YouTube continues to tighten the requirements to join its Partner Program.
After announcing last year that it would be necessary to have at least 10,000 total visits to a channel in order to gain access, it has now reintroduced new requirements that the company itself has described as “hard but necessary”.
With these changes, it will now also be necessary to have a total of 1,000 subscribers and a minimum of 4,000 hours of viewing by these subscribers.
In the beginning, these new rules only apply to those who want to enter the ‘Partner Program’ and start monetizing their videos by introducing advertising, but from February 20th also apply to those who are already members.
“It has become clear in recent months that we need the right requirements and better signals to identify the channels that have earned the right to publish ads,” explain YouTube in the announcement of the changes.
“Instead of basing acceptance solely on visits, we want to take into account channel size, audience participation, and creator behavior to determine ad eligibility.
YouTube also warns that they will closely monitor warning signs about the content, such as community protests, spam, and other abusive actions that users who are members of the program may be taking.
In recent times the platform is having many problems because of inappropriate content, and therefore have warned that if they detect that one of the channel partners is violating the rules will be expelled from the program.
In addition, they remember that if after three warnings does not stop its activity of uploading videos that violate the rules, the user’s account and channel will be deleted.
YouTube raises the bar with its creators
In YouTube had a last stretch of 2017 especially hectic, with the proliferation of videos and comments totally inappropriate and even terrifying in both the traditional service and YouTube Kids.
That made the criticism of users join the disbanded by advertisers, and hence from the platform have decided to take various measures to try to solve this situation.
Therefore, this decision to raise the minimum requirements to be able to use the advertising system can be interpreted as a movement to try to calm advertisers above all.
The biggest losers are the most humble channels, since according to the company itself, 99% of those affected by the changes earned less than $100 in the last year, and 90% earned less than $2.5 in the last month.
But the video service will also tighten the rules of the program ‘Google Preferred’ for YouTubers with more visits, something logical given the controversy Logan Paul recording corpses and being expelled later for it.
YouTube wants to discourage this type of content, and has warned that the content of the members of the program will be reviewed manually to be not only the best content of the network, but also “the most researched”.
Knowing that these rules will be fatal for the humblest YouTubers, now it remains to be seen how it affects the medium and large and whether they really manage to moderate the content better with them.
We will only be able to see this in the coming months, checking whether the flow of polemics around the content is low or maintained.