Why Your YouTube channels Needs 10,000 views for adverts

UPDATE: To see the latest requirements to get into the YouTube Partner Program (YPP), see this article on DIYVideoStudio.com.

So you want to make money online and you think an easy way to do that is create video content, upload it to YouTube and monetize it with ads. Well hold on there, the goal posts have just shifted. YouTube has just changed some of its rules about YouTube Partner Program membership.

YouTube has introduced changes it hopes will address the concerns of some heavy weight advertisers who recently discovered their adverts had been appearing beside videos that promote hate, extremist views and terrorism.

Obviously major brands do not want to be associated with such material but the is a further twist. Some of their advertising budget is being shared with the hate speech creators. Effectively, major advertisers fear they are inadvertently helping to fund and facilitate individuals and organisation whose views are highly divergent from those of their brands.

With around 250 companies quitting Google’s ad platforms, estimated by some to be worth about $750m in lost revenues, it is no surprise that Google have sat up and announced some changes to safeguard the interests of their advertisers.

Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, wrote in a blog post, “We’re taking a tougher stance on hateful, offensive and derogatory content.” He continued, “We’ll also tighten safeguards to ensure that ads show up only against legitimate creators in our YouTube Partner Program—as opposed to those who impersonate other channels or violate our community guidelines. Finally, we won’t stop at taking down ads. The YouTube team is taking a hard look at our existing community guidelines to determine what content is allowed on the platform—not just what content can be monetized.”

So how is this going to affect your YouTube channel?

If you already have an established channel you don’t need to worry. If it is already monetized your viewers will continue to see ads appear with your videos. However, if you are creating a new channel the changes will affect you.

You can monetize your channel as before by going to your channel features and enabling monetization, but your viewers will not see adverts on your videos until your channel reaches the 10,000 view threshold. Or at least that is when your viewers may start seeing adverts on your videos. According to a post by Ariel Bardin, vice president of product management at YouTube, "After a creator hits 10k lifetime views on their channel, we'll review their activity against our policies. If everything looks good, we'll bring this channel into YPP [YouTube Partner Program] and begin serving ads against their content. Together these new thresholds will help ensure revenue only flows to creators who are playing by the rules." So even if your channel reaches 10k views you will only get adverts appearing on your videos if you play by YouTube’s rules and policies, and those policies may change some more in the weeks and months ahead.

So is this bad for your YouTube channel? No. In fact, provided you are playing by the rules, YouTube’s changes are sensible and good news, since they are clearly aimed at bringing back advertisers and their advertising budgets.

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