I’ve been playing around and enjoying making youtube videos last year and going to continue this year.
But just had an email detailing the changes to how monetization is allowed and I’m now not allowed to use it as I don’t have enough subscribers and total watch time.
new requirements are 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours watchtime in the last 12 months.
but looking at my analytics the to figures are miles apart.
I currently have 280 odd subscribers but the watchtime is only 260 hours. So the watch time looks like quite a big figure to me.

Is anyone else an active youtube content creator and how do your figures stack up against the 1000 and 4000 hours?

With the greatest will in the world that seems reasonable. 280 subscribers isn’t very many, particularly as you’ll inherently achieve more as the platform gets older, so they need to raise the bar.

I’m not sure I’d expect to get paid for that.

This may be triggered partly by facebook’s promise to reduce the amount of promotional junk in people’s feeds, certain services heading off a bit of a backlash against promotional content?
Plus the fact that there are certainly several people creating ‘junk content’ on YT, laden with ads just to generate revenue…

1000 subscribers seems a bit high, I’m sure there’s a few niche channels with 250-500 subscribers that lack subscriptions but probably hit the hours requirement…

Ultimately there’s going to be a flurry of activity now from people creating “subscribe & view” bots to artificially bump channel’s numbers, Betcha…

njee20 sorry I probs didn’t word the question correctly. I don’t expect to get paid for what I do, it just a hobby but I quickly looked at the numbers vs mine. What I confused by was the total number 1000 subs vs 4000 watched hours.

Looking at my numbers the 4000 watched hours is actually a really big amount and wanted to get other peoples view on the 4000 hours vs their channel

I guess a 4:1 ratio indicates people returning to the channel to watch multiple things so it a a decent benchmark for the type of channel they want (regularly updated etc.). Not just some cat videos uploaded a couple of times a year.

It’s a fair point if it’s 1000 subs and 4000 hours, rather than 1000 subs or 4000 hours that means each of your subs has to have found 4 hours+ worth of content they wanted to watch on your channel, that’s actually quite a lot, it could end up encouraging people to pad videos and make for slightly more ponderous editing…

For most of the channels I choose to subscribe to, I’ve tended to do so at least in part because they produce relatively Succinct/concise/well edited videos; be it reviews, How to’s or whatever, people bunging up rambling 30+ minute videos twice a week tend to be wafflers/ranter not really worth viewers time.

personally I’d lower the viewed hours requirement, or make it an either/or thing… then again I’m not running google… probably for the best too…

And the wrong politics gets you demonitized on YouTube.

*Steps back and waits for triggered loons*

Surely more people view than subscribe though? So for every 4 views (simplified version not really 1 hours videos) 1 person subscribes?

Yep, and people will view multiple times.

some good points so far.

that is true you do usually get more ‘views’ on a video than subscribers. previously I think it was done on a certain amount of ‘views’ in a certain period. but changing it to ‘watched hours’ has set the bar quite a lot higher as looking at the info youtube gives on my channel most people don’t watch the whole video.

A friend of mine runs quite successful channel, > 8000 subscribers, no idea on viewing hours but likely to be quite high as his videos are training related and 20-30mins long each and given their nature most people watch them all the way through and multiple times, they seem to have between 10-30k views per vid on average.

I’ll ask him what the subs:hours ratio is tomorrow if you’re interested?

My friend’s son has quite a successful channel, posting (mainly) Fifa videos. He posted one 19 hours ago, it now has 126k views. Madness.

Apparently YouTube do cull subscribers if they’re inactive too, I guess it’s all about raising the bar at which they have to pay anything to content creators.

It would be interesting to know how many people are being ‘excluded’ by the new regs.

Apparently live streaming can end up with more viewing hours than prerecorded stuff. Probably easier for gaming channels I guess?

And the wrong politics gets you demonitized on YouTube.

Doesn’t even have to be the wrong politics, just the wrong journalist that watches it. And demonitisation is just the first strike, after that it’s a ban.

See Joerg Sprave vs Daily Heil.

DemolitionRanch already has backdated content on Twitch just in case (crazy preppers!) as one of their monitised videos was retroactively deemed to be a violation of T&C’s (the lego custom homemade shotgun shells one IIRC)

My friend’s son has quite a successful channel, posting (mainly) Fifa videos. He posted one 19 hours ago, it now has 126k views. Madness.

jesus, thats loads

go on then, link it

amedias if you can ask him about his subs:hours, I’d be really interested. thanks

And the wrong politics gets you demonitized on YouTube.

*Steps back and waits for triggered loons*

Does it? And how wrong do they need to be?

Plenty of big channels on there that make the Daily Heil appear quite liberal. And an equal amount that make the Guardian appear to be staffed by racist nans.

4000 hours seems fair, I guess it’s trying to limit it to those producing actual shows rather than short videos.

