Insights & Trends

Tubi - Fox's free, ad-supported streaming platform - is aggressively recruiting creator content. With 110 million monthly viewers and 2.3% of US TV viewing time, it's become a serious distribution channel for YouTube creators looking to expand cross-platform. Unlike YouTube, getting on Tubi means clearing an approval process, and AIR Media-Tech is one of the few companies that helps creators navigate it. Here's what you need to know to get on Tubi, what the platform wants from creators, and how AIR can help you make the transition.

From February 1, 2027, YouTube's monetization requirements for new channels double to 8,000 qualified watch hours or 20 million qualified Shorts views, plus 1,000 subscribers. An application for the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) that reaches YouTube by 23:59 UTC on January 31 is judged against today's bar of 4,000 watch hours, even if the decision comes weeks later. YouTube's help pages don't cover the cutoff, so we asked the partner support team at AIR Media-Tech, an official YouTube partner.

Dr Roto ran a Fantasy Sports channel on YouTube for four years, published more than 500 videos, and earned $0 from them. The channel followed all the rules. It just never got into the YouTube Partner Program, which shares ad revenue only after 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 public watch hours in 12 months.

If your track has a few seconds of someone else's recording in it, you need permission to release it. That's true even if you never sampled anything yourself and the sample came inside a beat you leased. Without that permission, your distributor can reject the track, Spotify can take it down and hold its royalties, and YouTube's Content ID can send its income to whoever owns the original.