8,000.

YouTube has made one of its biggest changes to its partner requirements for a while.

If you want to be part of the YouTube Partner Program, the means by which you are eligible to earn advertising and Premium revenue from your videos, there are two requirements to meet: you need a certain number of subscribers, and you need a certain amount of either watch time on long-form video or views on shorts.

For years the amount of subscribers has been 1,000 and the amount of watch time has been 4,000 hours over a rolling 365 day period. (Shorts is a completely different game to the one I understand so I'm ignoring it.)

For most small creators, the subscriber milestone comes naturally through building a solid base of enthusiasts, but the watch hours is a long struggle of trying to regularly capture enough new and casual viewers for long enough to get those hours. With it being a rolling target, it's easy for one of those early breakout hits to fall out of the window before you've been able to capitalise on it with a follow-up. A lot of small creators find themselves sat at around 3,600-3,800 without any obvious way to bump up that number.

YouTube have just announced that they're doubling that number to 8,000.

The rationale is surprising. Most would expect them to make some sort of statement about AI channels, rewarding genuine human connection, that sort of thing. But no. YouTube straight up say in their announcement what amounts to, "more people are watching YouTube for longer, it's become too easy to become partner, so we're upping the requirement".

What also interests me in this is that while YouTube have not amended the rules for dropping out of the Partner Program (you need 8,000 hours per year to get in, but only 1,000 per year to stay in) they have added an extra option for staying in the programme even if you're not meeting the watch hours requirement. That is to upload at least two long-form videos per 90 days.

Now, that is an additional get out of jail card and not a hard requirement; if you're one of the HBomberGuys of this world seeing millions of views per year on a four hour video then YouTube is not exactly wagging its finger telling you to upload more frequently. But from a company that has been typically cagey on revealing what it considers a "normal" upload schedule, usually suggesting creators find what is appropriate for them and their audience, I find it noteworthy that they've set a specific minimum floor frequency.

My own experience, by the way, suggests 30 days is about the point where I start seeing algorithmic patterns that suggest the engine is requesting more fuel.

But oof. 8,000. Really? I was kinda set when I saw it to make some point about how AI slop channels are gaming this system by releasing so much content (one of the few places where I think that word with its negative connotations is appropriate) that they are monstering the numbers even with only a tiny number of people per video subscribing or watching until the end. But they're not positioning it as an anti-slop move. Which again interests me, because YouTube are generally very vocal where they are making anti-slop moves, and they seem to be A/B testing some pretty aggressive experiments where some people get all of the slop thumbnails and others get none of them.

No, this is explicitly put across as a "we want fewer monetised creators" move.

What this means is there are some niches where previously the achievable proportion of the total addressable market would have comfortably supplied some monthly beer money, but now it'll leave you a couple of thousand hours under the new threshold. I'm not sure whether that will leave them underserved on YouTube as creators look for other platforms (a 6,000 watch hour channel will usually support a bigger Patreon income than ad revenue would ever have paid out) or if these things were enough of a passion project that people will do them anyway. Maybe YouTube even think that making it clear there's no grift to be had in tiny niches might increase the average quality and pool enough viewers to the remaining creators that 8,000 becomes more attainable.

They're also trying to prime creators with the idea they should be chasing Premium members. Not necessarily how to chase them, but that YouTube really wants the people paying monthly to feel like they've got things to watch.

I find all this an interesting move if not necessarily a wholly positive one. Possibly there will be further announcements which give more of a feel for where YouTube want to take their relationship with creators, human or otherwise.

Please don't read this bit

But if you were staring down 4,000 and are now staring down twice that number if you're not about to hit it in the next 6 months, what can you do about it?

I invite most people, but certainly small YouTube creators, not to read this. I think a lot of us at the early stages like to be very strong at what we consider "our channel", even when the things which comprise it are actively harming our chances at growing. I should know, I spend most of my time trying to do everything deliberately the wrong way and I'm just really bad at deliberate failure.

Alright, so maybe I learn things driving across all of the established best practice at an orthogonal direction while cackling to myself. But that doesn't mean anything. Plus a lot of it is pretty harsh and blunt which is probably not the right thing to tack on to an article where the correct sentiment is sympathy, so really... come back later. Or not at all.

• Bandwagons are dead. Completely dead. If it's a popular topic you're not only up against the thousands of humans thinking "Mario's really popular, if I do a video on that I'm guaranteed to get loads of views", you're up against the AI channels which can produce 300 low-quality Mario videos before you've written the first line of your script.
  • I usually think about this in terms of "how many people are interested in this vs. how many people are already making videos about it". The sweet spot for me is not when the first number is huge, but when the second number is tiny.
  • The next step is "how many people who are interested in this will watch more than one video about it". I'm not particularly good at this, because the moment I realise I've found something a big audience will return for, I get bored of it.
• You can't afford to be precious about things which consistently harm your channel if you want it to grow. By "consistently" I don't mean the one-off video which doesn't do as well as you'd hoped, I mean the audio that's always too quiet, the thumbnails that don't stand out, the two minute intro you painstakingly crafted and everyone skips.
  • YouTube seems to be moving heavily into an "every video stands on its own merits" model so a single bomb isn't really a big deal, and even a few bombs in a row are probably fine if they start tilting your core audience toward one which is more tolerant of a broad range of topics.
  • Having said that, this advice pertains mainly to the bit beyond the core audience - the casual audience ramp-up. This is where the things that regular viewers tolerate start having an impact.
• Don't look for "the one thing". It's never "the one thing". It's a consistent improvement in craft across every element of video production. Breakout moments do happen, but it's one of those, "the more I practice, the more unexpected lucky breaks I seem to get".
  • I went back to a couple of topics that failed for me previously and had massive hits with them. The difference was just... the videos I made the second time were better, because I was more interested in the craft than finding some magic secret.
  • Use the numbers. Not made-up ones that make you feel good, the real ones: reach, CTR, retention, traffic sources. What happened just prior to the taps being turned off? (Be critical. Something dropped somewhere.)
• Packaging needs to be clear and obvious. People don't sit on YouTube solving thumbnails, titles and intros like puzzles. They want it to be clear what they're going to get, have it quickly confirmed that they're going to get it, and then have it actually given to them.
  • I'm arriving at a view that trying to dazzle people with a blinding shopfront and intro is less important than being consistently "good enough" and maybe even harmful to your success - people expect to be entertained and for certain minimum standards to apply, but at the small channel stage they're not looking for high budget broadcast-quality production or for thumbnails to be anything more than "it's about this". I've done better out of setting a clear expectation that things are going to be a bit crap than I ever did out of trying to produce amazing intros that created an irresistible curiosity gap.

Well, it's late and I never intended this to be an advice thing but I guess some part of me wants that 8,000 to be more attainable for people who really have that monetisation threshold as a goal. Or that I feel this knowledge is going to waste held in the head of someone who's mostly either ignoring it or acting against it to see what happens. Also I'm procrastinating against making a video that will probably disprove at least 50% of the above while also giving me yet more theories about this whole "how to beat the odds without doing any of the things you're 'supposed' to" approach.

Besides, I said "don't read that". What more do I need to do? Not write it in the first place?