Doing any of those things without the algorithm showing your videos to people is hard though. They also require 3k watch hours in the past year so they expect you to grind for at least a year to "prove" you are worth monetizing.
That or go viral somehow and bootstrap yourself (which is likely why the shorts views are so high). Obvious not impossible as people still do it but the math seems suspect to me.
YouTube gets thousands of hours of video uploaded every second. I'm not sure what the ratio of monetized accounts to non-monetized accounts is, but if YouTube can run a channel "for free" for a year because they aren't monetizing it yet, it seems there's a threshold they are willing to accept to serve videos "nobody wants to see" until enough people do want to see it and they advertise on it.
So the high profile creators are costing YouTube money to serve their videos and YouTube wants help paying that cost. But they only extract it from channels they know are profitable because there are a lot of eyeballs on those videos.
Almost like they are promising X ad views to advertisers and want to keep that numbers game rolling. I feel like ad based spending is going to go through a correction in the next decade.
> They also require 3k watch hours in the past year so they expect you to grind for at least a year to "prove" you are worth monetizing.
No, if you get 3k watch hours on a video you are good to go, you don't have to wait a year. I've seen plenty of channels get monetized within weeks since they already had an audience.
I remember when Game Grumps made "The Grumps" channel and before they even uploaded a single video to it, they were already at Diamond(I believe) subscriber count. I don't remember if they were immediately monetized or not, though.
There are other places you can post to jumpstart your channel like Reddit or social media you're only reliant on the grace of YT if you allow yourself to be. There's also still plenty of niche blogs/news sites that can send plenty of audience to your new channel if you're producing good content. You're also misreading the hours metric it's just a rolling window not a wait period. If you hit those metrics in a week you can monetize basically immediately.
That or go viral somehow and bootstrap yourself (which is likely why the shorts views are so high). Obvious not impossible as people still do it but the math seems suspect to me.
YouTube gets thousands of hours of video uploaded every second. I'm not sure what the ratio of monetized accounts to non-monetized accounts is, but if YouTube can run a channel "for free" for a year because they aren't monetizing it yet, it seems there's a threshold they are willing to accept to serve videos "nobody wants to see" until enough people do want to see it and they advertise on it.
So the high profile creators are costing YouTube money to serve their videos and YouTube wants help paying that cost. But they only extract it from channels they know are profitable because there are a lot of eyeballs on those videos.
Almost like they are promising X ad views to advertisers and want to keep that numbers game rolling. I feel like ad based spending is going to go through a correction in the next decade.