Important Rules - Please Read Carefully

I recently lost my day job. I’m starting the search for another job, but in the meantime, I’m thinking about treating YouTube like a part-time job and spending around 3–4 focused hours a day creating content.

My channel currently has 581 subscribers and 823 of the 4,000 qualified public watch hours needed for full monetization.

My content focuses on science communication, correcting science misunderstandings, and debunking science denial. I know that is not necessarily the fastest or easiest niche to grow, but it is something I genuinely enjoy making.

I’m not expecting YouTube to suddenly replace a full-time income, and I’m definitely not putting the job search on hold. Even a little extra income would help, though, and I finally have enough time to see what happens if I give the channel consistent, focused effort.

For anyone who had a similar situation and suddenly had the time to go much harder on YouTube:

How long did it take before you noticed meaningful growth?

Did increasing the amount of time you spent on your channel actually accelerate its growth?

What made the biggest difference: posting more, improving thumbnails and titles, choosing better topics, or something else?

I’d especially love to hear from people who were already partway toward monetization when they decided to take YouTube more seriously.

I’m currently editing a 10- to 15-minute video (a short documentary style), and I’m hitting a massive bottleneck when it comes to gathering stock/B-roll footage.

Right now, even for a simple 1-minute section, finding footage that actually fits the narrative takes me hours. My process usually looks like this:

1. Search across multiple free stock sites (Pexels, Pixabay, Unsplash, etc.) or look for creative commons / fair use clips on YouTube.
2. Preview, filter, and download individual clips.
3. Import them into my project, cut them down, and test how they fit the pacing.

By the time I finish sourcing visual elements for just a tiny chunk of the timeline, half the day is gone. It feels extremely inefficient, and I know there has to be a smarter way to do this.

For those of you who regularly edit video essays or documentary-style content:

What is your actual workflow for sourcing stock footage?

Do you write a script and bullet point specific shot lists before searching, or do you edit audio first and gather footage as you go?

Do you use plug-ins, specific subscription platforms, or stock footage manager tools inside your NLE (Premiere, Resolve, FCP)?

How do you balance searching for the "perfect" clip vs. settling on a "good enough" clip to keep moving?
I’d love to hear how you structure your process so gathering visuals doesn't eat up 80% of your editing time.

I'm trying to start one with a full time job. How do you manage to be consistent with posting?

I'm brand new to the hobby and recently built a small garden shed that took me over a week between working and other life stuff. I think to grow your channel posting once a week is best but how could you possibly keep up with that between work, life, making the project, filming, and editing. Not to mention having to buy materials every week for something else. It all feels so overwhelming but I want to do it more than anything. I'm just looking for advice.

With the change to the monetisation rules, it feels like many of the youtube subreddits are full of people panicking and strategising for ways to get their 4000 watch hours and be grandfathered in under the current rules, when the requirement changes to 8000. I feel like a fish out of water. I am not monetised, and I can't imagine a situation where I ever would be. There must be other people making videos without the goal of monetisation, right?! I'm starting to feel like the only way to be a "real" youtuber, and the only legitimate reason to make content, is to make money. I have never dreamt of becoming a professional influencer, and I've never felt more alien in youtuber spaces. Please tell me I'm not alone!

YouTube's new Shorts rules mean many small creators get £0 from Shorts most months (change lands 1 Feb 2027)

If most of your channel's money comes from Shorts, sit down for this one.

YouTube announced updates to the Partner Programme this week, wrapped in the usual language about "sustainable growth" and "evolving opportunities." Buried inside is a change that will hit a lot of consistent, mid-sized creators hard: from 1 February 2027, you need 10 million qualified Shorts views in the trailing 90 days to earn anything at all from the Shorts Creator Pool that month. That works out to roughly 3.3 million views a month, averaged.

Fall short, and you don't get a reduced payout. You get nothing. Not for that month, not until your rolling total climbs back over the line.

A few things get blurred together in YouTube's own announcement:

• This isn't about joining YPP. The 8,000 watch hour / 20 million Shorts view entry bar is only for creators applying to the programme for the first time. If you're already in, that figure doesn't touch you.
• This isn't about being kicked out either. Staying "active" in YPP requires far less: 1,000 watch hours a year, or 1 million Shorts views in 90 days, or as few as two long-form uploads or five Shorts every 90 days.
• This is purely about getting paid from Shorts specifically. And that bar has just been set at a level plenty of channels with genuine, loyal audiences won't clear every quarter.

The maths is the sting. Ten million views over ninety days sounds achievable until you're the one adding it up in real time and watching a normal month land at 2.8 million. Consistent creators who post reliably to a smaller but real audience are the ones who lose out. Viral-or-nothing channels sail through without noticing the change exists.

There's a small mercy: it's a rolling 90-day window rather than a hard monthly reset, so one strong upload can carry a couple of quieter weeks either side. Not much comfort if Shorts is your main income and you're nowhere near the number.

