Don’t Bother Trying to Make Money on YouTube Anymore

Unless you are already famous or want to put in hundreds of unpaid hours, there is no way you can make money on YouTube after February 2018.   Worse, if you are already a YouTube Partner that does not meet the new minimums, you will be shut down in February 2018.  The minimums are odious:

1. Your channel needs 4000 HOURS watched every year
2. Your channel needs 10,000 subscribers

YouTube is doing this so that they can reduce the number of video’s that their human staff need to review before adverts are shown.  This is because they had a few high profile situations in which major advertisers had their content associated with ugly content like racists and terrorists.

We understand YouTube’s need protect their advertisers from negative associations so when we heard of this change we thought they would be setting up a two tier system:

1. Premium ads (Coke, GM, …) on human verified videos
2. Secondary ads (your name here) on all videos of existing channel partners

In this way, current YouTube “Partners” that have proven they post no questionable videos over a long term (say 1 year or more) would be grandfathered in.  Those video producers that do not meet the new minimum would likely (and fairly) be paid at lower rates.

It came as a great surprise to us at URTech that YouTube decided on a single verified tier only and that we along with tens of thousands of others are out on our ear with just 1 months notice.

This change has angered many YouTubers and will likely drive small content providers out of business.  Beyond fixing YouTube’s very serious advertising issues, the only positive we could come up with is that it will likely drive some competitors to enter the market or expand… but who wants to try and compete with Google.

As you can see on the right, our video’s have been watched near two MILLION times.  We double the number of hours required to meet their new minimum.  In the last month alone, we were paid a mere $54 for it for bringing in 500 hours of viewing to YouTube.  We are fine with the $54; in fact we would be fine with $40, but YouTube needs to provide of something real value in exchange for our content.

We are perplexed as to how Chanel Subscribers are a critical metric for YouTube; surely all that counts (beyond the content not being too aggressive) is the number of hours watched.

Watch this interesting YouTube video from DTNS for more details.

If you want more details, like to join an angry mob or just need to know the current status, check the responses to the YouTube Blog post explaining these changes.