Google's YouTube Changes Monetization Rules For Creators

[engine]

These are significant changes for creators.

Google's YouTube has made big changes to monetization for creators. In the past, creators needed to reach 10,000 views to become eligible for the Youtube Partner program.
That's no longer the case as of right now.

new channels will need to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time within the past 12 months to be eligible for ads. We will begin enforcing these new requirements for existing channels in YPP beginning February 20th, 2018.

In addition, when a creator receives "three community guideline strikes" Google will remove the users' accounts and channels from YouTube.

Google will be manually reviewing Google Preferred by mid-February in the U.S. and by mid-March everywhere else.

It'll also be introducing a three-tier suitability system which Google says, allows advertisers to review and reflect of appropriate brand placements.

Google is also working with trusted vendors for third-party brand safety reporting to help avoid some of the challenges it had last year.

We're currently in a beta with Integral Ad Science (IAS) and we're planning to launch a beta with DoubleVerify soon. We are also exploring partnerships with OpenSlate, comScore and Moat and look forward to scaling our third-party measurement offerings over the course of the year. Google's YouTube Changes Monetization Rules For Creators [adwords.googleblog.com]

[scottb]

I have read the average channel has about 5 subscribers for every video uploaded. That means a channel needs 200 videos to reach 1,000 subscribers.

If a 2-minute video takes 5 hours of work (that's my average), it means a producer needs to work 1,000 hours JUST to re-apply for monetization, hope for approval and then hope for enough revenue to make it worthwhile.

I can't see how YouTube is encouraging new publishers with such a high standard. A lot of existing small channel producers will give up.

[engine]

Exactly, scottb, this is bad news, especially for smaller creatives.

[RhinoFish]

We allow the scammers to run amuck, which usually punishes the little guy.

They need to police the person, not just the YouTube videos.
A bouncer outside is way more effective than a bouncer inside the 30,000 attendee party.

Manually reviewing videos, ughh.
Make people deposit $500 per YouTube account, and a keep a monthly billable ($1) credit card on file, watch the cockroaches scurry away.

They keep trying to scale their policing of videos.
Do that, but police the uploaders as well, it scales better.

I just hate seeing the little guy / gal getting pinched here - the scammers are usually big operations.
Something so wrong about all of this.
Our tech future is supposed to be very egalitarian!

[mack]

You could see this as bad news especially for smaller creators, and it is. To be honest I have never focused on getting subscribers. I was always able to generate views regardless, but YouTube is now classing subscriber count as a matrix or measurement of "quality". I can kinda see why, but I don't entirely agree with it.

Creators are always saying you should not do it for the money, but many do! And many approach YouTube as a business idea. People who have such an idea will now have their work cut out just to gain access to the YPP.

I think this will work out very well for larger publishers.Advertisers will still be spending as they are now, but the lions share will be getting distributed to a much smaller pool of YouTubers. I suspect some big names will be seeing a sizable increase in their CPM.

I just see it as a challenge to now learn how to generate new subscribers. and create content that draws traffic at the rate I need. On paper I know what I need, just need to make it happen :-)

Mack.

[Swanny007]

So... the focus will now be quantity over quality for people trying to get views & subs? I suppose it has been that way for a lot of people anyway.

For the record, my small personal channel got 8K views in the last year but I only have 700 subs. Will be at least a year until I can monetize my vids again. I will still upload. We're only talking two digits of profit per month but I'm still bummed!

[McMohan]

With ton of services that "Sell" subscribers and views, how is Google going to police that?

[glitterball]

I have several YouTube channels, some of which meet these new criteria and others that don't.
I can't help feeling that I'm being punished for dividing my videos up by category - and I have never gone after subs.
Also, if Google can have a "three community guideline strikes" against a user (rather than a channel), why can't they just apply the new rules to a user's total rather than a single channel?

Frankly, it seems pretty obvious to me that the motivation behind this is to reduce Google's excess ad space inventory so that they can shore up advertising prices. Surely the EU need to step in now against this blatant market manipulation?

[keyplyr]

I received the email from Google telling me my Adsense income from my YouTube videos would no longer be included in my total monthly check.

I have nowhere near the new criteria. Don't think I generated too much from them anyway. As long as they don't tell me they're removing my videos, I don't care. I only "monetized" them because I found the link one day :)

[radix]

Does the new policy mean that ads won't be shown over the videos upped by those who drop out of the program?

[scottb]

Swanny007, my small channel gets 10,000+ views a month, meets the new standard for watch time and is growing more than 100% a year. But it has only 125 subscribers because it's a regional travel channel.

