YouTube Is Doubling the Watch Hours New Creators Need Before They Can Earn

New creators hoping to make money on YouTube face a steeper climb. On Monday, YouTube announced the first big overhaul of the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) since 2018, a package that raises entry requirements for new creators while opening new ways for smaller channels to earn.

The program now counts more than 3 million creators, and YouTube says it expects to pay out even more in 2027 than it did in 2026.

Higher Entry Thresholds for New Creators

Starting February 1, 2027, new creators applying to YPP will need one of two things to start earning from ads and Premium revenue sharing: 8,000 qualified watch hours over the last 365 days, or 20 million qualified Shorts views over the last 90 days.

That’s roughly double today’s entry bar of 1,000 subscribers plus 4,000 watch hours, or 1,000 subscribers plus 10 million Shorts views. The new requirement leans on watch hours and views rather than a subscriber count.

YouTube ties the change to its own scale, pointing to more than 200 billion Shorts views a day and over a billion hours of watch time on TV screens daily. The entry thresholds for Fan Funding and shopping products aren’t changing, and anyone already in YPP isn’t affected.

Shorts Revenue Sharing Gets Its Own Bar

There’s a separate rule for Shorts. From February 1, 2027, creators need 10 million qualified Shorts views over the last 90 days to be eligible for ads and subscription revenue sharing on Shorts. Channels below that line stay in YPP and keep earning on long-form content, and Shorts revenue sharing resumes automatically once they climb back above 10 million views. YouTube notes that creators already earning significant Shorts revenue aren’t likely to feel the change.

New Earning Paths for Smaller Channels

Rather than leaning only on ad revenue, YouTube is adding incentive programs built around growth and engagement. For channels under the 10 million Shorts view threshold, that means new ways to earn tied to hitting milestones: bonuses for YouTube Shopping, incentives for brand deals, and extra earnings for starting and growing trends. YouTube says more details are coming.

Premium Lite Goes Global

Alongside the threshold news, YouTube is expanding its cheaper Premium Lite plan to every country where YouTube Premium is already available. The plan offers uninterrupted, offline, and background viewing of most content.

Creators earn from each subscription type through a dedicated revenue pool: 30% of net Premium revenue and 60% of net Premium Lite revenue. That pool is split based on member watch time and views, and within it, creators receive a 55% share for long-form videos and 45% for Shorts. YouTube says the wider subscriber base should lift earnings, since a Premium subscriber tends to be worth more to a creator than that same viewer would’ve been watching ads.

What YouTube Won’t Keep Monetizing

The thresholds decide who gets into YPP. Getting in is only half of it, though, since a separate clarification earlier in 2026 spelled out what keeps earning once you’re there. YouTube gave more detail on its long-standing “inauthentic content” policy, aiming at the mass-produced, template-driven videos that content farms pump out, often as Shorts. Worth knowing, because it runs on the same logic as the threshold change: YouTube judges the channel as a whole, not one video at a time.

What It Means for Creators

For established creators, this is mostly good news: a bigger Premium footprint, a larger payout pool, and new incentives on top of ad revenue. If your channel uses AI tools but runs on your own ideas and editorial calls, the inauthentic-content clarification shouldn’t change much for you either.

The pressure falls on newcomers and on channels built around mass-producing near-identical videos. New creators have to build and sustain a much larger, steadier audience before ad and Premium revenue kicks in, and Shorts-first channels have their own 10 million-view bar to clear. At the same time, the content has to hold up as original and worth coming back to.

So the job now runs on two tracks. Hit the numbers, and keep the work genuinely yours. Watch hours and Shorts views are what get you in, and originality is what keeps you earning. Metricool’s YouTube analytics let you track your watch hours and Shorts views alongside the rest of your channel’s performance, so you can see how close you are to each threshold and where your growth is coming from.