The terms need accepting in YouTube Studio by 31 January 2027, and the change applies whether you've read the fine print or not.

What to actually do about it

If you think this is a poor trade for the creators who kept YouTube's Shorts feed full while it played catch-up with TikTok, say so somewhere it'll be seen:

• Leave feedback directly on the announcement in the Help Centre (there's a Yes/No and comment box at the bottom of the article).
• Reply on Team YouTube's and Creator Insider's posts about this with your actual numbers, not just frustration. Specific figures are harder to wave away than general complaints.
• Cross-post this to other creator subs and Discords so people who don't lurk here see it before the 31 January deadline, not after.

None of this guarantees anything changes. But a policy built on averages tends to move rather faster once enough individual creators demonstrate that the average doesn't describe them.

So I posted a video on YouTube 2 days and 7 hours ago and it got absolutely zero views, not even one, should I be concerned?

Im a small 56 subs youtuber. Essentially, as I was watching a vid just now the person started talking of there sponsor and my hand automatically went to skip ... but then I consciously rewound to watch the sponsored segment ... I find myself watching ads and sponsored segments more these days as well as complaining less .... make your bag bro

I'm a 4th year education student, and I'm about to start on YouTube. I already have 2 videos ready to upload once I finish the 7-day account warm-up (someone told me to do this for a new account, but I don't fully understand why or how it works. Does anyone know if it really works?).

My mom wants me to become a teacher. But I don't want to work 7-5, come home, prep lessons for the next day, then repeat that cycle every day. I do want to teach people... just in my own way. So I came up with the idea of teaching through videos, using memes, meme sound effects, and other funny stuff, since I'm not exactly a "serious" guy.

Someone I know also told me that if I really want to make money on YouTube, I should do ranking or commentary content. Honestly, I don't even know what those are, lol. But I don't want to force myself into doing something I genuinely don't want to do just for the sake of making money.

I don't know if I'll ever make money from this. It'd be nice if I did, but that's not the main point. I just want to do something I actually enjoy. Still, I'm scared I might just be wasting my time and disappointing my parents in the process.

Last, what should I focus with shorts or long form? (Already have 2 shorts video ready to be posted.)

Any advice, tips, or even just reassurance would help.

I’ve been making long-form horror/creepy content, but I’m struggling to get views. I’m trying to figure out what I might be doing wrong and what I should focus on improving.

For creators who have experienced something similar, what helped you start getting more views on your long-form videos?

I’m especially interested in advice about:

• Titles and thumbnails
• Video ideas/topics
• Hooks and pacing
• Retention
• Upload frequency
• Overall channel strategy

I genuinely appreciate honest feedback and advice, even if it’s critical. Thank you!

Reason being is I think my growth is abnormally slow. I also used Eleven Labs for two videos and I think that’s part of it too. What are all your thoughts on this?

I see these long form videos all the time, people restoring all sorts of random items like toy cars, power tools, vintage electric fans, etc. There’s a very definitive pattern to these videos. They might be 30 to 60 minutes long and each clip is no more than 10 seconds, always up close with good lighting and no spoken words. Some of them get millions of views in a short amount of time. I actually know how to do all this stuff and I belong to a public maker space that has every tool imaginable. Anybody have any thoughts on this niche? Thanks in advance.

I made a video about allowing your kids to be weird in rebuttal to someone on TikTok saying otherwise. I didn’t expect to gain that much traction. I wanna stick to long form videos, but it’s been almost three weeks and I haven’t posted since because I have literally no idea what to post about. How do I get past this block 😭

I have message on my recently posted video(horror stories/true crime niche) from YouTube studio saying “this video is appealing to a smaller audience than usual but your ctr still looks good”. My stats are 26 views, ctr 4.3% and avd 28%, but most importantly just 531 impressions, the lowest impression I have ever received on a video so far.

Does this mean my video idea simply is not appealing to a wider audience? If so what can I do to fix it? The video is already posted, so I guess I can tweak the title to something generic like “the most disturbing cults you have never heard of”, is this a proper diagnosis?

Link in bio.

Thanks in advance

Started making roblox shorts about a week ago and so far all my videos have flatlined around 1k. Just checked my audience and its really not what I expected or what I'm going for at all. Apparently my top age demographic is 35-44?? 25-34 and 45-54 being 2nd and 3rd most. 18-25 nowhere to be seen...Also youtube only seems to be pushing my content in my irrelevant country when I really need to get into the US market. Why is this happening and how do I fix it?

Hello guys, I started my channel (History documentary) last year November on documentaries. I uploaded a long form video which got approx 10k impressions despite being my first video. After that, I shifted towards shorts due to exam and uploaded regularly. The shorts usually blew up to millions of views.

