It is quickly becoming more and more difficult to make money through YouTube. As of today, YouTube has officially announced a change to its partner program in an attempt to reduce the amount of bad accounts pulling in revenue. A channel’s lifetime views must now be 10,000 before they can begin to make money off of ads through the YouTube Partner Program. While this certainly won’t have an effect on the larger channels with an established subscriber base, it will undoubtedly have quite a large impact on the smaller channels that are looking to gain traction.

YouTube claims that this requirement is being put in place due to the large amount of bad channels that post content from copyrighted sources and other YouTubers. This way, they won’t be able to run ads on their unlawful content, which could potentially save YouTube a lot of money and legal grief. Channels will have to post consistent content and hope for success if they want any chance of making money.

10,000 can seem like quite an intimidating number, especially to those that are thinking about starting their own channel. The process will inevitably take much longer than before, as their early videos will most likely only garner a few dozen views. Smaller channels will now have to put even more time (that they may or may not have) into content creation, as they already aren’t sustaining enough views to make it a full-time job.

On the other hand, the mandate is not quite as bad as it may seem at first. There was no length of time or video limit to the 10,000 view requirement, meaning that these can (supposedly) be accumulated over any amount of time., meaning that these channels will most likely be able to reach this requirement at some point. It also could also motivate content creators to realize higher quality content, which is never a bad thing.

Hopefully, this new view requirement doesn’t harm smaller channels as much as people assume it will. Keeping ad revenue from dishonest channels that unlawfully use content will certainly help YouTube with its current ad crisis, something that will benefit everyone in the long run. It remains to be seen how this will change the current state of YouTube, if at all.