YouTube Is Making It Harder For Their Creators to Earn Money

While OnlyFans is busy turning 5,000+ people into millionaires, creators on YouTube are gonna have to work a bit harder for their money. 

YouTube (worth an estimated $400 billion) has decided its creators have it too easy, and they’re revamping the thresholds at which their users can start making money. Just a few weeks ago, the company announced creators wanting to make a profit from their content will need at least 8,000 “qualified watch hours” in a 365 day period, or 20 million “Shorts” views within the previous 90 days. “Shorts” are, well, short videos designed by YouTube for users with shorter attention spans. YouTube allows plenty of long-form content, too, but they use Shorts as a way for users to upload the same short-form content one might see on apps like Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.

The platform is also separating Shorts income from income earned on regular videos. Dubbed the Shorts Creators Pool, YouTube creators are expected to maintain 10 million Shorts views over 90 days to earn money there. Creators will see no Shorts Creators Pool revenue if this isn’t happening, even if they’re making money from long form content. 

As of now, YouTube users attempting to monetize their content need a minimum of 1,000 subscribers, 4,000 “watch hours” within a year, or 1,000 subscribers and 10 million plus Shorts views in a 90 day period. The platform says these changes will take effect February 1st of 2027. 

YouTube claims they’re making these adjustments to “keep pace with the growth of YouTube, which now sees over 200 billion daily Shorts views and over a billion hours of watch time on TV” daily. 

YouTube is also not the only platform altering their monetization standards. Just recently, Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) announced they’re changing their “Revenue Sharing” program in an attempt to reward original content creators. They’re calling it “Original Content Rewards”, trying to redistribute funds away from “clickbait” accounts (who currently make a killing off other people’s work) and towards original creators. 

Additionally, Facebook launched a new program aimed at getting more TikTok and YouTube creators to earn money on the platform. Calling it the “Creator Fast Track”, Facebook is offering guaranteed pay and reach for popular creators from TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. The program can earn these creators about $1,000 a month so long as they fit the following guidelines: creators must have at least 100,000 followers on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube. If creators have over a million followers on any platform, creators are eligible to make $3,000 a month. Facebook also announced surprising numbers last fiscal year, giving nearly $3 billion in revenue to creators on the platform. 

Ironically, OnlyFans is no giant company like Meta or ByteDance, yet they’ve still paid their creators more than any of these companies. Data released by OnlyFans just recently revealed that over 5,000 of their nearly five million creators on the platform are now millionaires thanks exclusively to OnlyFans. Turns out no one needs complex creator monetization programs secretly designed to give large platforms more traffic. A 20% cut of every transaction is all OnlyFans needs to keep growing, while giving their creators a place to do the same.