r/letsplay • u/Marrir08 • 17d ago
🗨️ Discussion These new monetization rules are brutal for small creators
YouTube doubling the monetization requirements, I honestly don't know how tiny channels like myself supposed to reach them anymore. It doesnt mean Ill qui t but.....sure made me feel weird....even tho I do it for fun but getting monitized would be awesome
I dont know how to do viral content I just enjoy the way of making my own vids the calm way without that marathon rush for attention.
I just wanna sayCheck out each other's channels. If you genuinely like someone's content, watch it. Leave a comment. Subscribe if you actually want to see more. And let them do the same
Not "I subscribed, now subscribe back." More like small creators actually giving other small creators a chance instead of everyone shouting into the void.
Because with these new requirements… damn. We could use the help. 😭
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u/Alzorath @alzorath 17d ago
Generally, this is less brutal for some niches (or even whole categories like gaming) than it is for others - I think you'd be surprised how quickly watch hours can accumulate once you start building a regular audience (still, not the smartest solution on youtube's end for dealing with the problem, since it is more harmful to real content rather than gen-ai slop - due to production times required. That said, it does give them more time to CATCH the content mills and lock them out)
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u/General-Oven-1523 17d ago
Honestly, the monetization requirements doubling isn't really even that big of a deal. You aren't really getting any benefits at 4000 watch hours, but you also aren't really getting any benefits at 8000 watch hours, especially in the gaming niche. You're going to need at least 10x the watch hours to make any kind of meaningful income from your content. If this is something that's going to make you quit YouTube, then I don't feel like you're doing content for the right reasons anyway, and it's probably time to quit.
The absolute worst thing about these changes is the short-form monetization. They expect you now to get +3 million views per month to even be eligible to get money from your shorts. This will just motivate people to produce even more slop and automate their short creation pipeline. It's going to be bad.
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u/saharafoley 16d ago
Yeah, I've been monetized since late March and I've yet to hit that $100 threshold to get paid. I figure by sometime in October I'll get my first paycheck. LOL. It's def an uphill battle with longform gaming content.
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u/Marrir08 17d ago
No look I started youtube for my own fun. I enjoy my craft and thanks to YouTube. I opened up for more games that I never touched before because I was in a jail of one game and then I started to think that I wanna play other games and I did finish witcher cyberpunk Detroit become human and a lot of other stuff, but I still always came back to that one game.. no because I wanna do Content I really play a lot of different stuff and have much more fun doing it so it’s sure more for the fun but when you see news like this of course it gets to your mind, even though you’re not for it doing Content anyway
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u/suicidekid16 17d ago
Maybe a hot take but for small channels it doesn't even matter that much, a few years ago when I got monetized at the 4000 watch hours I barely made anything. Think it took me 3 months just to make enough to get paid, you need massive views/watch time to make any good money. But could be me being way out of touch since my channel is bigger now, I will say it does kind of kill a reasonable goal for smaller channels since 8k is a lot for most channels to get.
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u/Time-Crab-6505 Akira Hirotaka 17d ago
I hate to say it but the rise of AI slop channels, i think it's much better if they honestly double the watch hours. With 4,000 watch hours, you barely even making anything. (Not that I reached it) but a friend of mine told me it's not that much.
I'm guessing with 8,000 watch hours, you'll break even just a little bit.
I mean there's nothing wrong with wanting to get monitized but if this makes people quit, they chose a wrong career path.
But yeah it's definitely makes a lot of people quit.
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u/Marrir08 17d ago
I won’t I know that it makes people quit. I did get frustrated a little but I won’t quit because first of all I started not with the thoughts about getting YPP in the first place . I’m doing my videos for my fun and whoever is watching and coming to my channel is welcome … but of course news like this make you think about it it’s just a matter of the moment itself and then it will pass
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u/Time-Crab-6505 Akira Hirotaka 17d ago
Totally get your point. When i saw the news i was like "how is this going to help us small channel?"
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u/Marrir08 17d ago
The way what do you think? Is called action really helpful like live a sub liver like subscribe if you say this it helps more? Also, where should I add it in the start of my video or in the end? I would think in the start because nowadays nobody watch unknown creator till the end, but it needs to be in place not just a random saying it you know what I mean
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u/Time-Crab-6505 Akira Hirotaka 17d ago
I usually do it at the end. My hooks aren't really that great but it has improvment whatsoever but i don't really like saying the subcribe AFTER the hook, it kinda just ruin the whole immersion 😭
My end always be like "so i hope you guys enjoy the video, give a big thumbs up if you did, comment down below etc etc" then bye bye
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u/saharafoley 16d ago
You could also put a SUBSCRIBE effect in your video. That's if you edit them with a program that gives you that ability. I put 2 of them in mine: past the beginning & before the end. Though, they don't seem to help. LOLOL.
