about monetization? This is for people who dont have a real job and trying to make it in youtubes version of hollywood.
I had a video of a newsworthy event a while back that went viral, and I made over 5 grand on it over the course of about 2-3 years when YouTube changed its monetization policy to require like 10k subscribers or something before the creator could monetize.
The video didn't stop getting views. It had a spike in views just a few weeks ago when something similar happened in the same area. But I haven't made any money from it in like 8 years.
I know nothing about how YT works. How is 20 million shorts views in 90 days a viable number? That seems ridiculous.
I guess they'll keep pushing it till the line starts going down.
Pichai you fucking banchode.
That's too bad. I was just about to start posting videos too.
Go PeerTube! We need more creators there, and some of the great ones are already on there
I do have an account! I try to follow as many creators as possible there.
I've been making shorts on Loops. I'm about to make my first 5 min+ video (although it'll be geared toward Japanese people).
Nice! Can't promise to follow you, but I'd like to know more about your content - that is, if you're willing to share!
Cool! I don't make anything on my Peertube account yet, but here's my loops account. I teach Japanese in English and French, and also English in Japanese! I'd appreciate it if you took a gander :)
Looks cute! In a very good way :)
Thank you!
There is way too much obvious AI channels on youtube. I encountered them because I like football. A football youtuber called Vizeh did a video about this issue. It is very exhausting to browse youtube this way. I am sick and tired of it.
I like the animated stuff like monkey wrench and lackadaisy and and my stories and the science and engineering videos and the sovcit public meltdown vids. I’m not sure where else to go for those. I don’t think I find as much on nebula and I’ve heard peer tube kinda has a never-grew-up vibe to it.
And they will continue to bleed talent for every ounce of value they can, just like the record industry, the movie and tv industry, the book industry, the video game industry, enshitification is an emergent property of a degree of value extraction.
For a second, I thought this required creators to watch 8000 hours of videos, and felt relief.
It would at least throw up an obstacle for bot/spam accounts. They’d have to make the effort of watching a bunch of videos.
…But no.
Consistently one of the worst paying social media services and not exactly in a generous market.
Good luck creating content, shittube
You can make money on YouTube without having a monetized account. But you can also make money on PeerTube in exactly the same way.
maybe youtube wants us to switch to torrents.
piracy? yes.
but they(youtube) honestly cant even afford to serve the content and remain profitable.
so....
What do people on you tube have to do with Torrents? Much less paying those people?
peertube
So you are saying the relationship is: we can create torrents to have our peer to peer videos without youtube. Similar to how peertube handles it.
That makes more sense.
Libraries should host the peoples internet.
get fucked, that's what you get from using google services
Jesus who watches this much yt? The only thing I watch are a couple of how to videos a month. It boggles my mind that people watch so much pure crap.
good. hopefully this will improve the quality for the first time in 14 years or so. Monetization is essentially synonymous with enshittification. Less monetization -> less enshittification. Less need to put stupid red arrows and bug eyes on your thumbnails. etc. I don't even care if youtube is just straight taking all the difference. Anything to decrease the number of people who are in it for the money is good.
I remember what people made videos for fun. Good times.
We still do.
I agree with you on quality, but I’d point out that YT is also requiring a lot of people to work for free.
Imagine if a mechanic’s boss told her they wouldn’t pay her until she changed the oil in 800 cars for free.
It's really not. No more than a casino is requiring you to roll dice and flip cards.
People can just... not host their shit on the site. Or not be in the influencer/content creator business entirely.
People are being baited into doing this work. People are being scammed and lied to about their prospects. But nobody is actually making you do this shit, much less do it for free.
She'd be crazy not to pick up and work somewhere else. Or hang her own shingle.
But that's the hitch with YouTube. It's not just not-paying-you. It's also hosting your media for free. What you're really trading on isn't revenue from YouTube, it's free hosting services. And then you need to monetize the content yourself, if you want to generate an income.
Case in point - Ms Rachel isn't getting rich off her (wildly popular) YouTube channel nearly so much as her toy line and her celebrity appearance fees. Similarly, guys like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones do commercial line reads right in the middle of their shows, fully independent of what YouTube injects. Adam Friedland and Justin Rozniak do paywalled episodes through Patreon. Mr. Beast sells shitty snack food.
Everyone who has made a living on YouTube has ultimately collected the bulk of that money from outside YouTube.
It's honestly insane and kinda selfish and self-defeating to say that the response to a bad situation is to just take your business elsewhere.
Like...we can't just write off everyone else's misery and suffering because you personally found a way to avoid it.
That is literally 99% of the world's problems and thank you for providing a brilliant example at the lowest moral stakes possible.
The degree of privilege required to even entertain making a living as a YouTube starlet is astronomical.
And, again, free video hosting and distribution! That's why 99% of people put videos in YouTube. You can host something and pass it around without needing a self-hosted solution to manage it.
That's the business model. It's not Netflix
In the beginning, YT was more like what you describe. It’s not anymore.
Where you are wrong is that it is Netflix now.
YT sees themselves as a competitor to Netflix. They have said this publicly. And Netflix is trying to compete with YT. They are actively managing it like Netflix without paying anyone for the “shows” that gets added to their streaming service.
Easy to say if you're not a creator.
I write, edit, record, and publish everything I create, all by myself.
Devaluing smaller creators is going to mean more AI slop, because more people will be motivated to take shortcuts.
And those who don't will probably quit. Creating authentic content and growing a channel takes time, and a lot more of it now.
Yes, that was my whole point. I want you to quit if you are trying to make money on youtube.
Patreon, Nebula, even Audible will give you a better cut of the proceeds.
Video slop is even less commercially viable than the audio, pictures, and literature.
Sora got yanked off the market inside a few months due to how badly it burned tokens for video nobody wanted to look at.
At a fraction of the audience
I see a lot of quality. And none of these people, even though a lot of them are pretty damn popular, will be making money anymore.
good