posted in Technology
YouTube now requires creators to have twice as many watch hours to start earning money
techcrunch.com/2026/08/10/youtube-now-requires-creators-to-have-twice-as-many-watch-hours-to-start-earning-money/
At this point I’m convinced that yt just hates smaller creators.
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.