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From 1 February 2027, a channel applying to the YouTube Partner Program will need 1,000 subscribers and 8,000 valid public watch hours over the previous 365 days. The current bar is 4,000 hours over 12 months.
The Shorts route doubles as well. Twenty million valid public Shorts views over 90 days, up from 10 million.
YouTube published the changes on Monday under the headline “New opportunities to earn”. The Verge’s Emma Roth reported it first, under a plainer one: YouTube is making it harder to earn money on YouTube.
Both headlines are accurate. That is the interesting part.
The squeeze lands on people who are not there yet
Nobody currently in the programme loses their place. YouTube says the new thresholds apply to channels applying from February 2027, and that existing partners are not affected by the change.
More than three million creators are already in. None of them has to clear 8,000 hours.
So the wall goes up behind the people who are inside it. A channel sitting on 5,000 watch hours today would qualify this year and would not qualify next year. It is the first significant change to the programme since 2018, and it is aimed entirely at the queue.
That queue has had a thin 12 months. YouTube spent the summer tightening monetisation rules on mass-produced channels and catching human creators in the sweep. Patreon, the main alternative for creators trying to route around platform payouts, cut a fifth of its staff in July.
The Shorts pool gets its own bar
Earning from the Shorts Creator Pool will require a separate 10 million valid public Shorts views over a rolling 90 days.
Falling below that does not remove a channel from the Partner Program, and it does not touch long-form earnings. Shorts payments stop, then resume automatically once views recover.
YouTube says Shorts now draw more than 200 billion views a day. It is also the format everyone else is chasing. Netflix began licensing short-form video from Variety, Rolling Stone and BuzzFeed in August to slow the drift.
The subscription maths
Premium Lite expands to every country where Premium is offered. YouTube will put 60% of net Premium Lite subscription revenue into the pool creators share, against 30% of net Premium revenue.
From either pool, creators receive 55% on long-form watch time and 45% on Shorts.
YouTube also makes a claim worth reading closely. “When a user signs up for Premium, partners, on average, earn more than when the user was watching ads.”
The footnote reads: based on 2026 performance. It is an average, and it is one year of data. The company has been pushing subscriptions hard, including a deal to fold Peacock into Premium at no extra cost from early 2027.
What the help pages carry and the blog post does not
Three things sit in Google’s support documentation rather than the announcement.
The first is a new Targeted Shorts Ads share. Where an advertiser buys against five or fewer channels, eligible creators take a direct 45% cut of that revenue, on top of the standard pool.
The second is a redefinition of an active channel. From February 2027, a channel stays active with 1,000 valid public watch hours in 365 days, or one million Shorts views in 90 days, or two long-form uploads or five Shorts every 90 days. The current rule switches monetisation off after six months of silence.
The third is a contract migration. Creators who accepted the old Commerce Product Addendum before 2023 move to the current Commerce Product Module. Eligibility, mechanics and revenue share do not change. Accept it in YouTube Studio by 31 January 2027, or fan funding earnings stop.
Every partner has that same date. Terms must be accepted in Studio by 31 January 2027 for the new agreement to take effect the following day.
What is not changing
The lower tier holds. Fan funding, Creator Partnerships and Shopping still open up at 500 subscribers plus 3,000 valid public watch hours in a year, or three million Shorts views in 90 days.
YouTube is adding incentives alongside the higher bar: bonuses for creators using YouTube Shopping, production credits attached to brand deals, and earnings boosts for channels that activate around cultural trends.
And the company says it expects to pay creators more in 2027 than in 2026.
A bigger pot behind a higher wall
Both of those things can hold at once. The money going out can rise while the number of people allowed to reach it is cut.
The context is a platform that no longer thinks of itself as a video site. More than a billion hours of YouTube are watched on television sets every day. The company spent 2026 signing talent such as Trevor Noah and rolling out a seasons feature, positioning itself next to Netflix and Disney Plus rather than next to TikTok.
Premium services curate. That is what they sell. YouTube has also been rebuilding discovery around creators after its own AI experiments failed to hold viewers.
The open question is what a doubled entry bar does to the pipeline that produced those creators in the first place. Nobody finds out until the applications start landing against the new numbers, and that is six months away.
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