YouTube doubles monetization threshold, making it harder for creators to earn

Ssoyoung, a mukbang YouTuber with about 12.5 million subscribers, made headlines after saying on a broadcast that she had paid off her husband's 900 million won debt — a testament to the income some creators earn on the platform.

Hibab, another mukbang YouTuber with about 1.7 million subscribers, has said her monthly YouTube earnings reach 100 million won ($70,700). Tzuyang, one of South Korea's most prominent YouTubers, has also said she earns around 100 million won a month from YouTube alone.

The eye-popping incomes of top YouTubers have been a recurring topic of public fascination. While such figures represent only a tiny fraction of the top 1 percent of creators, they have drawn no small number of people into trying their hand at YouTube. But making money on the platform is about to get harder — YouTube has sharply raised the bar for account monetization eligibility.

YouTube announced Tuesday that it will tighten the requirements for its YouTube Partner Program (YPP) — which allows creators to receive a share of advertising revenue — starting in February next year. Under the new rules, creators must accumulate either 8,000 hours of watch time over the past year or 20 million valid Shorts views over the past 90 days.

That is exactly double the current thresholds of 4,000 watch hours over the past year or 10 million Shorts views over 90 days. The update marks the first revision to YouTube's revenue-sharing policy in about eight years, since 2018.

Accounts already enrolled in the YPP will not be affected even if they fall short of the new requirements.

YouTube said the changes are intended to keep pace with the platform's growth, noting that Shorts now generates more than 200 billion views per day and TV-based watch time has surpassed 1 billion hours. The company added that it expects to pay out more to video creators next year than this year as a result.

Industry observers said the tightened standards will make it harder for new YouTubers to start earning money on the platform.

Some also warned that the gap between top and bottom earners could widen further. Income inequality among YouTubers is already stark, with earnings increasingly concentrated among the top 1 percent of creators.

People Power Party lawmaker Park Sung-hoon of the National Assembly's Finance and Economy Planning Committee obtained data from the National Tax Service on solo media creator income from 2020 to 2024. According to that data, the top 1 percent of creators by comprehensive income in 2024 numbered 348 people.

Together they earned a combined 450.1 billion won, averaging about 1.29 billion won per person. The average income of the top 1 percent has risen 70 percent compared with 2020, a steep upward trend.

By contrast, the bottom 50 percent — 17,404 creators — earned a combined 428.6 billion won, with average per-person income of just about 24.63 million won.