Why Did YouTube Increase Monetization Limits in 2027
Most YouTube creators who want to get their channels monetized are in panic because YouTube just rolled out a new monetization update. According to the new rules effective from first February 2027, YouTube has increased the requirements of watch hours and views for monetization.
Earlier, you needed 4000 watch hours and 1000 subscribers or ten million shorts views in the past 90 days to get your channel monetized. Starting next year, you will need 8000 watch hours in the last 12 months or twenty million shorts views in the last 90 days to be eligible for monetization. That’s just the double.
Most creators are worried because the 4000 hours of watch time is already a very difficult metric to achieve, let alone ten million views on shorts unless you hit a lucky jackpot and your video or short goes viral.
There are already a lot of people talking about the pros and cons of this update, but I have a simple explanation of why this is happening, and what you need to do about it.
First, let’s look at the two main reasons why I think YouTube is doing this. Since a lot of us have already seen it lately, YouTube is getting bogged down with millions of AI slop videos. Poorly generated videos that are either brain rot or simply use machine generated content that has little to no value and can be mass produced on scale.
A lot of the viewership on YouTube is already frustrated with this, and YouTube knows it. Since there’s no way around the AI boom, and YouTube itself is already promoting AI tools, the only way YouTube thinks is to deescalate this problem is to de-incentivize the creation of AI slop.
Raising the monetization limits is expected to dis-encourage people who are not passionate about creating videos or building an audience.
The second reason is the loss of long form viewership. YouTube generates most of its revenue from long form content, and also there is no good way to properly monetize its short form content business. YouTube wants to incentivize the creation of long form videos.
Since shorts are easy to make, and have a low barrier to entry, it is highly prone to AI slop generation. YouTube is probably seeking to balance this shift and bring content creators and viewers back to the long form videos.
A lot of experts also speculate that once this monetization policy is applied, content creators will see better RPM numbers.
Whatever may be their reasoning behind this, I think that since AI content generation is already too easy, this monetization update will only hurt genuine content creators who put in their serious time and effort into creating genuine content.