People use travel videos for one-time advice for a vacation. They don't subscribe as much as they do to other topics.

So channels that follow the rules are getting thrown out along with the junk. Just like smaller websites that follow Google's SEO rules.

[glitterball]

Swanny007, my small channel gets 10,000+ views a month, meets the new standard for watch time and is growing more than 100% a year. But it has only 125 subscribers because it's a regional travel channel.

In the same boat: over 30,000 views per month for my regional travel channel, but less than 300 subscribers.

And we need to stop the pretence about quality. My most successful video (on another channel) has 8 figure views and it is the worst and lowest quality video that I ever uploaded to YouTube. Other videos that took months to create, and a lot of money, have less than 10,000 views.

[glitterball]

There is now a change.org petition to try to stop this:
[change.org...]

[scottb]

Thanks for the link, Glitterball. I signed it and posted it on YTtalk.com.

[Naijasturf]

I was shocked when I saw this update from Google, but I hope they gonna pretty change the T&C else they would lost so many YouTube users.

[RhinoFish]

Viewers will lose breadth of content too, a steep price to pay for a few bad apples.

[tangor]

It's all about the money. G's, not yours. :(

From a secondary (tech) point there's good reason to reduce the number of "creators". Even with clouds and cash and all that, there are finite limits on what one can store, much less police.

[glitterball]

Another motivation for this is to increase the share of advertising revenue that the most popular YouTube stars will receive - by culling ad slots from the great unwashed. They are probably thinking defensively and want to increase revenue to their home-grown stars to prevent off any future competing platforms from poaching them.

[engine]

They've certainly set the bar high, and too high, imho.
It won't stop someone from breaking the rules and doing something that common sense would tell them not to do it. Common decency and taste often don't come into it until it's too late.
It will boot them out of the program.

Many of the creatives with much smaller numbers might just be better, so i'm not sure the rules actually allow for better to rise through.

[glitterball]

The thinking does seem to demonstrate that the powers at YouTube believe that Vloggers are what YouTube is all about.
Obviously most high quality content (that has a great deal of money and effort put in) does not do as well as the likes of Pewdiepie.

That's why I have come to the conclusion that this is designed to foster YouTube stars rather than those that make videos with an educational or reference value. The channels that youtube push to me on their homepage are nearly all Vlogs now as well.

I must admit that I hate vlogs - even if the subject matter is of interest to me (Photography or Video production), I really couldn't give a crap about their daily lives and all the other padding that they need to include in order to bang out 2 videos per week.

[ByronM]

"Sanboxing" new content creators seems to be googles way of forcing pay to play. They do it with search (even though everyone swears it doesn't) and now they do it with youtube. Guess it's a good thing we didn't give Google Plus any traction.

It's not about too much ad inventory and wanting to raise prices, it's about forcing advertising to be the only growth funnel there is.

[Swanny007]

I eventually unsubscribe from *all* vloggers. I can't stand the daily "fluff" to get one good nugget of info, or one good helpful or relevant video per week. So sad the vloggers are being rewarded even more. Sigh.

I intend to continue what I've always done which is upload videos I want to do, until February 20. At that point I will lose partner status and I will cease uploading videos until my channel slowly and naturally reaches 1K subs. I may upload something now and again, but it won't be for at least a month or three. I will also unsubscribe from and really big YouTubers and watch less, for a month or two, at least. If enough people do something similar, Google will see the impact. One guy, they couldn't give a hoot about... especially when you're not giving them money.

[keyplyr]

With both Chrome 64 & Chrome Mobile 64 I am now* being asked if I want to use the adblocker on YouTube videos, for some videos displaying ads.

These are the usual small banner ads on the YouTube videos.

*this started earlier today: [webmasterworld.com...]

[glitterball]

Another added benefit for YouTube is that they will probably never have to pay the current balance that the soon-to-be-cutoff YouTubers have accrued up until now, since the total balance will be under the Adsense payment threshold. That should add up to quite a bit!

[OurBigAdventure]

I think Google is trying to get out of having to review content before showing ads on it so they are going back to their original search engine idea of using incoming links, only this time it's subscriptions. They must have done some sort of spot checking to see that 1000 was a magic number that advertisers wanted.

[too much information]

You don't need a petition to make Google change this policy, just spread the word for all YouTubers to unsubscribe from everything. No subscribers anywhere means no ad revenue for anyone including Google.

Afraid of losing your favorite channels? Just bookmark them instead.