“It’s the end of the world as we know it. It’s the end of the world as we know it. It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.”

Except that I don’t. I don’t feel fine at all. YouTube decided to throw a curve ball out of left field (I’m pretty sure I have that analogy straight) and it’s got the whole online community shaking in its demonetized boots. How do you feel about the changes to the YouTube Partner Program? Do you care? And what does this have to do with a murder of crows?


 
In case you missed it, YouTube published a post on its official Creator Blog last Tuesday outlining the key changes to the YouTube Partner Program “to better protect creators.” Because that’s definitely their motivation.

In short, they moved the goal posts for smaller YouTubers (who account for some 95% of the channels on the platform). In order to qualify for monetization, you need to have 4,000 hours of watch time in the last 12 months and you also need to have 1,000 subscribers. For reference, that works out to about 20,000 minutes of watch time each month on average. And of the 500 million channels on YouTube, only about the top 2.5 million or so have over 1,000 subscribers.

The timing of this announcement is a little inconvenient for me. When I put together the highlight reels to celebrate my one-year “vlogiversary,” I had considered going on a bit of a break before returning for a second season… or at least shaking up the schedule.

Now I feel compelled to put in one good last push before the “grace period” ends on February 20. Realistically, YouTube is one of the very few platforms that actually pays its creators. Do you make any money (directly) from Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or Snapchat? Probably not. If anything, this motivates me to look into Patreon and other possible alternatives.

But hey, if you want to subscribe to my YouTube channel, we just may be able to break that 1,000 subscriber threshold before the new changes really take hold. I just have to survive being attacked by literally hundreds of crows every afternoon. No big deal. See you next week?