The winners and losers of YouTube’s view count and monetization overhaul

But the big number you see at the bottom of any video? That’s what’s changing, in a move the platform said is to help eliminate metric confusion for creators. It also puts it more in-line with TikTok and Instagram in terms of primary metrics, both of which count a click or autoplay as a view. 

Easy as it is for creators to rack up views, turning them into money will get harder. Early next year, YouTube is also making changes to its Partner Program, increasing the minimum qualification requirements for creators to apply. As of February 2027, new channels hoping for ad revenue and Premium revenue sharing will need double the long-form watch hours (8,000 instead of 4,000) and double the Shorts views (20 million instead of 10 million). 

It’s a steeper ask, and Shorts has an added hurdle: a rolling minimum threshold of 10 million views every 90 days for creators to keep earning revenue from their content. If they fall below that threshold, they won’t have to reapply to the YouTube Partner Program (YPP), but they won’t make any money for those 90 days either. 

Here’s a list of who stands to win and lose from these changes. 

Winners: Long-form creators

“For established long-form creators, I don’t see this as a huge disruption,” said Joey Gagliardi, director of creator programming and education at G&B Digital Management and the College of Influence. The other execs and agents Digiday spoke with agreed — long-form will continue to be the platform’s premier offering.

The only thing that’s different is now the big number you see on the app or on your television will no longer be a fragmented look at viewership when compared to Shorts. Those more superficial views may help longer videos get an initial jump in impressions (as the views on those videos used to only count if someone stuck around). If the quality is there, they’ll keep viewers locked in and watching past that crucial engaged mark.

Losers: Short-form creators who take longer to produce content

YouTube’s rolling minimum threshold kicks in next year will be a challenge for creators who make short-form content that takes longer to produce. Though anyone who makes it into the YPP will remain there even if their Shorts fall below the threshold, they won’t make money for that entire period they missed the mark. So if you don’t get 10 million views every 90 days, there goes your revenue.

Jeff Bruno, a YouTube animator, told Cartoon Brew it was an “insane requirement to keep hitting consistently” and that short-form creators are already considering moving to long-form. Lengthier productions or a slow few weeks can demonetize a short-form creator, whereas automated or AI-generated short-form channels can keep pumping content out at a pace humans simply can’t.

Gagliardi stresses “caution” when approaching this new Shorts metric, as a larger, rolling threshold will create pressure to post more, which could affect content quality. 

“Ideally this rewards consistency and real audience engagement rather than just encouraging creators to chase quantity over quality,” he said.

This change could also negatively affect mid-sized, long-form creators who make a decent chunk of change by uploading Shorts. According to a Reddit post on r/PartneredYouTube, this could prevent a large number of them from making money through Shorts revenue, as the threshold is so high.

Winners: Cross-platform posters and measurers

YouTube’s new view count brings it more in-line with platforms like Instagram and TikTok, which count views from the moment a video starts. This makes comparing content across platforms much easier for both creators and marketers, and could encourage more creators to start posting on YouTube, according to Josh Gabay, YouTube strategy lead at marketing agency Creator Match. 

“Creators will find more leverage to cross-post content across these platforms for greater reach and audience size,” he said. “This creates a greater incentive to produce more content, which has led brands to enter the YouTube space.” 

YouTube has been counting views this way for Shorts for some time now, but this change will make everything uniform across the platforms, and therefore help creators better gauge the clickability of their longer-form content. 

Take NowThis, which has 2.2 million followers on YouTube. It’s been posting short-form vertical videos of its big franchises like Are You Okay for quite some time now, but it will help them better compare how some of their less-frequent, long-form uploads perform. 

“It makes it easier for us to do apples to apples comparison for different formats as we consider extending our franchises,” said Sirui Hua, head of audience and analytics at NowThis. 

Adam Lieb, CEO of video game marketing platform Gamesight, called the new metric a win.

“We finally get reporting that’s normalized across platforms, we don’t have to slap an asterisk next to every YouTube number anymore,” he said. “YouTube creators come out ahead too, as their view counts used to look smaller next to, for example, a TikTok creator’s with similar reach.”

