YouTube Partner Program Lowers Eligibility Criteria for All But Adsense

[Ryuzaki]

Source: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/more-ways-for-creators-to-earn-on-youtube/

Normally to join the YouTube Partner Program (YPP), meaning you can monetize with ads, requires 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in 365 days. Then they tacked on Shorts and it was like 10 million Shorts views in 90 days.

Now they're dropping it to look like this:

(500 subscribers, 3 valid public uploads, and either 3k watch hours or 3M Shorts views)​

But this isn't a true monetization, it's more like a YPP Lite. What it gives you access to is an early unlock of basically every monetization feature except Adsense ads. You get:

• Channel Memberships​
• Super Chat​
• Super Stickers​
• Super Thanks​
• YouTube Shopping​

It's going to start rolling out to the US, UK, Canada, Taiwan, And South Korea, and then all other eligible countries over time.

YouTube also apparently has a shopping affiliate program where you can promote crap from big brands and those brands, YouTube, and you all get your cut. It looks like this on mobile. You've probably seen it on desktop before with the horizontal carousel under the video description.

​

The ONLY reason, in my opinion, to care about doing this is once you become eligible to show the Adsense ads, you don't need to get approved again. You'll just automatically be eligible I suppose whenever the cron job runs. This is a nice pre-approval that lets you know if your channel will be worth your time or if they'll decide you can't monetize, but you find out sooner rather than later after wasting too much time.

 

[Biggy]

I wonder why they lowered. My opinion is that they are not getting enough youtubers to do full time. As most gave up on their limit or greedy profit share Google/Youtube takes

 

[Ryuzaki]

I wonder why they lowered.

This is an interesting question. I had an interesting experience lately. In about two weeks time I consumed every video worth consuming on a specific topic, to the point where Youtube stopped promoting any more of them to me (after trying ones from India I couldn't understand). Which meant there were other topics I enjoy that were getting better user metrics and worth promoting over the worst of the other topic. So I went into the channels I was watching and scrolling through all their uploads and yeah, they just didn't seem good.

Which made me think two things: 1) Youtube isn't the bottomless pit it used to be. It is, but our standards and expectations as viewers have increased to the point where the endless amounts of low quality videos just aren't doing it for us any more, which ends up making like 99% of Youtube's library worthless to them and us. And also, their amazing recommendation engine is only recommending the worthwhile videos, which exposes just how few of those there are on any given topic.

I think Youtube is wide open for the plundering if you can really bring your A-game in terms of production, scripting, quality, and user satisfaction. Just like SEO... it doesn't take much to be in the top 10%, but so few ever put the dozens of puzzle pieces together and make it all click.