YouTube Increases Requirements to Unlock Monetization
Posted on August 13, 2026 by Aywren
Just after I talked a little bit about my adventures with YouTube this year, and my quiet hopes to maybe one day earn a little bit from my work, YouTube drops the bomb on all small channels by increasing the requirements to unlock monetization in the future.
Currently, you need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watched video time for the past 365 days as a long-form video creator to reach this mark. If you make shorts, you need 10 million views over the past 90 days.
As someone starting out and exploring this option, this was already quite a hurdle to overcome.
Well, YouTube announced that as of February 1, 2027, these numbers are going up. Like way up.
Seems like the 1,000 subscribers is staying the same, but they doubled the number of watch hours for long-form video to 8,000. For shorts, it seems like you now must consistently maintain views over the past 90 days, or your shorts will become demonetized.
Now, I didn’t start my channel with the idea of making money from it. But video creation is a huge time sink and I’d be fibbing if I said that getting something in return for the work I put into the channel is something I’d turn down.
I was already wondering where in the world I’d get 4K hours viewed from as a tiny channel. I’ve hit a little over 900 hours in the past two and a half months. Unless the momentum really picks up, I don’t see myself breaking the threshold before the monetization changes go into effect.
And that’s just a little discouraging.
They say the reason they’re doing this is to “ensure that YPP continues to be the leader in the creator economy by meaningfully rewarding active creators”. I’m curious if they’re indicating that some folks who are already partners are just skating by on an inactive library of videos from the past. Hard to tell.
All I know is that the folks going to struggle with this the most are the ones already struggling to become monetized in the first place. Those are the people who are already putting a lot of time and effort into growing a channel and trying to be successful.
I’m not sure if something has changed overnight due to this announcement, but I do know that YouTube has not boosted my newest video anywhere near as much as the previous two, which did really well for my channel’s standards. In fact, the one I released two days ago is performing extremely poorly, almost back to the standards of my very first video, despite having built up a small subscriber base since then.
It certainly sounds like “make a YouTube channel” may not be a viable means of establishing a little income from the net going forward. It was already pretty tough to do before unless you got really lucky. Going forward, it’ll be even more difficult.