YouTube Shorts Monetization Changes are NOT good

Good morning, good evening, good afternoon everybody. Welcome to the stream. Thanks so much for coming by. Today is August 11th, 2026. It's Tuesday. I hope you're having a good day if not bad. Final Fantasy 14 Switch 2 version, right? Yes, that is not right. Yesterday we did a YAP stream where we played Final Fantasy while yapping. Today will probably similar, although I may switch to some other games. Might do some Zomboid or some uh No, I can't remember the other game. Scrap mechanic. Too many games, chat. Can't keep them straight in my brain. Scrap mechanic andor that. I've been hearing good things about the Switch version. What was I yapping about yesterday? Um, little bit of everything. We were talking about the stream, the games I'm playing, the games I'm going to play. It's up on YouTube. No, it's not actually. It'll be up on YouTube in about 2 hours. I curated a summary of it so you can check it out to see everything we talked about. The YouTube stuff hadn't happened yet when I streamed. All that came about after the fact. We'll likely be talking about YouTube today though. And I may be putting together a YouTube uh like a standalone video of that. Talking about that. I already made coffee. It is in my person. Although I have only taken one sip. So, we're grinding uh relics. If you don't know what that means, that means that we're going to be doing a bunch of stuff and not getting the drops we want for hours and then complain about it. But somehow we're going to keep repeat doing it. Yeah. Mhm. That's right. But we're going to be grinding these fates and there's also some critical engagements over in an area called the Occult Crescent. So, you're going to be killing bosses and they drop these special items. I think this one's called a Demi Atma. Azerite Demi Atma. And I'm only on phase one of the relic grind. There's multiple phases. There's levels to this game. Boy, these phases are going a lot faster with humans here. I must say I'm quite excited about that given that I got to do about 10,000 of these. [laughter] I got to what? I got to do about 10,000 of these. Um, so if they got to go fast, that's good. That's very good. I'm happy about that. But yeah, these yapping videos I did that I did yesterday and kind of today, they're they're kind of good podcast formatting things, especially when you edit out all the all the no sniffs and the and the h and the huh and all that stuff and you just get voice commentary. It's like a podcast. You can open it in a tab and be one of them n there podcast type things where I talk about absolutely everything under the sun. Under the sun. The sun comes up and the sun goes down. Work away. Work away. Just going to aggro everybody I can. That's how we do here. Work away. >> [laughter] >> But yeah, let's talk about we're going to talk about this YouTube thing today. As I y those you don't know, YouTube changed their policies um for requirements for partnership. So apparently you have to get more you have to do more watch hours and basically all the metrics that you have to do to get partner or get monetized I should say monetized partnership it has gone up. So, if you're just starting out or you're trying to get your channel partnering on YouTube, it's harder now than it was before, right? So, that's the first part. The second part is that they're changing monetization of shorts. What do that mean? That means that you will no longer receive money for your shorts if you are under 10 million views per 90 days. That's right, 10 million. And that's the part that that got me in a ruffle yesterday. That's the part that got me in a ruffle because I have spent way This is a personal thing. This has got nothing to do with other people. I have spent way too much time changing how I do everything on my streams and my YouTube to accommodate shorts. I have flipped my my setup upside down for that nonsense. Right? No longer were we going for like the one to two minute YouTube videos that I used to do that were funny. Nah, we were going for the vertical shorts because that was the future, right? And they said, "Oh, well, yeah, you can still get paid, but you got to be a big creator." Cuz let's be honest, if you're getting 10 million views for 90 days, you are not a small creator. You are huge. So, medium and small creators basically got the boot. Uh, but they still make money off your videos. Your ads still play. Yeah. Well, I don't know if ads even play on shorts. So, I've been on YouTube Premium for I don't know how long, but they do. YouTube still I I mean, you're asking me if YouTube makes money off my videos. If they don't, then why are they doing it? I mean, it comes down to that. They're they're going to make money in one form or another. Whether it be data, whether it be ads, whether it be something. So, yeah, they're they're going to make money. If they don't, then why are they doing it? They're not doing it for our our benefit, that's for sure. It's a lot of dudes over here. They're not doing it for our benefit, you know? So, yeah, everybody that's not huge, um, you're not going to get paid unless you have 10 million views over 90 days. There's a kicker. They're like, "But if you do still want to make shorts, you'll be rewarded through incentives, like shopping and bonus incentives." Oh, really? Well, count me in. You know what that sounds like? You know, you know what that sounds like? I will reward you through exposure. That's that when they said that, I was thinking, are they going to reward me with exposure? Cuz that that's what that is. Shopping benefits, incentives, and bonus incentives. That doesn't equal money, chat. That's that's that's a straight up lie to your face. So, I I took that as an insult. I didn't even read that part. I was just like, that's an insult. I've seen that before. I know what it means. You're going to want to get 10 million views if you want to get paid. Um, I wonder if there was a massive influx of joint shorts recently. They had to crack down. Yes, there was. And there is. People are creating faceless AI channels and they're regurgitating content at an alarming rate and they're automating it. So, if one gets taken down, two more takes its place. Hell hydra. So, it's bad. It's really bad. It's