Congratulations, YouTube just made it even harder to make money on their platform

YouTube made an announcement some hours ago about a change that affects content creators. Under the new guidelines, beginners and small-time YouTubers will have to have a lot more subscribers and a lot more watchtime hours per year.

Today we are announcing changes to the YouTube Partner Program (YPP). While our goal remains to keep the YPP open to as many channels as possible, we recognize we need more safeguards in place to protect creator revenue across the YouTube ecosystem.

What’s changing? Under the new eligibility requirements announced today, your YouTube channel, [insert your channel name here], is no longer eligible for monetization because it doesn’t meet the new threshold of 4,000 hours of watchtime within the past 12 months and 1,000 subscribers. As a result, your channel will lose access to all monetization tools and features associated with the YouTube Partner Program on February 20, 2018 unless you surpass this threshold in the next 30 days. Accordingly, this email serves as 30 days notice that your YouTube Partner Program terms are terminated.

This comes after some some big content creators did stupid things, so they pretty much decided to punish the entire community. Last year they introduced the “10,000 lifetime views” target for people to stay in the monetization program, which many smaller accounts managed to solve, but the new guidelines will either crush the hopes of smaller YouTubers to monetize their content, or create a horde of spammers.

Another problem I foresee the possibility of YouTube monetizing certain videos that the uploader can’t.

Personally, I only participated in the program just to see if I could make any money at all, but I stopped uploading content a long time ago.

While not everyone will jump ship, I can see how this will probably make some people leave to other platforms, or just come up with Patreon accounts.