You need to meet some minimum requirements before you can make money from your YouTube videos. Find out what those are here.
One of the best things about being a YouTube creator is the ability to earn money from the videos you are uploading. This is done by sharing advertising revenue with the YouTube creator when ads are shown on videos. These ads usually appear before and during the video, but mid-roll ads can also be used.
However, before you can start earning money from your YouTube channel, you need to meet a couple of minimum requirements. Once you meet these requirements you’ll be able to apply to be a YouTube partner, and link your Google AdSense account, meaning you can begin receiving payments for your hard work as a video creator.
Watch Time Requirement
The first requirement is that you must have at least 4,000 public watch hours on your videos in the last 12 months.
This watch time needs to be on public videos, so if you have lots of watch time from unlisted or private videos, this will not count towards the 4,000 hours.
As you can expect, it’s best to focus on content that is both longer and engaging so that you can increase your watch time as much as possible. If you are a YouTube Creator who focuses on very short videos, you will need a lot more views on average in order to reach the watch time requirement, so this is something to take into consideration when creating your videos.
Subscriber Requirement
The second requirement is that your channel must have at least 1,000 subscribers. The good news is that in most cases, as long as you have engaging content, you should hit 1,000 subscribers before you reach 4,000 hours of watch time. It’s recommended that you encourage people to subscribe to your channel as much as possible in the early days so you can get up to that magic number of 1,000 and enable monetisation. You can do this by:
- Creating engaging content that inspires, educates or entertains viewers so they feel inclined to subscribe in order to see more content from you.
- Asking people to subscribe during the video.
- Adding an end screen to your video encouraging users to subscribe when they finish watching your video.
- Adding a link to subscribe to your video description, as near to the top as possible.
Don’t try and buy subscribers or use platforms that allow you to “sub4sub”. These fake subscribers are tracked and are removed on a regular basis from your subscriber count. Focus on quality and great videos and the subscribers will come naturally.
Enable Notifications
If you are not yet eligible to enable monetisation on your YouTube channel, you can request to be notified by YouTube via email when you reach the minimum requirements of 4,000 watch hours in the past 12 months and 1,000 channel subscribers. You can do this by logging into your YouTube Studio and clicking the Monetisation button on the left hand side.
From this page you can see how far along you are to reaching the requirements, as well as enable the email notification.
Remember, that once you reach the minimum requirements there is no guarantee that you will be approved as a YouTube partner. When you request monetisation, your channel will be reviewed by YouTube and if they find that your video content does not follow the YouTube Monetisation policies, they will not approve it for your account. So again, create high quality, original, unique and engaging content.
You can view the YouTube Monetisation Policies here.