YouTube recently doubled the requirements in terms of watch hours to be a partner in ad revenue — from 4,000 to 8,000 watch hours. And this really is a small change. Now, I see people flipping out about this with videos saying things like, "they're screwing content creators over." And I'm grateful that in my Skool community, a guy who just started his YouTube channel recently, Scouse Will, made a post saying that it's not worth him making YouTube videos because of this.
Here's my stance on this. I'm a full-time YouTuber. I've been on YouTube since 2011. I have six channels. I make thousands of dollars a month on YouTube. I don't have another job — this is all I do. I just deleted everything last year, so I have four channels I'm still looking to monetize and two that are monetized. So I'm in a good position to give perspective.
YouTube Is Personal Development First, Income Second
Here's what I said to him. He was telling me that doing YouTube videos was forcing him to confront a lot of things about himself. And I said: for your own personal development — for everybody, or maybe not everybody, but for lots of people — it is worth doing YouTube. But at the same time, if you're doing YouTube with the expectation of income, that's a lot different. Most of you should only do YouTube as a hobby and just share your life and not even think about making money.
I've done a couple of videos about this. One said, "Content creators, stop working for free." And that video is basically saying, look, if you're going to call yourself a content creator, you need to act like a professional. Professionals don't upload a couple of videos — three or four videos every week — and figure, well, I'm done, I should just get income. No. I upload on average five and a half plus videos a day. I upload five to eight videos a day on average. That's 494 videos I've uploaded since May 18th. If you want to do this for money, you need to act like it's a job and work it like a job.
The Queen and the Dumb Career Move
And I know I'll mention the queen again, because some of you like that shout out. I dated this woman. She quit her corporate job — which looked like it was taking good care of her — to do content creation, where she was making $0. She was putting a ton of effort in, but she didn't even have a good path to income. And I guess she didn't want your boy to make it all easy for her and have it be like TI: you can have whatever you like. Yeah. Stacks on me. YouTube on ice. We can pop water bottles all night, baby. You can have all the views you like. Yeah. She didn't want that.
So it's a dumb career move to think that you're going to upload videos and just make money off them. Now, yes, perhaps one percent of people have some quirk of their personality, or they're so beautiful, or they're saying the exact right thing at the exact right time, that the algorithm is going to push them. But most of you are not that. So what you need to do is decide: either YouTube is a hobby or it's not. And for most people, just do YouTube for fun.
What the Doubled Watch Hours Actually Cost
And here's the truth about the change, too. Take my monetized ICP channel. I just started this channel on March 21st, 2026. I've gotten 329,000 views — 39,000 of those organic views. And here's the ad revenue: 5,900 watch hours in 28 days. Now, this is good crypto ad revenue. This is not gaming videos or vlog revenue — this is good financial services revenue: $372. So if we add a couple thousand more watch hours to it, we could round it to about $500 for 8,000 watch hours.
So yes, you could argue that since YouTube has doubled the threshold for watch time hours, you need to get an extra 4,000 watch hours, and wow, you might miss out on a couple hundred dollars of ad revenue in order to do that. Is $200 life changing for you? Because it shouldn't be. To me, I don't even worry about things less than $10,000 in one direction or another. I think about my whole year of ad revenue at once. If you're sweating a couple hundred dollars, you're in such a scarcity mindset that you're not going to make it on YouTube. And you should just get a job or find some reliable income or make some connections locally, because YouTube is hard and it's getting more difficult with AI.
You've got somebody like me who cranks out five to eight videos a day. I use AI to generate thumbnails. I use AI to rapidly research and speed up my video production process. I use AI to go in and optimize my metadata. I can have descriptions and titles done fast, and I run my videos through multiple AIs to almost instantly generate the most clickbait titles for my videos. And if you're not doing that, you're not, in most cases, going to get what I'm getting.
Ad Revenue Is the Minority of My YouTube Income
But here's the even deeper point. If you're worried about a couple hundred dollars in ad revenue, you have no idea how to really make money on YouTube. Ad revenue is a minority of the money I make on YouTube. The majority of the money I make on YouTube goes through jerrybanfield.com. And this you don't even need to be monetized for. All you need to do is have your own website and get to selling stuff immediately, as soon as you launch your channel.
My website is set up where I just built it with AI. It is super easy to build with AI. You can literally use Claude Max like I do, which is $200 a month — so I don't sweat small amounts of money. YouTube is not a great side hustle if you're sweating small amounts of money. If you're sweating small amounts of money, you're not going to be making money. Because I guarantee you, to make $200 in YouTube ad revenue, you could have just as easily gotten a job for $10 an hour and guaranteed yourself that you made $200 from 20 hours of work. Whereas if you put in 20 hours of work on YouTube, you're probably not going to make anything. If you calculate most YouTubers' income in ad revenue, you're making a few dollars an hour. You could easily work and make more money than that.
If you want to make real money on YouTube, you need to sell something. And the popular things to sell are community. If you want to make real money on YouTube, look at what I'm doing: selling a community directly on my website. I have this straight on the blockchain. There's no more third party in the middle — it's my community, on my website, via my code. And you can buy that with Stripe or with ICP straight on my website. I just launched this and tested it with one of my other profiles. You can literally be the very first person in this community. How cool would that be?
