FAQ About 4000 Hours of Watch Time for YouTube

Why 4000 Hours? Some History

Making money on YouTube used to be quite easy. You just needed a channel and an AdSense account, and your very first video and views could generate income. But starting 2017, YouTube implemented some requirement prior to start monetizing a YouTube channel.

But Why did YouTube implement this requirement? The reason is that first, YouTube doesn’t want users to monetize content they do not own or that goes against the policies and second, because the pressure from advertisers who would see their ads on copyrighted or unappropriate videos.

With the 4000 hours requirement, YouTube wants creators to put effort on their channel before they can turn it into an income source and at the same time YouTube has more control on where Ads are placed, since once the 4000 hours are reached channels need to go through a manual review.

As YouTube stated back in the days, “These changes will allow us to significantly improve our ability to identify creators who contribute positively to the community and help drive more ad revenue to them (and away from bad actors)”.

Do all Hours Count? Nope.

Now, we all know that we need 4000 hours on our YouTube channel prior to ask for monetization and turn our passion into a side income as well. (Or main income, for bigger channels!).

But, if you are reading this you are probably not there yet and so let’s focus on the beginning. Baby steps 🙂

As we said, we all know that we need 4000 hours but what many people do not know, is that not all of them count and there are some twists. It is important to know how they are counted to avoid losing hours and at the same time do not waste time on growth strategies that do not bring hours.

So, what are hours are NOT counted toward monetization?

Hours from YouTube Ads. If you promote your video with YouTube Ads you might get a lot of views and hours, but none of these will actually count for the 4000 hours threesold.
Hours from any private or deleted video. Even if one of your videos might get – let’s say – 300 hours, in the moment you set the video to private or you delete it, all the hours get lost! Make sure you do not delete or set private any of your videos, at least until you are approved into the Partner Program.
Looped views or views from same IP. Now, this used to work, but not anymore. If you loop your videos you can get 2x the amount of hours the video has, at best. And if you do it from the same IP/account, watch time is counted only in a 24h span.
Hours older than 12 months. Any watch time you accumulate expires after 12 months from the monetization threesold of 4000 hours. This means that if on 1st of April of 2021 your channel gets 500 hours, one year later, on the 1st of April 2022, all the hours will disappear from the counter.

How many views are 4000 hours?

Well, this is a tricky question as it depends on the length of your videos and the average watch time. But if we consider that the average watch time on YouTube is 3 minutes per views, you would need at least 80.000 Views!

As we said, it depends a lot on the average watch time of your video. Consider that 4000 hours equal to 240.000 minutes, so you can do the maths according to your own channel stats.

Let’s say you have lots of short videos and your average watch time is 1 minute…
240.000 / 1 = 240.000 Views.

On the other hand if you upload lotss of livestream and long videos, and your average watch time is 6 minutes…
240.000 / 6 = 40.000 Views. You can expect that you need 40k views to reach 4000 hours!

Later on this page you can find a calculator to help you out.