YouTube to stop paying smaller content creators
If you’ve got fewer than 4,000 hours of watch time in the last 12 months or less than 1000 followers, bad news for you. You’re no longer eligible to earn any income off of videos. For those who make short videos and don’t spend time at the end of each video begging for followers, this means they’re most likely out of luck.
For your smaller blogs *cough* Pocketables *cough* this means a hit of maybe $150-300 a year in income. While not end of the world it’s one of those things that can actually pay for hosting and give one an excuse to actually continue on into either greatness or obscurity.
Here’s a cut and paste from what YouTube sent me
Under the new eligibility requirements announced today, your YouTube channel, Paul King, is no longer eligible for monetization because it doesn’t meet the new threshold of 4,000 hours of watchtime within the past 12 months and 1,000 subscribers. As a result, your channel will lose access to all monetization tools and features associated with the YouTube Partner Program on February 20, 2018 unless you surpass this threshold in the next 30 days. Accordingly, this email serves as 30 days notice that your YouTube Partner Program terms are terminated.
One of YouTube’s core values is to provide anyone the opportunity to earn money from a thriving channel. Creators who haven’t yet reached this new threshold can continue to benefit from our Creator Academy, our Help Center, and all the resources on the Creator Site to grow their channels. Once your channel reaches the new threshold, it will be reviewed to make sure it adheres to our policies and guidelines, and if so, monetization will be re-enabled.
A blog post here outlined why.
One of the things they claim is that 90% of the people being dropped from the program were earning less than $2.50 in the past month… yeah, not that low… so I’m at the top 10% of people getting kicked unless I can find someone to watch 654 hours of video on my channel in the next month or get 700 new subscribers. Meh.. Oh well. Maybe I’ll start talking extremely slowly from now on in an attempt to boost that viewing time by 55 hours a month.
Figured I should take my own advice and never trust Google for anything stable (including income). It was nice to pay for hosting of some of my side projects and have an app that just mostly worked.
Maybe the next thing they’ll do is actually remove the pirated movies within two months of reporting them… nah.
Anyway, for what it’s worth, lot of smaller YouTube channels are going to be hurting next month, so if you like them subscribe and if they’ve got less than 1000 followers know that they’re doing this because they like it, not for the $7.80 a month it used to pay ;)
