posted in Technology
YouTube now requires creators to have twice as many watch hours to start earning money
techcrunch.com/2026/08/10/youtube-now-requires-creators-to-have-twice-as-many-watch-hours-to-start-earning-money/
YouTube says the changes are being introduced to “keep pace with the growth of YouTube, which now sees over 200 billion daily Shorts views and over a billion hours of watch time on TV” every day.
This reminds me of some past employment positions I had with extremely lucrative companies that, upon several employees having pushed and developed their skills to be able to reach production quotas (despite increasing safety hazards), simply raised production standards to avoid paying what was promised (certainly not meeting the threshold of what workers are worth).
In short, if you are a content creator on YouTube, do it for the love of your hobby and make money with your day job.
In short, if you are a content creator on YouTube, do it for the love of your hobby and make money with your day job.
The problem with this is that if you want to get any exposure you have to keep the algorithm happy and the algorithm wants consistent release schedules which means you’ll always have that hanging over your shoulder and fucking up once means nobody will ever see your video in the sea of millions of other videos. It’s an absolute meat grinder which is why so many channels fade out and why people try to do it full time.
Sure you can upload as a hobby but if people aren’t watching it, why go through all the trouble?
I think it's called vlogging. Like journaling, it can help yo look back at what worked for you and didn't, perhaps one day what didn't work will, when you catch something you missed, before. And there are legitimate other platforms, like PeerTube, but you're not guaranteed views there either, so again, for the love of your hobby.