YouTube imposes new creator monetisation restriction

Smaller YouTube channels will as of today find it harder to generate revenue from their content .

The Google owned network has announced a change to its partner program, which until now allowed even new users of the service to immediately start monetising their content. As of now, however, creators will not be able to activate monetisation until they’ve hit a minimum of 10,000 lifetime views on their channel.

The change will not affect revenues earned on channels with less than the required views before today’s change.

The move is supposedly designed to combat the practise of users uploading content created by others and claiming revenue for themselves. However, by restricting the number of monetised channels, it will also lessen the chances of brands finding themselves unwillingly aligned with hate speech or racist content, as is a very hot issue for YouTube at the moment.

Today, more creators are making a living on YouTube than ever before. However, with this growth we’ve started seeing cases of abuse where great, original content is re-uploaded by others who try to earn revenue from it,” VP of product management Ariel Bardin said.

To help protect creator revenue, we recently made it easy for anyone to report an impersonating channel. To date, this change has helped us terminate hundreds of thousands of channels violating our policies. Now, we’re taking another step to protect creators by updating the thresholds required to join the YouTube Partner Program.

This new threshold gives us enough information to determine the validity of a channel. It also allows us to confirm if a channel is following our community guidelines and advertiser policies. After a creator hits 10k lifetime views on their channel, we’ll review their activity against our policies. If everything looks good, we’ll bring this channel into YPP and begin serving ads against their content.”