Ongoing YouTube Platform News

[Ryuzaki]

Profanity Update​

Cuss words are now allowed for full monetization again within the first 7 seconds of a video. This doesn’t mean that advertisers don’t have filters of their own to keep theirs ads away from the temporal proximity of naughty words, though, so it’s still a bad idea. Bad words in the title and thumbnail will still get you limited monetization.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Aside: YouTube has surpassed $100 billion in creator payouts. That's a lot of money!

Sponsored Segment Insertion​

On the Creator Insider video (embedded below) YouTube announced some things like being able to link out from Shorts to sponsors and other items like that, but the one that stuck out to me was...

Instead of having to burn in sponsored segments into your long-form videos, they're working on being able to trigger the insertion of a separate piece of video for those segments. The benefit here is you can remove them when a sponsorship expires, replace them with other sponsors at that point to re-earn for those videos, and whatever other creative ideas people will come up with.

That's great versus editing out those segments using the built-in editor in YouTube Studio, though I'd have negotiated higher terms to make them permanent, which I suppose most people do anyways. But here's the video if you're interested:

 

[Upsilon]

Seems like a lot of creators are having issues with YouTube nowadays because, presumably, YouTube changed how views work.

The reason for that is - again, presumably - because YouTube is not serving as many views as before with its algorithm shifting toward stricter AI moderation and a new “engaged views” system. Turns out this system hides more videos in restricted mode and only counts/watch-promotes views with interactions (likes, comments, shares), reducing overall visibility and reach.

Here is a video talking about it. He made follow up videos for anyone interested.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Seems like a lot of creators are having issues with YouTube nowadays because, presumably, YouTube changed how views work.

They definitely changed Shorts views to be impressions, and only in the dashboard can you find true views, which are "engaged views". They did this to have their view counts be more in alignment with how TikTok works, apparently.

But this recent rash of longform views going down... people had all kinds of theories. It's the AI child verification thing, it's restricted mode in overdrive, it's this and that. What it turned out is uBlock Origin blocked YouTube's specific URL that registers views into the system. This is why views went down but likes-to-views went sky high. It's also why revenue stayed the same but RPM went way up. Any metric surrounding views changed while revenue remained the same. You also see a drastic drop in Desktop viewers on this same day (August 13th or so, if I recall), because TV and mobile ad blockers aren't quite as easy to install.

But YouTube absolutely shifted the recommendations algorithm away from "news feed / recency bias" to try to surface more of the evergreen gold on the platform, which definitely will pull away from new users. This, combined with the push for new accounts to get some exposure, eroded a significant amount of real views (not just uncounted ad-blocked views).

If you go to YouTube with the intention of escaping algorithm nonsense from Google SEO, don't. It's the exact same rollercoaster going on over there.

 

[Ryuzaki]

YouTube is Doubling YPP Entry Stats​

On February 1st, 2027, the barrier to entry for monetization is increasing drastically as seen below:

Long-form is increasing from 4,000 to 8,000 watch hours. Shorts are increasing from 10M to 20M views and you have to maintain 10M in the past 90 days to stay monetized.

Of course, they make a claim of how 3 upcoming changes will be beneficial to everyone and they’ll pay out even more money to creators. Then they make this #3 in the video like that’s gonna reduce the reaction. But the reaction means nothing, it is what it is. You can watch the video here:

Just another way to fight spam, in the classic Google way of doing it. Makes sense, but it’s getting tougher and tougher.

 

[DanielS]

YouTube is Doubling YPP Entry Stats​

On February 1st, 2027, the barrier to entry for monetization is increasing drastically as seen below:

Long-form is increasing from 4,000 to 8,000 watch hours. Shorts are increasing from 10M to 20M views and you have to maintain 10M in the past 90 days to stay monetized.

Of course, they make a claim of how 3 upcoming changes will be beneficial to everyone and they’ll pay out even more money to creators. Then they make this #3 in the video like that’s gonna reduce the reaction. But the reaction means nothing, it is what it is. You can watch the video here:

Just another way to fight spam, in the classic Google way of doing it. Makes sense, but it’s getting tougher and tougher.

With this update I'd say screw the YPP. Just build channels from an affiliate/lead-gen perspective from day 1. Those requirements are way too high for the average channel. Can make way more from affiliate/coaching/etc. with those numbers than you can with Adsense.

 

[Ryuzaki]

YouTube to Change How Long-Form Views are Counted​

Starting 8/24/26 (9 days from the announcement), YouTube is aligning the rest of YouTube with Shorts of all things, which they changed to inflate view counts alongside TikTok, which also inflates view counts.

On Shorts, any impression (the video appearing and immediately being swiped away) became a view. An "Engaged View" became the monetizable view, which they keep a secret the amount that matters but the viewer must watch for "several seconds". Then there's Qualified Views for earning money which means a video can't be private or unlisted.

YouTube is now extending this to long-form video, which will look like this:

• Impression - A thumbnail appears on screen for over 1 second with 50% of the image on screen.
• View - Any time the first frame of the video plays. Even with mouse hovers on auto-play when you're just moving your mouse along. (This is retarded)
• Engaged View - When a video is watched for "several seconds."
• Qualified View - When a public video is watched for "several seconds."

The goal here seems to be clear in my mind. They want to equalize view counts for marketing purposes for direct comparisons against TikTok and Instagram who inflate views. They want to boast even higher view counts, period, for marketing and to shareholders I suppose. And they want to obfuscate public-facing metrics, for whatever reason but it doesn't seem to be an honesty or privacy related reason.

They way they sold this one is "It'll help you out with sponsors, because sponsors will be too stupid to know we made this change, despite the fact that you'll gain no competitive advantage because everyone's views are equally inflated."

Having fair marketing that normalizes their numbers against their competitor's numbers is fine, but stop trying to sugar coat it for the creators.

As an aside, I think the big shoe to drop is going to be, whether that happens soon or even in a few years, that long-form creators will have to start maintaining watch hour thresholds to stay monetized. Right now you just have to stay active in a 6 month period, and even posting a community post counts.

I can't even say that's bad to get rid of inactive people, though paying them for their past work can't be that big of a deal either, and is fair, if the videos are live and playing ads. But maintaining a threshold can be tough when the algorithm changes as much as Google's did/does. That's not something that's in the creator's control. And it wouldn't be hard to put your finger on the scale to demonetize honest creators who are trying to maintain the threshold. Might make the quarterly earnings look a little better. But you can only play that card once or twice before there's nobody left to shave off. And if the hurdle to stay monetized becomes so difficult and demoralizing... I'm just trying to understand where they're trying to go here.