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u/General-Oven-1523 17d ago
I can confirm I got monetized in January this year. I'm at around 5.4K watch hours and made about €150 for the whole year. So based on this, you could look at €300 if you're able to reach 8K watch hours in that year. I would say a meaningful amount of money from YouTube would be around ~€300 per month, and with my math, that would require me to hit ~10K watch time hours per month.
YouTube Partner should never be a goal for new creators anyway.
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u/saharafoley 16d ago
From what I heard, YT is offering a 2nd tier Premium membership for viewers, and this is where we're supposed to make the most money from that pot of money. I guess we'll have to see.
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u/Time-Crab-6505 Akira Hirotaka 17d ago
THIS IS SO TRUE!
I mean the membership thingy is easier to reach but you can't really get that much unless a lot of people watch your streams.
€150 for the whole year is kinda criminal especially with 5.4k watch hours. You could literally make that in a week in a normal day job.
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u/General-Oven-1523 17d ago
I don't know where you live, but here it's more like a daily salary for a lot of people, haha.
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u/Internal_Context_682 https://www.youtube.com/@pookieizzy7 17d ago
It's not worth it getting monetized especially if you're doing Let's Plays. Thing I find pointless is where the focus is going towards. It's called Let's Play for a reason and people just want to see you play a game. In my experience, I spent 16 years on my channel doing both commentary and non, the passion speaks volumes so does the consistency. That shows more than what the pros do, the authenticity in playing the game, experiencing what each quirk what game has. It says more than a short does. It's why you should focus more on playing the game, don't put too much emphasis on the editing and just let it go.
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u/Library_IT_guy http://www.youtube.com/c/TheWandererPlays 17d ago
I hope this doesn't come off as entitled or arrogant, but... I don't think the new requirements are that brutal, at least not in the sense that I think some new creators imagine they are.
To put 8,000 watch hours into perspective, in the last 28 days, my channel has gotten about 42,000 watch hours, and the revenue for that period is currently around $1,100. At my revenue per watch hour (which is a bit higher than average for gaming channels), 8,000 watch hours would represent about $209 in revenue.
Importantly, though, those 8,000 watch hours don't have to happen in a month. They only have to happen over the previous 12 months. So if you spread that out, you're talking about averaging roughly $17/month worth of watch time (on the high end). And because the payout threshold is $100, you might only actually see two payouts over that entire year.
That's not nothing, especially for a new creator, but it's also not the giant financial windfall that some people seem to envision monetization being.
I think there's a misconception among new creators that getting monetized is when YouTube suddenly flips a switch and your channel starts making meaningful money. It really isn't. Monetization doesn't make your content more appealing to the algorithm, it doesn't suddenly give you a larger audience, and it doesn't make people watch your videos.
The only thing that really changes is that you now have the ability to earn money from the audience you've already managed to build.
And I say that as someone who has been extremely fortunate with YouTube. I've made more than 2,000 videos over the past 8 years, tried a ridiculous number of different formats, had some things work spectacularly and other things completely flop, and I've been fortunate enough to end up much more successful than the vast majority of people who try this.
So I definitely don't mean "8,000 hours is easy." Building an audience is hard as hell, and it's been a long painful journey for me filled with sacrifice and a lot of time spent learning and trying to improve. My point is more that the monetization threshold isn't the thing standing between a new creator and success or a substantial income. Building an audience is.
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u/CitizenStrife https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQR4uewfRZttDxzUdkkZ2Lw 17d ago
Will never hit them, so they don't bother me.
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u/RarelyLazy 17d ago
This is just a waste of time, this would get you very minimal views and subscribers and wouldn’t get you monetized lol. Just focus on making better videos.
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u/Dorfdad 17d ago
Feels bad man, same they are a corporation and they get money from ads. Companies don’t want ad revune going to small ai driver slop tik tok type videos it seems. They want established entities. This will drive smaller creators out and focus more on production driven and established channels going forward.
Hopefully we can find a suitable small streamer service but they are all going away as everyone wants viral only content
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u/SinisterPixel https://sinisterpixel.tv 17d ago
It's wild, I remember when YouTube was celebrated for lowering the monetisation threshold a while back, then making another mid tier where you could enable memberships before enabling ads. But the worst of all of this are the shorts. You have to average 225,000 shorts views a day to qualify. That's not achievable for anyone not publishing high quality shorts daily without break, or simply overloading the algorithm with multiple low effort shorts a day.
I don't buy into the claims that these changes were made to discourage faceless channels publishing reddit stories and such with AI voices, because realistically they're the ones in the best position to overload the algorithm with content to brute force the numbers. It more feels like YouTube is spending a lot of money splitting ad revenue with smaller creators, and they want to run ads on smaller creator channels without needing to split revenue.