1000 people subscribing to a channel producing 8x 30min shows, rather than someone uploading 30s of wobbly helmetcam footage and their accounts software having to deal with the 13p it earnt because the uploaded ticked the monitise box. Then the legal team having to watch it because they’d used an artists song without permission, clawing that 13p back and generally being a ball ache to administer even if 99% of it it automated.

this changed just as I got over 10000 views lol I’ve got 135 subs and 567 hours of watching since I started Feb 27th last year so going to be while till I make pennies off youtube ha ha ha ha.

You could always add your own adverts (just find a site that gives a referral link) to something relavent to the video, you might even make more money from it than YouTube pays.

got amazon links but not doing it for the cash or lack of 🙁

jesus, thats loads

go on then, link it

CapgunTom. My wife watches a lot of vlogs on families, lifestyle etc, which I get. Tom’s a really nice guy, his enthusiasm is laudable, I like FIFA, but watching vlogs about it…? Nah, don’t get it. Still, clearly a lot of people do, and good for him!

I got this also, my channel is a mile away though only have about 50 subscribers, my watch time will be closer to 4000 minutes than hours though!

Surely by doing this you tube are taking a massive hit on there advertising revenue as they won’t have as many ads to sell and place on videos, they take about 60% of the revenue from your viewed ads anyway. So I can’t see it lasting long before they start to reduce it if makes a massive difference for them. As for putting proper music on it gets picked up before it is put on the site and tells you what the restrictions are, some bands are a no no others won’t work on Apple devices etc, either way the adverts are put on straight away going to the artist/record label etc.

Anyway here’s a cheeky plug only 942 subscribers needed and if you could watch it on repeat for a week I’d be most grateful

[video]https://youtu.be/OhKzMkYwSyI[/video]

need to remove the music unless its royalty free.

I don’t make enough videos to get the views and subs.

amedias if you can ask him about his subs:hours, I’d be really interested. thanks

I just did, he says:

He has just over 8000 subs, this has fluctuated but generally slowly increasing.
His viewing hours is in the last 12 months is just over 46 thousand hours, ~4-4.3 thousand hours a month on average.

HTH

Would be interesting to compare to the CapgunTom, as he has over a million subs by the look of it, but shorter videos, wonder what his ratio is like…

The music’s fine to use, as i said you get a list of restrictions as to what it will play on and ultimately any money the video makes goes to the artist or whoever not me. But I think a real song makes for better viewing than some wishy washy royalty free tune. Obviously it depends on the song used.

I’m a long long way from making any money on the view count/subscribers front, so this may change as it gets closer and the money starts rolling in

@amedius

Would be interesting to compare to the CapgunTom, as he has over a million subs by the look of it, but shorter videos, wonder what his ratio is like…

There’s some sites that you can type the YouTube channel name in and it’ll tell you there stats and a range of how much they are earning.

Ones called socialblade.com is one of them
capguntom

Looks like he gets about 20,000 views a day, average video is 15 minutes, so if you assume people watch 50% of the video on average (which is probably an underestimate if you’re into such things) then that’s 2,500 hours a day/900k hours a year, with 1m subscribers, so further adrift from the 1:4 ratio of subscribers to watchers.

that shows up some other channel called MTBscotland – mine is nowhere to be seen 🙁

My nephews spend literally hours watching people play computer games…

They are various games and the vid seems to be game action with the person playing superimposed at the bottom of the screen.
No idea if they are explaining what they are doing while they are playing or what…

Seems like a relatively easy way to make money if you are good at the games.

I reckon I’ve given quite a few hrs to 3D printing people on YouTube.
Some of them are very good at spending a lot of time not actually saying very much; just bulking out the vids, I guess.

Yeah, I find that a recurring theme with “how to” videos on YouTube to be fair! About 3% is actually useful, and I have to watch those bits 24 times because they do it so quickly!

My nephews spend literally hours watching people play computer games…

They are various games and the vid seems to be game action with the person playing superimposed at the bottom of the screen.
No idea if they are explaining what they are doing while they are playing or what…
That’s likely to be Twitch (now owned by Amazon), I spend the odd hour on it here and there myself (it’s surprisingly entertaining to watch someone really good at a game you’re familiar with).

There’s not many that actually make any real money from it (I guess similar to Youtube) but a few of the top streamers like Shroud certainly do (he has over 30k subs so will get at least $75k a month from that + donations on top which will be a fair amount to). Thing is they lose subs fast if they don’t stream for a couple of days so none of them take time off and end up streaming for 12+ hours a day – not a healthy way to live.

https://www.quora.com/How-much-money-can-an-average-user-on-YouTube-earn-from-a-video

Have a look at the top post. It’s unlikely you’ll get paid just for the amount of video people watch. more likely they can measure the amount of time people are viewing the ads associated with your channel.

No ads engagement will = no money.

I’d imagine you’d need to a shedload of ad engagement before you start making money.

Aim for somewhere between 50k-1m subs, and figure out how to drive those people to click and watch ads, then it might be worth looking at the monetisation aspect of it.