a lot of junk AI channels that are taking over shorts have taken over shorts. Also, they're taking down legitimate channels. The AI channels are are doing takedowns for the actual people that made the content. And in some cases, they're succeeding. They're they're getting them banned. It's pretty bad. I don't know if this is YouTube's motivation behind doing this. I can I can probably guess that it's partially that, but as a creator, I don't care. I mean, that's I mean, as as a consumer, I would care cuz on paper that would make your lives better, but as a as a content creator, all I see is you were paying me before and now you ain't paying me nothing for the same thing. And that sucks. I don't care how you look at it. As a creator, it sucks. So, that's that's what's going on with that. And what you're seeing is a lot of you you're seeing a lot of people's true colors come out on online, specifically on YouTube and on Twitter, even like on Instagram and and and Tik Tok. You're seeing people's true colors come out cuz what they're doing is they're trying to griff this system and they're gaslighting you saying, "Oh, why are you getting upset? This is good. If you really want to make it in this new system, do this. Here are 10 five ways to bypass YouTube's new requirements. Want to get partnered in 5 minutes? Try these steps. You see all these people doing this stuff as a response to what's happening and they're using it as a means to make money. And to me, that lacks a little bit of integrity. That's that's just dirty. That's that's really dirty." And I even seen a couple people saying when it first came out that this is a L from YouTube. And now I'm seeing them saying the opposite. That this is good. This is actually good. This is a good thing. Why are you guys mad? This is a good thing. You were making money before, you're not making money now. This is good. And if you're not making money, you're doing it wrong. Here's how to do it right. Subscribe to my channel and like. It's really scummy what they're doing, you know? So, I see right through it. I've been doing this long enough to where I know what people are doing. They're grifting. They're making you feel bad when you should. They make you feel bad for feeling bad when you should feel bad. You should be a little bit perturbed by that cuz what YouTube is doing is not cool. Do they have every right to do it? Yeah. Are they breaking the laws? No. Did they lose my trust? Yes. I don't trust them anymore. YouTube I I was trusting I was at the point where I was trusting YouTube more than I was trusting uh Twitch. Cuz Twitch made a lot of promises too. This was for this, this was for that. And I didn't trust Twitch. Twitch lost my trust years ago. But I was still I still had a little bit of trust for YouTube, right? I think they lost a lot of it yesterday. I just if they say something, I need proof. I need I need I need six months of data to back it up, please. Cuz you're probably lying. So yeah, the the thing that that doesn't bother me. I don't the the higher requirements for partner. I know why they're doing that. It still sucks for people trying to get partner though. It still sucks. The same thing Twitch is kind of doing. Twitch lowered the requirements, but they kind of what Twitch did was a roundabout way of just making everybody an affiliate. They lowered the requirements for partner, but basically you are an affiliate, which kind of, you know, kind of weird. So, what am I going to do going forward? I don't know. I don't know. I'm still trying to decide like I can tell you I'm going tell you what though. I'm not motivated to make another short. That killed my motivation because I was making shorts. I was making multiple shorts every single day. Y'all don't understand how much this crap changed my workflow. I was always making shorts. Always. Sometimes 10 at a time from one stream. I was pumping out so many shorts. It was crazy. And it took time. Right now, I'm not motivated to do it. Even though I wasn't really making a whole lot from it, it was better than nothing. Right? Because it was existing content I had already made. I was repackaging it and I was getting paid for it, which is a good idea, right? I wasn't putting a lot of effort into making the content. Most of the effort was editing the content and formatting it. But when you're doing like 10 a day, it takes a while, you know, takes a little bit. But I don't know. I actually don't know what I'm gonna do. Like because I'm getting a lot of exposure on Instagram reels. A lot of exposure. But I'm not getting paid. But the good thing about that is that if you do get a lot of exposure on Instagram, that can be transformed and turned into brand deals. But that's not that's not automatic. That just says, "Hey, I got the numbers. Maybe I can get in the door and get a call with this this vendor, you know, but that's not guaranteed." So that's the motivation behind to keep doing it because you're putting yourself in position to get brand deals just like making just like streaming, just like making regular videos. Your your statistics and stats can open up sponsorships and stuff, but that's a grind in itself. And it's not guaranteed. What was there before YouTube did this was guaranteed money from your shorts, which is very, very good thing in content creation. You want guaranteed money. You really do. because there's a lot of ungaranteed like question mark stuff. You don't know how much you're going to make every week is it's just like it's a lot of questionable stuff, right? So, whenever you have something that is like guaranteed money from a video, if I make a video, I know I'm going to make at least a penny. Whereas I can make 10,000 reels and I might get one sponsor. Might. So, it's a big difference. All right. I still haven't got to drop. This is a scam. It's a big difference, you know. So, that's what they took away. They took away guaranteed income. When you're a content creator, guaranteed income is very, very valuable. I don't care if it's a dollar, $5, $10. That stuff's very, very valuable. And they took that away. So, that's why I'm I'm perturbed about it. And I also um over time, I feel like I've wasted time. I can't help but feel that way cuz I put years into this, a lot a lot of time, and I