YouTube raises the bar

A vloggers paradise it has been! YouTube has, for this year, made some major changes to its monetisation policies. To be specific, to earn money out of the video streaming channel is possible only by strictly adhering to certain rules from February 20 onwards. The 10,000 public views policy, implemented in April, 2017, gives way to the new standards. Accordingly, the eligibility for monetisation under the YouTube Partner Programme (YPP) is 4,000 hours of overall watch time in the past 12 months besides having at least 1,000 subscribers. 

The reason for making new changes, as it cites on the official blog, is to “prevent bad actors from harming the inspiring and original creators around the world who make their living on YouTube.” An incident to this effect supposedly came from Logan Paul, one of YouTube’s star creators, who posted a video of a suicide victim in a forest in Japan. YouTube “kicked Paul off its Google Preferred ad programme and placed his YouTube Red original programming efforts on hold,” said The Verge, a tech portal.

Apart from the view time and subscription parameters, more manual monitoring is underway. YouTube would count community strikes, spam and other abuse flags to make sure the content abides by its policies. Getting three community guidelines strikes is the criteria for an account and related channels from YouTube to be removed. All clips have to pass manual review prior to getting added to premium packages to connect popular content and big brand advertisers.

The new guidelines have sent jitters down the vlogosphere, for whom YouTube is offering a grace period from the date of implementation. 

“Channels with fewer than 1,000 subs or 4,000 watch hours will no longer be able to earn money on YouTube. When they reach 1,000 subs and 4,000 watch hours they will be automatically re-evaluated under strict criteria to ensure they comply with our policies,” reads a blog post of YouTube. What do newcomers do? “New channels will need to apply, and their application will be evaluated when they hit these milestones.”

In the pipeline is a three-tier suitability system to be implemented later. Techcrunch says it is “aimed at giving marketers more control over the trade-off between running ads in safer environments versus reaching more viewers.”