YouTube Shorts: 20 Million Views to Get Paid, and 10 Million to Stay

What changed, and when

YouTube announced the change on 10 August 2026 and it takes effect on 1 February 2027. It has two halves, and only one of them is about getting in.

Sources: YouTube Blog, 10 August 2026; TechCrunch, 10 August 2026.

The entry change is a doubling. The second row is the one most Shorts channels will feel, because it turns monetization from a one time exam into a rolling test. YouTube says channels below 10 million Shorts views in the last 90 days stay in the program and keep earning on long form videos, and Shorts earnings resume once they are back over the line.

What 20 million views means per day

Ninety days is a short window, so the daily number matters more than the total.

The long form route is no gentler. 8,000 watch hours in a year is about 21.9 hours of watch time every day, or roughly 1,315 minutes, every single day for twelve months.

One more date is worth knowing. Because the window is the last 90 days, the views that count on 1 February 2027 are the ones from roughly the start of November 2026 onward. If you are close to the old bar, the months before February are the ones that decide which rulebook you apply under.

How many Shorts that takes

What you need depends almost entirely on how many views a typical Short of yours gets. Here is the arithmetic, with nothing assumed except the average.

Our arithmetic from YouTube's thresholds. Averages hide a lot: most channels get most of their views from a few Shorts.

Two things stand out. At a few thousand views per Short, the bar is out of reach by volume alone: nobody can post 44 good Shorts a day. And at 50,000 to 100,000 views per Short, it becomes a steady habit of two to four Shorts a day. For most channels the job is to move up that table, not to post more at the bottom of it.

The new part: staying paid

Until now, once a channel was in, it was in. From February, a Shorts heavy channel that has a slow quarter stops earning from Shorts until it recovers. The long form side of the channel keeps earning either way.

That changes how a Shorts channel should think about consistency. A month off used to cost you a month of revenue. Under the rolling test it can also cost you the months after, while the 90 day total climbs back over 10 million. Steady output beats bursts.

YouTube also said it will add new ways for channels under the threshold to earn, including bonuses for YouTube Shopping, incentives for brand deals and boosts for starting and growing trends. Details had not been published at the time of writing.

Where the Shorts come from

Most channels that clear these bars do not film every Short from scratch. They cut them out of long videos they already made: podcasts, streams, interviews, lessons.

Here is what that looks like in practice, from the Shorts made on Vid2Shorts between 27 August and 25 September 2026:

First party totals from our own job log. No video, channel or person is identified.

Most people take one or two Shorts from a video and move on, and that is where the gap is. A one hour podcast usually holds far more than two moments worth posting. The channels that took five or more Shorts from one video, and the one that took 23, are doing what the new thresholds reward: getting the most chances at a big Short from footage that already exists.

A plan for the 90 days before February

1. Find your real average. Take your last 30 Shorts and divide total views by 30. Then find your row in the table above.
2. Work out your daily number. Divide 222,222 (to join) or 111,111 (to stay paid) by that average. That is the pace you are signing up for.
3. List the long videos you already have. Every podcast, stream and talk is a stack of possible Shorts you have already paid for.
4. Take more than one moment from each. Aim for five candidates per long video and keep the best three.
5. Post on a steady schedule. The rolling window punishes gaps more than it rewards bursts.
6. Watch the 90 day total, not the monthly one. YouTube Studio shows your Shorts views over time. The number that matters from February is the last 90 days.

For how much a Short is worth once you are in, see do YouTube Shorts make money. For turning one long video into several Shorts, see how to make Shorts from a YouTube video.

Questions people ask

The bottom line

From 1 February 2027 the bar to join through Shorts doubles to 20 million views in 90 days, and Shorts channels have to keep clearing 10 million every 90 days to stay paid. In daily terms that is 222,222 views to get in and 111,111 to keep earning.

Very few channels can reach that by posting more Shorts at a few thousand views each. The realistic route is fewer, better Shorts, and more of them taken from the long videos you already have.