YouTube doubles the bar for joining its Partner Program from February 1
New creators will need 8,000 watch hours or 20 million Shorts views to start earning, and existing partners get upload quotas of their own next year.
Anyone still working toward their first payout on YouTube is about to need roughly twice as much of everything. Starting February 1, joining the YouTube Partner Program will require at least 1,000 subscribers and either 8,000 qualified watch hours over the past year or 20 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days. The current thresholds are 1,000 subscribers with 4,000 watch hours over the past year, or 1,000 subscribers with 10 million Shorts views over the past 90 days.
Creators already inside the program keep their status, and YouTube says the update won't affect them. There is a catch on the Shorts side: existing partners may lose revenue sharing from Shorts if they fall under 10 million views.
That is part of a wider split. YouTube is separating how ad money is earned across long-form video and Shorts, so clearing one threshold no longer qualifies a creator for both, and earning on Shorts means continuing to hit minimum Shorts targets.
Current partners get maintenance rules next year too: they will have to hold either 1,000 watch hours each year or 1 million Shorts views, and posting two long-form videos or five Shorts every 90 days keeps a channel in good standing with the program. Go six months without uploading anything and YouTube will remove the channel from the program.
The company frames all of this as keeping pace with its own scale, citing over 200 billion daily Shorts views and more than a billion hours of watch time on TV every day.
The sweetener is on the subscription side. YouTube is expanding Premium Lite to all countries where it offers YouTube Premium, and creators take a share of that subscription revenue based on member watch time and views, split 55% to long-form video creators and 45% to Shorts creators. In its blog post the company argued that more Premium Lite subscribers should mean higher payouts, because partners on average earn more when a user signs up for Premium than when that same user was watching ads.
The headroom is real if the pitch works. YouTube has reported 125 million paid users across both tiers globally, while Engadget puts the platform's subscription-free audience at nearly 2.7 billion people each month.
Published by Techtutka ·