YouTube doubled the requirements for entering its monetisation programme on Monday. New creators who want to start earning from ads and subscriptions will need at least 8,000 qualifying watch hours in the past year, or 20 million Shorts views in the last 90 days. Until now the bar was 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours, or 1,000 subscribers and 10 million Shorts views.

The change takes effect on 1 February. The Google-owned company says existing members of the partner programme won't be affected - which is true, and precisely why it is cleverly framed. Those already inside have no reason to protest. The door is closing behind them, not in front of them.

In addition, to earn through the Shorts fund, channels will have to maintain 10 million views over a 90-day period. Those who fall below that threshold stay in the programme and keep earning from long-form videos, with Shorts revenue returning as soon as they cross the number again.

The reasoning and what's missing from it

YouTube says the changes are being introduced to "keep pace with YouTube's growth", which now records over 200 billion daily views of Shorts and more than a billion hours of watch time on televisions every day. Note the construction: the platform is growing, therefore the entry bar has to rise. Logically one doesn't follow from the other. If total viewing has doubled, that doesn't mean each individual new channel gets twice the audience - it means the pie is bigger while the number of people invited to the table stays the same.

The practical consequence is direct. A creator starting from zero now needs twice the audience before seeing a first cent. That is especially hard for those working with Shorts, where 20 million views in three months is nowhere near the same as 20 million views for someone who already has a built audience. A narrower entrance also means fewer new people reaching monetisation at all.

For a creator from this region the arithmetic is harsher still. An audience speaking Macedonian or Serbian is limited by definition, and thresholds set against a market of hundreds of millions of viewers don't adjust for how many people exist in a given language at all. Who sets those numbers, and against whose market?

In the same announcement YouTube is also expanding the cheaper Premium Lite subscription to every country where Premium is available. Creators receive a share of subscription revenue based on watch time, with 55 percent going to long-form creators and 45 percent to those making Shorts. "With these additional subscribers, creators can expect higher earnings," the company writes, explaining that partners on average earn more when a user is subscribed than when they watch ads.

YouTube isn't alone in this. Last weekend Elon Musk's X changed its payout rules to reward only original content, and earlier this spring Facebook launched a new monetisation programme aimed at attracting creators from TikTok and YouTube. Everyone is changing the rules in the same direction, in the same season. A creator chasing views on three platforms at once is a creator with negotiating power on none of them.