Losers: Slop content 

Though slop and clickbait content will see a drastic increase in the views, and the public-facing number below their videos will rise, it’s a false signal. If the content is bad, the engaged metrics will be bad, and if they’re hoping to monetize they probably won’t meet YouTube’s requirements. 

“I don’t think it behooves them to have AI slop aggregator accounts running rampant on their platform,” said Joe Caporoso, president at Team Whistle, a DAZN Group sports and entertainment media company that focuses on long-form YouTube content. 

But will this actually deter slop accounts, especially if those numbers initially get even bigger? Mustafa Aijaz, vp of media company SoaR, is a little worried about these inflated metrics. 

“On the surface, you’re not really able to gauge who’s actually a good creator or who just packaged their video in a way that’s optimized for ‘clickbait’,” he said. “I don’t know if there’s going to be clickbait like it used to be… We’re already kind of seeing a quality problem with all the AI stuff.”

He told Digiday he’s going to double down on making sure they see a creators’ full analytics page to be absolutely certain that they can sell what’s on the tin.

Ultimately, the ad revenue for YouTube Shorts is there and brands won’t want to invest in slop, no matter how massive that slop may seem. 

Winners: New creators (right now)

For smaller creators, a jump in viewership instantly gives their channel more curb appeal.

“I think it helps give you a little more quick exposure and a little more juice behind your channel, and probably the ability to scale quicker on smaller brand deals,” said Caporoso. “Even though everyone knows these views are going to get inflated, there’s a degree of credibility that comes with that public view number on all sides of the equation.”

If creators leverage that credibility into quality content with a clear hook, they can turn those initially inflated numbers into long-term success.

“The thing I’d hate for creators to take away from this is, ‘Great, now I need to become twice as viral’,” said Gagliardi. “That’s not a strategy. To me this reinforces the importance of creators understanding the business underneath their audience – what they’re actually good at, what their audience responds to and which revenue paths make sense for them.”

Losers: New creators (in February)

If newer creators are hoping to get monetized, they should take advantage of the viewership changes ahead of February. The new view counts will signal impressions, while their engaged views will signal what’s resonating with viewers. Leaning into the latter will help them reach the metrics they need to get monetized under YouTube’s February requirements. 

If they don’t start making changes now, they’ll find monetization is an even harder benchmark to reach come February. 

Moreover, new creators who join the platform after these changes may struggle to reach the minimum, and with the established creators having already adjusted their content for new view counts, it could be even harder to break through the noise.

Winners: Creators who get ahead of the news

Creators clever enough to take their newer, bigger YouTube metrics to brands and try and get deals for Q4 may end up with a bigger pay-out than they normally would. 

Caporoso pointed out that YouTube’s view change announcement took place mid-summer, when many people are on vacation, and not long before the changes come into effect — there’s a risk that some brands don’t look under the hood come September and pay through the nose for a creator with less-than-optimal engaged viewership. 

Losers: Brands that don’t look at the big picture

Brands and agents will have to pull back to ensure they’re presenting the bigger picture when it comes to partnerships – even though creators may slip through early and get some big deals, they won’t be able to maintain those relationships if they can’t deliver, which hurts everyone in the long run. 

“YouTube is inflating the top-line number while pushing the more meaningful signal deeper into analytics, and that creates real consequences for anyone benchmarking performance, guaranteeing views or buying media against view-based CPMs,” said Nick Cicero, founder and CEO of Mondo Metrics. “Overnight, the reported economics can improve without the underlying audience behavior changing at all.”

Aijaz said they’ll have to be even more vigilant on the reporting side, and really vet the creators they’re pushing to clients.

“It requires a deeper dive into YouTube channel metrics to understand true engagement versus ‘inflated’ momentum,” said Gabay. “The question is which type of risk a brand is most willing to take with creators: would a flat rate deal now make more sense versus a views-based deal where budget caps are reached sooner? What will they instill to protect against those risks? And, will this incentivize multi-video package deals and longer-term creator partnerships versus one-off activations? Could we reverse engineer brand deals where Engaged Views are taken into account, and how can we tie this with the creator’s YouTube account for accuracy?”

There’s a lot of questions swirling, but everyone ultimately ended at the same place: wait and see.