But I also have where you can schedule a Zoom call with me for 30 minutes, which can easily bring in a couple hundred dollars in a single day for me. Then I've made it even faster now, because some of you can't wait a day or a couple of days for a scheduled time — you just want to talk to me right this second. So now you can do that too. You want to talk to me about your YouTube channel for 10 minutes as soon as possible? If I've set that I'm online, you can buy this and I'll give you a call within usually a few minutes. As soon as I see the notification and I'm available, I will hop in — often you'll get a call from me within 10 minutes, on WhatsApp, FaceTime, Zoom, whatever you gave me your number for. Or you can talk to me for 30 minutes. And then I have a Skool community also, and that makes more than my YouTube ad revenue every month. All of these are things you literally can start with zero views.
Get a Mentor — or at Least Talk to a YouTuber
So if you're sweating, "oh my God, YouTube made this change" — look, if you're going to take YouTube seriously, you need to be acting like it. You need to be learning and thinking like it. And you should have a mentor. I don't need a mentor at this point — I've been doing YouTube 15 years — but I have colleagues. I have peers. I have YouTubers that text me, that WhatsApp with me, that schedule calls with me, that I've followed for years. And I know what I see in their businesses, and there are lots of other YouTubers I know and talk to. So if you don't have that, you should be talking to a YouTuber. Otherwise, you are completely wasting your time on YouTube outside of personal development. Now, that aspect of YouTube is valuable.
My Vlog Channel Makes Money Without Monetization
For example, I have a channel that you could make yourself — a vlog channel. This channel makes money straight through my website at jerrybanfield.com. And this channel does not make any YouTube ad revenue. But people have come through from my vlogs and spent hundreds of dollars in the last month joining my Skool community and scheduling calls. On my main channel, I have YouTube ad revenue, and on my website there's going to be a bunch more things you can buy. But this vlog channel is not monetized. And for this channel in particular, yes, could I monetize sooner with the old watch time requirement? Sure. But does it really matter if I have to wait an extra month or two? Again, I don't care about missing a couple hundred dollars in ad revenue.
Looking at the actual analytics for this channel, it's on its way to monetization. It's almost to being monetized on the new system — this will basically be two, three, four more days and I can monetize there. And if I remember correctly, YouTube didn't change this threshold; they just changed the ad revenue one. So you can still get Super Chats, you can still live stream and get memberships and all of that right there with 500 subs. And this is nice, because once you've completed that tier, then you're able to easily complete the watch page ads requirement. At the rate I'm going based on my analytics, I'll probably be able to get the watch time ads within a couple of weeks.
I've got 1,900 watch time hours on this channel in a month, which is half of what you need right now. But look at the growth. And the subscribers are growing even faster — at this rate, I'll hit the watch time hours faster than the subscribers. So again, this change isn't a big deal because, ooh, I might have to wait a couple more months.
What Actually Matters: A System to Make Money
What is a big deal is that you know the truth about YouTube and what it really takes to make money. If you want to make money on YouTube — especially if you want to do it as anything more than a hobby or a side project — you need to be taking it seriously, putting in some serious effort, and then having a mentor who can tell you where you're wasting your time. Most of you are putting too much time in and not getting enough views, subscribers, and high-quality fans. Most of you, like the woman I dated before, have no system to make money if you do go viral. She had some of her videos get hundreds of thousands of views, and she didn't make any money off it. Unlike if my videos get hundreds of thousands of views — people start coming through jerrybanfield.com, scheduling calls, buying the community, and joining the Skool.
And I'm going to put things like tips up on my website. Then there's a leaderboard, so you can show off on the leaderboard that you're the top Jerry Banfield fan. I'm going to put all kinds of other products on there — courses, comedy, all kinds of stuff is going to go up there.
So if you want to do YouTube full time, this change doesn't matter. And if you're just doing YouTube as a hobby, this change might cost you a couple hundred dollars. But if you're doing YouTube as a hobby, then you shouldn't be spending hardly any money on it anyway. Just film the videos on your phone and upload them, and be happy with whatever views you get. If you want more of my thinking on all of this, I've collected years of it in my YouTube Coaching playlist.
Why You Need Your Own Platform
I hope this has helped, because I see a bunch of people panicking and going off on YouTube. From YouTube's point of view, they need to make their business profitable. And this is also a good example of why you need your own platform. And this is why I'm bringing everybody to jerrybanfield.com as much as I possibly can. Because when you have your own platform, you can set the rules. But when you're on YouTube's platform, they have the traffic. So what you need is traffic plus your own platform. And your own platform is easier than ever to build with AI today.
If you don't have your own platform, you have no right to even complain about the terms, because you're using somebody else's platform. That's like going into somebody else's house — if you don't like it, go somewhere else. YouTube is the best deal for content creators out there right now. And at the same time, you've got to get people off of YouTube if you really want to monetize the best.
I hope to see you on jerrybanfield.com. I would love to talk to you and hear about your YouTube channel.
I'll also put some services up on my website where you can just submit your YouTube channel and I'll give you something like an email review of your channel and everything. I'm going to add all that stuff up there, so go take a look for that on my website.