- Let's play a fun little quiz.
Super London Cars, sitting on around 25,000 subscribers,
creating YouTube Shorts about, you guessed it, Supercars.
From these videos, they have gained 30 million views
and 170,000 hours of watch time.
My question to you is how many of these hours
have counted towards the 4,000 hours of watch time
required for monetization?
You won't believe the answer, even when I tell you.
(urgent rock music)
This video of a Bugatti Chiron,
parking really close to another car, 25 million views.
This video of a Lamborghini Aventador, 1 million views.
This video of a Ferrari LaFerrari, 800,000 views.
You know what, I get it.
It's a simple value proposition that still works today.
Film rare, expensive cars, keep the content short
and snappy, let car enthusiasts go wild, and you know what?
It works, and I applaud Super London Cars
for grabbing that opportunity we've all been talking about,
YouTube Shorts, with both hands
and creating a successful channel out of the idea
in what, ooh, less than 60 days.
And in years gone by such phenomenal success would easily
be enough to qualify this channel for YouTube monetization,
but here's the catch.
Videos played from the Stories and short videos shelf
don't count towards monetization requirements.
So is that it? Is this channel screwed?
Does it explain why only a tiny fraction of the hours earned
on this channel have gone towards monetization requirements?
No, not at all.
Take a look at this.
(smooth music)
I have explained this before, but what the hell,
here we go again.
It all depends on where you watch the videos
as to how the watch time is calculated.
For example, if you watch a video
through the standard YouTube player in the mobile app,
it's classed as a regular YouTube view
with watch time that should count towards monetization.
However, if you watch that same video through,
as YouTube call it, the Stories and Shorts video shelf,
this is classed as a Shorts view
and the watch time doesn't count
towards the monetization requirements.
Now you can check what type of views and watch time
you are getting from YouTube analytics.
So on the analytics page of your YouTube studio,
click the see more button to bring up advanced analytics
and then click on Traffic source.
This will show you at a channel level
how many views you are getting as YouTube Shorts.
The watch time is also displayed
for each traffic source here too.
So roughly speaking, what you should be able to do here
is disregard the watch time from Shorts,
since we know they don't count, but count the watch time
from all of the other traffic sources towards monetization.
We can illustrate this on the vidIQ YouTube Shorts channel,
which shows you how many hours
we've earned towards monetization
and compare it to those traffic sources.
When we remove Shorts as a traffic source,
the watch time hours, very roughly, add up.
It will take time, but we should eventually reach
that 4,000 hours of watch time requirement.
But now let's compare these numbers
to the Super London Cars channel because they have
way more subscribers, millions more views,
a massive amount more watch time, and yet they're only
700 hours closer to monetization than we are.
Clearly, the numbers don't seem to add up here.
And when you look at the traffic sources
for the Super London Cars YouTube channel
they're even more confusing.
While it is very clear that the channel
is earning almost all of its watch time from YouTube Shorts,
there are still thousands of hours
coming from Suggested videos and Browse features.
These hours alone should be more than enough to take
Super London Cars over the monetization threshold.
So what on earth is going on here?
Well, I can think of three possible explanations,
none of them good ones.
First of all, this is a simple glitch
in the YouTube analytics and the Super London Cars creator
needs to contact YouTube to get this fixed
so that they can apply for monetization.
Secondly, YouTube have changed their policies
so that no videos that are under 60 seconds long
count as watch time towards monetization,
but YouTube haven't told any of us about this,
or the traffic source analytics aren't accurate enough
to tell us when there are views coming from YouTube Shorts
that are actually applied to Suggested videos
and Browse features, which makes it really difficult
for us to try and get a certain answer out of all of this.
And let's be honest, this just all
adds to the confusion over YouTube Shorts.
I mean, first of all,
there's no consistency in requirements.
If a watch time from Shorts doesn't count
towards monetization, why did the subscribers gained
from YouTube Shorts count towards monetization?
There's also the continuing question
of just how useless this button is for YouTube Shorts
creators but we've already done a video on that topic
over here, and that is a fascinating watch.
But, yeah, as far as I'm concerned,
this channel with 30 million views
and 170,000 watch time hours
should be eligible for monetization on YouTube.
Surely, YouTube, is that right?
If you're wrong, please let us know in this video.
So yeah, YouTube Shorts, lots of opportunity
to get views and subscribers.
Are you ever gonna be able to make any money out of this?
I'm not quite sure.
(soft upbeat music continues)
(graphic thunders)