invested a lot into shorts thinking that it would turn around and it didn't. It actually tanked and they're they're they're getting rid of it. So, now they're going down the path. Tik Tok went down where they basically remove everybody from monetization except special people, select few aka medium, I mean large creators and higher, large to gargantuan creators and higher are going to get the money. Those are the people that are going to get paid now and their rates are going to go up. Meaning that they're going to get higher paychecks because all of us dead waiters at the bottom are no longer getting paid and we're supposed to be happy about that. Yeah, I'm happy. Yeah. Woo. Wow. I have the opportunity to possibly get those higher rates that you guys already get. Woo! Wow. And that's how they stay at the top. You know, it's that old mantra, the rich get richer. That's pretty much what's happening. The big boys are happier and we should be happy, too. The engagement from Instagram could still be useful, but yeah, no money makes it hard to keep going. Yeah, I'm definitely motivated to keep posting to Instagram cuz um I there's some UGC providers out there that will uh give you opportunities based on your Instagram numbers, right? So, it opens doors. Right now, that's the biggest play for shorts. has always has been the play, but prior to yesterday, you could still you can make money off of that and you can get opportunities to make even more. Now that that YouTube short algorithm, I mean um YouTube short uh monetization is gone, which sucks. I'm probably still going to make vertical format stuff. Whether I post it to YouTube or not is what I'm what I'm what's like up in the air. I might not even bother posting to YouTube. There's no point. Cuz the UGC people I've seen, they don't really care about YouTube as much as they care about Instagram. They care about Instagram and Tik Tok. They don't usually list YouTube as part of their uh criteria. If you want a UGC deal, then they see you got like 150,000 views on a video that you did on Power World. My Mercy Ring Power World video got 150,000 views in like less than a week. They see stuff like that and they go, "Yeah, maybe we can give this guy a UGC deal to sell this product or to do a do a read for us and we'll give him this amount of money with bonus incentives." But YouTube, no, they're not even looking at YouTube. Instagram, Tik Tok, that's what they're looking at. At least again, these are UGC providers I have seen. I'm not saying they don't exist, but uh but it it really it was grinding my gears just reading some people on online basically trying to gaslight us. The best word I can think of is gaslight. And they were just like, "This is not a bad thing. What are you talking about? Why are you complaining? There's nothing wrong with this. And I'm just like, buddy, come on. I know why you're doing this. Hey, we got to drop. [cheering] So, that puts us at three. I guess I better help him kill this. So, I think I can leave this area now. Go to the other one. Yeah. So, if you curious, this is what I wrote yesterday on Twitter regarding the YouTube thing. This is what I wrote. I said, first, let me read what the YouTube message was. says, "Starting February 1st, 2027, to earn ads and premium revenue each month from the Shorts creator pool, creators must or creators will need to maintain 10 million qualified Shorts views." oops over the last 90 days. If your channel already meets this threshold, you're unlikely to see changes to your shorts earnings. Channels below this threshold remain in the YouTube partner program and continue earning on long form format with shorts revenue sharing automatically resuming once they cross 10 million qualified shorts views again. So this is what I wrote. I said time to pivot again because as a content creator we're constantly shifting focus, adjusting with the market, all that kind of good stuff. We call it pivoting. I call it pivoting. I don't know what everybody else calls it. You basically are pivoting your foot and you turn a different direction. So, I said, "Time to pivot again. This is exhausting. I spent way too many hours positioning my content around shorts, reals, and Tik Tok. And now they yanked away my only source of income from it." Now, that's an important sentence because all of these three, the only reliable income I got was from shorts. Everything else didn't pay anything. These were opportunity plays. You get views on Tik Tok and Reels, it opens opportunities everywhere everywhere else. Shorts was the only one that paid us for your views. Reals and Tik Tok do not do that, right? So I said, "Now they've yanked away my only source of income from it." It being my content around shorts and reals and Tik Tok. It was a very It was very little income, but I expected it to grow over time, and that's genuine. I did expect it to grow. The more I did it, the more I expected it to grow, and and I had some some peaks and valleys, but overall, I think the trend was going up, right? Well, not anymore. I'm already focusing on long form content, right? You guys know that. I already talked about it. But that's just one thing on top of the shorts plan I had. So, I had multifaceted things going on, multiple hands, multiple arms, and all this kind of good stuff. It truly sucks that I wasted all those all that time, which is years. And now they've essentially gutted the program from four small and medium creators. Gutted. There's only so much diversification one can do in this space. And options are quickly drying up daily. Opportunities and options are going away. It's like people are exiting this this market at a at an alarming pace. Right now, I said 20. This was a frustration sentence. I said, "20 years of this nonsense and I've just about had it because we're we're constantly adjusting and tweaking and tuning and changing focus all the time and now I got to do it again." So, I'm just tired of it. I say, "Who's next? Twitch?" I Twitch is about Maybe Twitch is about to do something, too. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe maybe they're about to do something weird. I don't know. And I do realize some people just aren't going to care. But you know I'm basically speaking from the perspective of [snorts] content creator.