YouTube makes it easier for small creators to earn money on the platform

It’s tough for new up and coming content creators to break through on YouTube these days, especially considering that you can’t immediately earn money becoming a YouTuber until you achieve enough subscribers and views to be part of the YouTube Partner Program. However, the Google-owned platform has now announced new ways for these small content creators to earn money while they’re starting out.

In a new post on the YouTube blog, the platform has revealed that they’re expanding the YouTube Partner Program to smaller creators with lower eligibility criteria. This will hopefully help small channels access fan-funded features such as channel memberships, Super Chats, Super Thanks, Super Stickers and more. To get these features that will let your viewers send you money, you will first need to have at least 500 subscribers, have at least three valid public uploads in the past three months and either 3,000 valid public watch hours in the past year or 3 million valid public Shorts views in the past three months.

To be clear though, this does not mean that with your 500 subscribers you’ll be able to monetise your videos with ads during playback. Normal monetisation via ads still requires you to accomplish the older, stricter criteria for the YouTube Partner Program, which include at least 1,000 subscribers to your channel and either 4,000 valid public watch hours in the past year or 10 million valid public Shorts views in the last three months.

YouTube does state though that you won’t need to reapply into the YouTube Partner Program once you’ve achieved the second requirement for full monetisation of your videos.

“As these creators continue to grow their channel, they’ll automatically become eligible to earn revenue sharing from ads and even more benefits once they reach the existing YPP eligibility criteria, without having to go through the full YPP application process again.

These existing eligibility requirements to unlock revenue sharing remain unchanged,” – Amjad Hanif, YouTube Video President of Creator Products

The new, easier YouTube Partner Program requirements are already being rolled out to creators in the US, UK, Canada, Taiwan and South Korea, with the platform saying that they will introduce the earlier access to the YouTube Partner Program wherever eligible over time. You can check out the full blog post from YouTube here.