YouTube now requires creators to have twice as many watch hours to start earning money
YouTube announced on Monday that new creators will have to meet higher thresholds to begin earning money from ads and subscriptions. Creators who want to start earning on the platform will need at least 8,000 qualified watch hours over the past year or 20 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days. The change is going into effect starting February 1.
- ▪YouTube announced on Monday that new creators will have to meet higher thresholds to begin earning money from ads and subscriptions.
- ▪Creators who want to start earning on the platform will need at least 8,000 qualified watch hours over the past year or 20 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days.
- ▪The change is going into effect starting February 1.
3 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 1 hour. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
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Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/10/youtube-now-requires-creators-to-have-twice-as-many-watch-hours-to-start-earning-money/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:27:44 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-10T18:30:47.885Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-10T18:30:47.885Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | wIjL1UMZga-l · 3 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
YouTube announced on Monday that new creators will have to meet higher thresholds to begin earning money from ads and subscriptions. Creators who want to start earning on the platform will need at least 8,000 qualified watch hours over the past year or 20 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days. Currently, creators need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours over the past year or 1,000 subscribers and 10 million Shorts views over the past 90 days. The change is going into effect starting February 1. The Google-owned company says the update won’t impact creators already in the YouTube Partner Program. Additionally, YouTube announced that creators will need to maintain 10 million Shorts views over a 90-day period to earn money through the Shorts Creators Pool.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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