The monetization threshold has doubled, and YouTube may be targeting short-form videos.

Since the summer of 2023, YouTube has been cracking down on ad-blocking plugins to reignite the growth of its advertising business. Three years later, even with all kinds of obstructions from YouTube, it still cannot stop users' enthusiasm for skipping ads. Seeing that users are hardly buying its measures, YouTube has decided to target creators.

Recently, YouTube announced adjustments to the thresholds of its ad revenue program. Starting from February 1, 2027, creators participating in the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) will need to meet higher requirements, including having at least 1,000 subscribers, and obtaining 8,000 valid watch hours in the past year, or 20 million valid Shorts views in the past 90 days.

In comparison, currently, creators only need to get 4,000 valid watch hours within a year, or 10 million Shorts views within 90 days to monetize through YouTube's ads. With the YPP threshold directly doubled, the YouTuber community has been in an uproar, as it will become much harder for them to make money on YouTube.

In fact, the valid watch time contributed by YouTube users has been declining, and the situation has become even worse after Google launched the AI-powered "Ask YouTube" feature. The "Ask YouTube" feature built on Google's Gemini model allows users to ask "complex questions" about a single video, quickly get the key points, or jump to specific parts of the video.

According to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, as of June 2026, more than 140 million users have used the "Ask YouTube" feature on the "Watch" page. When AI helps users extract valuable content from large volumes of information, there is no reason for the valid watch time they contribute not to decrease.

But the question is, why did Google suddenly raise the threshold for YouTube's ad monetization?

There is no doubt that the weak growth momentum of YouTube's advertising business is the key reason. In 2025, its advertising revenue reached 40.4 billion US dollars, with a year-on-year growth rate of only 11.7%, which dropped significantly from the 14.7% increase in 2024. Its advertising revenue this year is expected to be 43.2 billion US dollars, and the growth rate may fall to 7%. Marketing research institution WARC Media predicts that TikTok is expected to surpass YouTube in 2030 and become the video platform with the largest advertising revenue in the world.

Relevant data from Sensor Tower shows that by 2025, TikTok users spend 95 minutes per day on the platform, while YouTube users spend 85 minutes per day, with a gap of 10 minutes between the two. Compared with long videos, the fast-paced, high-return feature of short videos has been increasingly favored by current internet users. Moreover, TikTok focuses on performance conversion ads, and the logic of product recommendation and in-shopping-cart order placement in short videos is very clear.

At present, YouTube's ad design still stays at the exposure level, and the path for users to jump to e-commerce sites to buy related products after watching videos is broken. In the market environment where global marketing budgets are shifting from pure brand exposure to transaction conversion, TikTok is naturally more favored by advertisers than YouTube. However, YouTube's advertising system has been running stably for nearly 20 years, and it is unrealistic to carry out drastic reforms quickly, so it can only make minor adjustments for the time being.

Since YouTube's advertising excels in exposure, it needs to continue to strengthen its exposure capability. As the required valid watch time for YPP increases from 4,000 hours to 8,000 hours, the time that ads are exposed to users will naturally increase synchronously. Of course, Google has made dual preparations, and it has also increased the weight of Shorts short videos.

Relevant reports from overseas media Android Authority show that YouTube has been exposed to be testing a function that directly jumps to the vertical-screen Shorts page after opening the App. According to estimates from third-party institutions, YouTube is expected to reach about 2.85 billion global monthly active users by 2026, and such a huge potential user base is naturally the "blood supply" for YouTube Shorts.

In this case, Google's real intention is clear. If creators want to monetize through YouTube and Shorts short videos, there are only two paths to choose from next: one is to win by volume, use more content to exchange for longer watch time, or strengthen the private domain traffic strategy, improve fan stickiness, and let each individual fan contribute more watch time.

But no matter which path creators choose, Google is the winner. The only possible cost is that YouTube's status in the minds of creators will decline once again, after all, it may no longer be a place where people can make money easily.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Three E Life" (ID: IT-3eLife), written by San Yijun, and published with authorization from 36Kr.