In February 2018, YouTube made its biggest single adjustment to its monetization policy yet.
The change came in response to concerns that Youtube was hosting too many "spammers, impersonators, and other bad actors" on the platform, the company explained in a January blog post.
Specifically, creators would now need to accrue 4,000 hours of watch time within the past 12 months, along with at least 1,000 subscribers, in order to qualify for the Partner Program. This was a big jump from the previous requirement, which allowed creators to start making money after crossing 10,000 total views across all their videos.
"Though these changes will affect a significant number of channels, 99% of those affected were making less than $100 per year in the last year, with 90% earning less than $2.50 in the last month," YouTube wrote in the post. "...we’re making changes to address the issues that affected our community in 2017 so we can prevent bad actors from harming the inspiring and original creators around the world who make their living on YouTube."
The reason for this change is often attributed to the controversy around the actions of one star creator, Logan Paul, who filmed a suicide victim and uploaded it to his channel in an incident that made global news — just weeks before the new requirements for the Partner Program went into effect. However, these particular changes don't actually affect superstars like Paul.
In response to that specific event, and similar incidents of misbehavior before it, YouTube instituted a tightening of its internal video rating policies, often resulting in the total removal of ads from what would have otherwise been lucrative content. These reactions to offensive content became known as the "Adpocalypse" in the creator community and beyond. While this was separate from the changes made to the Partner Program, the two are often conflated.
Still, these changes were welcomed by some creators, who thought that these changes raised the bar for the whole platform.