https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72851
On January 16, 2018, we announced new eligibility requirements for the YouTube Partner Program. Once a channel reaches 4,000 watch hours in the previous 12 months and 1,000 subscribers it will be reviewed to join the program.
The previous requirements for eligibility into the program was just 10,000 views. I personally never bothered to become a partner since I never had any intentions of monetizing anything on my channels; as I noted before, I merely used it to share stuff with friends or videos for this blog (with little effort done except a few transitions).
I do realize the negative impact this has on smaller creators who are now currently partnered since many may not have the subscriber numbers. The 4,000 watch hours (over the prior 12 months) is also going to be a challenging metric for many to reach (especially if it relies on the same algorithms that YouTube uses for its other analytics based functions) because that means you can’t just fudge the system by “viewbotting” videos in order to automatically drive up views or watch times. YouTube uses multiple algorithms to come up with what it vaguely calls “quality views”.
Using my small channel as an example, it currently has 143K views and around 164 watch hours (over the last 30 days). I keep sub counts private. The average view duration is around 2.5 minutes per video. It’s relatively easy to do the math to figure out how much more watch time (which naturally will fluctuate) is needed on a video to meet the 4k hours (over the prior 12 months). The watch hour metric is meant to drive compelling content that large number of viewers will watch mostly all the way through.
That type of video content requires putting in actual production work on top of coming up with content that prospective viewers will spend time actually watching. This is the uphill challenge these folks will be faced with for that metric.
I see some smaller creators running a sub-for-sub campaign but all that gets you is subscriber numbers. That still has to translate into actual watch time on videos that YouTube’s algorithms do not see as “machine botted” views (and where a greater than 70% of that clip is viewed). To put this into simpler language, small creators already find it challenging to get actual views on many of their videos. They are going to have to work much harder now with these new eligibility requirements to meet and maintain the watch hour metric.
So what spurred YouTube to make this change?
As per their Content Creator blog:
We’re making changes to address the issues that affected our community in 2017 so we can prevent bad actors from harming the inspiring and original creators around the world who make their living on YouTube. A big part of that effort will be strengthening our requirements for monetization so spammers, impersonators, and other bad actors can’t hurt our ecosystem or take advantage of you, while continuing to reward those who make our platform great.
Which is baloney given the recent Logan Paul controversy where one of their own top creators was given what amounts to a slap on the wrist not just for the Aokigahara video, but his other racist inspired antics. That’s the kind of drama, trash and douchebaggery YouTube looks the other way with while screwing over many smaller creators looking to make a breakthrough. This change makes it that more difficult to accomplish unless they go down the route of the sensationalist style vlogging to get the kind of numbers that YouTube now wants.
Alternatives?
To be frank, a new YouTube alternative platform isn’t going to work. It’s just far too costly (bandwidth being one of them) to come even close. There was a time over 10 years ago when there were a lot of sites; some old stalwarts still exist (Dailymotion, Metacafe, and Veoh for example) though I don’t believe any have a viable monetization system for creators. Many others (Revver, ViddYou, Viddler, Vreel) have since consolidated, been bought out, or closed. Vimeo is also one of the few survivors but they went with a very different business model and demographic.
Twitch might be an alternative for some (since they have been working on their upload “beta” as well having other categories besides gaming including IRL and creative). I still standby my past assertions that search on Twitch is still horrible and it too suffers from prioritizing their larger partners over the smaller caster.
Still other small creators are looking at using Facebook or Instagram; neither of which I consider viable alternatives because video is not a huge focus so it suffers from the ability to search and even categorize content.
It’s easy for an already established content creator to say this is actually a good thing since it will prevent the clone style accounts from trying to steal content to quickly monetize a few bucks here and there (again not as simple and straightforward based on what I wrote about before). Sure, those folks also started from the bottom BUT that was a different time when the platform did not have the numbers it has now nor the advertising clout. It’s easier to carve out a niche on a new platform then it is to come in today, and expect to try and get your own signal out over others who are trying to do the same.
YouTube’s approach is going to continue to favor their biggest creators because that nets them the most money (given their percentage take of the revenues).
