I was looking back at all the articles that I've written about Youtube and wondered about what else I haven't covered.

For the 700th video milestone, I wrote about determination.

For the 800th video milestone, let's talk about the recent changes to Youtube rules regarding monetization. Youtube announced on their blog on 16 Jan 2018 that to be part of their Youtube Partnership Program for monetization, you have to meet 4,000 hours of watchtime within the last 12 months and have at least 1,000 subscribers.

Apparently, a lot of people are complaining about it. I've seen my friends complaining about it on Facebook too.

Let me give you the bottomline. For those people complaining about losing money, you're not earning a lot anyway. And if these new criteria are taking away your motivation to make videos, you are not someone who will make it on Youtube anyway. It's the hard truth.

Let me give you a perspective on those numbers. I'm going to use my own data here. A typical viewer of mine spends an average of 4 minutes watching my videos. To reach 4,000 hours (240,000 minutes), you need 60,000 views in a year. That's works out to be 5,000 views each month or around 165 views per day. The CPM is around US $1, so that 5,000 views is going to earn you around US $5. If you cannot even get past that small hurdle, how are you going to even grow your channel further?

Lachri Fine Art posted a video recently about this and my thoughts are exactly the same as hers. Her video has quite a number of dislikes but it's the hard truth as mentioned.

It's better to see those new rules and criteria as milestones rather than obstacles. It's better to have them as goals to work towards. If you're in it for the money, you're not going to last. You're not going to be passionate enough to make enough videos, to enjoy making those videos, in order to meet the criteria. If you still want to make it work despite the new rules, then work for it.

Youtube is still a platform with limited potential. It's up to you use it to your best advantage. If you want to stop because of the new rules, you're going to miss out on a lot, and you won't even know what you're missing out on. Look at how much these artists have achieved.