YouTube has grown immensely since its roots as a video repository before being acquired by Google. It now has 1.5 billion monthly active users and millions of channels where you can watch almost anything.
Thanks to the integration with Google assets, you can make money on YouTube. However recently, YouTube made a change where they required channels to have a minimum of 10,000 views to start earning money on the site. Now today, they have decided to announce more rules and they affect smaller channels than ever before.
“After careful consideration and extended conversations with advertisers and creators, we’re making big changes to the process that determines which channels can run ads on YouTube,” they said on the post.
YouTube will now require new channels to have 1000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watchtime within the past 12 months to be eligible for ads. That is not all, they will also check for other signals like strikes, spam or abuse flags to determine whether the channels are suitable for advertising.
YouTube says that these changes are geared to reward creators who make engaging content and prevents spammers from gaming the system. Although these changes will affect a significant number of channels, YouTube says that the creators who will remain in their YouTube Partner Program represent more than 95% of YouTube’s reach for advertisers. They will be enforcing these requirements for existing channels beginning February 20th 2018.
In addition, YouTube will now manually review channels included in Google Preferred and ads will only run on videos that have been verified to meet their ad friendly guidelines.
