Of course it does. That shit platform is newly entirely AI now.

What’s with the editorialised title? How do these changes make it harder for new creators?

Beginning February 1, 2027, creators who have 10 million qualified Shorts views over the last 90 days will be eligible for ads and subscription revenue sharing on Shorts.

3.3 million views a month isn’t exactly new creator levels

It's not a new requirement, tho. 10M Shorts views over 90 days is already one of the requirements to enable monetization in the first place.

It doesn't. This is just adding more money to creators who reach certain tiers of engagement. This doesn't make it any harder for new channels to earn.

The change that made it harder for new channels happened years ago, back in 2018 after the adpocalypse fallout when they increased the watch time requirements and removed a bunch of channels from YPP.

New creators applying for YouTube Partner Program (YPP) will need 8,000 qualified watch hours in the last 365 days, or 20 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days.

Old requirements for comparison:

1,000 subscribers with 4,000 watch hours in the past year or 10 million Shorts views in the past 90 days.

YouTube is a monopoly, they can get away with it

That’s why I pay for Nebula. Others should too, or for other similar platforms that support creators more directly.

Its owned by google/aphabet so the cancer now spreads down the tree.

The anti-ai pushback probably runs afoul of plans to replace some creators with AI talking heads.

Sometimes I wonder if YouTube realizes they only exist BECAUSE of the creators.

my dude, most companies are not entirely sure what their workers are for

Ain’t that the truth.

I work in the international department of my company, a while back our VP of international flew in for a site visit. We had to explain some pretty basic concepts to him to help him understand what we did.

YouTube also knows it has a monopoly.

They are probably hoping YT will be nothing but bots so they don’t have to pay anyone

I hate how true this is.

maybe they want to save storage costs, generate videos from AI prompts instead of storing 4k video files

I subscribed to YouTube Red back in the day, when that’s what it was called.

Then circa early-to-mid 2018 they changed the rules for monetisation from the previous 10k total 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 even 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.

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.

This is bullshit. 4000 hours of watch time was already a near impossible goal for new channels, especially after the past year’s UI and algorithm changes. Now they want twice that?!?

It’s theft. Even if you only have 100 views, you should be eligible for a cut of the profits you generated with your content.

The market is dying for a new competitor to come in and disrupt their monopoly

As someone who is currently monetized with 5000 watch hours in the past year, I’m super mixed on this. On the one hand, I’m only making like 30 bucks per month, basically nothing, so I can see how YouTube would want to reduce overhead. On the other hand, that $30 bucks per month is a nice little bonus. I’d still be creating without it, but it is nice to have, and, YouTube already doesn’t pay out until you hit $100, so that oughtta reduce most of the overhead. It seems like it’d be a better solution to just raise that to a $200 minimum or something. You’re probably right, it might just be greed.

Putting ads on these creator’s videos AND not paying creators is wild though, no matter how small the channel is.

Side note: Am I at risk of becoming un-monetized?? I know it’s possible.

Side note the second: I host my own instance of PeerTube for my videos - joeltube.com

The problem is infrastructure costs. You’re either spending a metric shit ton of money on hardware or you’re spending a metric fuck ton of money on renting it.

I bet part of that is to avoid paying out the ai slop shit channels that they have enabled and welcomed, it’s probably trivial for most of them to pump so much slop that they can reach those numbers in a month.

Either that, or they’re looking to fully kick out actual humans from trying to join unless they’re really determined to wade through the bullshit.