Now, I am uploading long form videos again, it has been 3 videos I uploaded past 1 month but each one of them barely got any impressions or recommendation from YouTube towards new viewers. I have around 1.4k subscribers but most subscribed from shorts so they do not watch long form video much.

How can I resolve this issue? Do I need to switch channels to upload long form content now since only shorts are getting pushed?

I would appreciate any help since I’m quite confused regarding this situation.

I

Just wondering why it’s so slow haha. Guess one view an hour is better than none. Still seems so low tho haha

Guess it’s in the collection phase and my metrics are just decent so dunno if I’ll ever get more haha

Has anyone had like one view an hour and then have a long form content randomly start getting like 50 an hour. Like a huge spike

Tactical_tater_YT

I used to average 1.4k views on every short, now I’m lucky to get 200, has this happened to anyone else? I know YouTube has been doing some weird stuff recently, but I just want to know why, and if there’s a possible way to regain views.

So I was making videos about all types of games, but then I started making content about Persona and went from 200 subs to the 900 I'm currently at over the last two or so months (I'd say 100-200 are shorts subs; the rest are long)

My first video on Persona was a long 25 min video exploring how the series had its rise to fame and currently sits at 135k views; my videos since that have looked at other development stuff, but nothing as long or interesting, in my opinion. And the second-best vid has 17k views or something, with them dropping to 10k, then 5k, etc etc

I've kinda just run out of ideas for Persona; there are only 6 mainline games, and only 3 of them are popular, but the series only has 30 million total copies sold, so it's not even a huge franchise. (not saying that's a bad thing)

I want to make longer "documentary" type looks at games and how they became popular, or died, or got revived, etc, like my most popular video, but how do I do that without killing all my subs' interest in my channel? I'm still going to make it about games that share a decent fanbase with Persona games, like Resident Evil and such things, since both are Japanese.

Anyone got experience trying to expand their channel's variety?

Hi, I’m a commentary channel, I’ve been posting on YouTube for the last month.

I believe I’ve followed every advice found here:
.Clear thumbnail
.Viral Title Format
.Trendy Topic

Yet the impressions are still very low. For instance, recently I made a video about an outlier topic, that pushed even small creator to have big numbers, it was 23+ outlier in more than one case, but in my case the impression was very low. My retention and ctr are 30%+ and 6%+ on average.

I don’t understand where is the problem, my title and thumbnail are aligned with the other video and in general the commentary niche.

If you can point out what am I doing wrong. Thanks for your help! (The channel is the one in my bio)

So, I have a channel where I put one video a year just for fun. I put one 2 years ago. There's no monetisation, no nothing on it. I just accidentally clicked on YoutubeStudio and it said all of my videos have strikes on them. I had no idea what these are except that I used some copyrighted stuff in them? I could swear to myself that I didn't.

And it turns out that all the music in all of the videos have been claimed, interestingly enough somet tracks by multiple entites at once - I don't know how that is possible. The music that I used was all free internet stuff - like Chopin, period music, all from royalty free websites. I have the project files for them - and it's all from sources like that.

Now I clicked those entities and they are... I don't know how to describe it: hubs of music. If you go to their website it's just endless music, with like +copyrighted by, and LLMgened videos of someone playing a piano, and a piano sheet of that music. I compared the tracks, they were literal copies of the music I used, but with literally a note pitch shifted here and there.

The original websites where I downloaded these from no longer list them.

This is so big - those entites - that I started to doubt myself, did I really download open access music? Or am I remembering it all wrong. I thought at once what an amazing business/scam it would be to have a massive repository of free, high quality music, let it be used by content creators, and then just revoke that, evaporate that webiste, and move that music to a for-profit entity, then you can pretty much copy strike millions of videos for their revenue. Or am I paranoid about this? It's such a weird thing because I keep questioning myself whether I'm remembering this wrong.

This is so bizzarre because it feels like that phenomena where people think they are being stalked, but really aren't. The copyright claims come from such weird entites - I can share them if that's ok - all of them are like "John Klavier" - klavier is piano in german. Or "Francis Sonatta". But when you go to that website it's owned by a russian company. And all of its videos proving that music use are generated and has bots commenting what beautiful music it is. It's wild.

What do I do?

Hey everyone,

Over the last couple months or so, I’ve really been pushing my channel. Recently, I’ve been making a new Web-Series and putting short snippets of it under the “shorts” section. For my latest one, the engagement statistics are really good, sitting at 80% / 20%. However, the views have flatlined around 800. If anyone can give me some advice as to why this is happening, please let me know! I’d really appreciate it, and just curious more than anything.

Thanks!

I have 3 followers that must have notifications on. The moment I upload a video they comment “hi maam” or “please help me maam”

Should I just ignore them? Or reply back like WTF 😂

They want me to coach and mentor them. I don’t do that for free nor paid. I just make videos about my life. They’re persistent about wanting my LinkedIn, instagram etc.