New YouTube channels will need 8,000 watch hours from February 2027
The entry bar doubles for newcomers, but existing partners are untouched by it. The change that actually bites them is a 10 million view floor on Shorts revenue, and Premium Lite is now rolling out to every country with Premium.
YouTube has changed its Partner Program for the first time since 2018, and the headline everyone reached for was the easy one: the bar to get in has doubled. That is accurate. It is also the part fewest people will feel.
Read properly, the announcement YouTube published on 10 August contains three changes, and only one of them is about getting in.
Getting in: 8,000 hours or 20 million Shorts views
From 1 February 2027, a new channel applying to the programme needs 8,000 qualified watch hours over the previous 365 days, or 20 million qualified Shorts views over the previous 90. The old numbers were 4,000 hours and 10 million views.
Thresholds for fan funding and shopping tools are unchanged. And YouTube says plainly that creators already in the programme are not affected by the increase.
Already in: the Shorts switch
This is the change that matters if money already lands in your account.
Also on 1 February, ad and subscription revenue sharing on Shorts becomes conditional on 10 million qualified Shorts views over the previous 90 days. The important detail is that falling short is not an eviction. A channel below the line stays in the programme, keeps earning on long-form video, and Shorts revenue resumes on its own the moment it climbs back over 10 million.
It is a switch, not a locked door. For channels under the threshold, YouTube is promising incentive programmes instead — bonuses tied to Shopping, incentives for brand deals, boosts for starting trends — with no figures attached to any of them yet. That is the paragraph worth revisiting when the numbers arrive.
Premium Lite goes everywhere Premium already is
The third change drew the least attention and is the most concrete for viewers in Portugal. Premium Lite, the cheaper subscription that strips ads from most content, is expanding to every country where YouTube Premium is already sold.
The arithmetic differs by subscription. YouTube sets aside 30% of net subscription revenue from Premium and 60% from Premium Lite for the creator pool, splits that pool by watch time and views, and pays each channel 55% of its share on long-form and 45% on Shorts. Over three million creators are dividing it.
The new terms are signed inside YouTube Studio. It is the same tidying-up that pushed Suno into watermarking AI-generated music: platforms are all deciding at once who gets paid and why, while pirated books keep moving through Telegram and WhatsApp groups paying nobody at all.
By Oliver Grant
Image: Freestocks.org / StockSnap.io (CC0)