I'm also impacted by this, I have the sub count but not the view time. I'm 60000 minutes short (analytics report in minutes, but the restrictions is in hours, presumably to make the number looks smaller?)
I made $27 from YT last year, which is an absolutely woeful return on investment of the time I put into my videos (I think I could literally do one hour of free lance work as a software dev and pass that out ), so if I was in it for the money I'm doing the wrong thing! In fact the only reason I enabled ads is I'm convinced YT only recommends videos with ads.
I'm also fortunate enough that I can fund my own channel and projects, but I would hate to thing someone isn't doing a project or video because they can't afford it cause they didn't get the $100 or whatever. There is places where $100 would go quite a long way too.
There is a couple of things that bothers me about this:
- Are smaller channels going to get the same opportunities to be recommended now that they are not monetized?
- The system favors longer videos
Regarding the longer videos, I made the decision that my style of videos would be as concise as possible, as that's how I like to view videos, and I feel like I'm being punished for it. I try to have as little fluff as possible on my videos. This doesn't suit all styles of videos but it works ok for me. My most popular video series is called two minute tidbits, which are heavily condensed videos on one subject or area. Making videos this short takes more time than you think! The average time it would take me one is maybe 4-6 hours.
I'm probably going to wind up short of the target of 4k hours even with the boost my channel got from Dave (It's going to be quite close though). But I'm not going to stop making videos, or even change what videos I make or how I make them.
I'm just going to have to knock it out of the park for the next month
it is really worth bothering google writing a check, and your viewers having to put up with ads for $27 ?
Did you stop reading the post when you got to the $27 part?
Here is the analytics of traffic sources on my channel for the last year
Red line is when I started enabling ads, Maroon colour is the amount of traffic from suggested videos. You can clearly see there is a lot more maroon after I enabled ads than before.
Also there was two videos I used to watch every week after Game Of Thrones, one by Auzzie Man Reviews and one by Alt Shift X. I was subscribed to neither. I used to get notified on my phone when Alt Shift X released his video (had ads) and Auzzie Man's didn't even show up in my apps feed (no ads)
Maybe this is anecdotal evidence that doesn't mean anything, but it's good enough evidence for me to think it makes a difference.
But to answer your two points:
Re Google: I am not really bothered about the administration Google has to go through if I'm being honest. They also will only write you a cheque at $75 so I haven't received anything off them anyways.
Re Viewers: Even though it really seems like people don't care about 5 second skippable ad (I know I have never turned off a video because of it), I would have been happy to leave the ads off, but as mentioned above, I think my channel is performing better since I enabled them so It's something I'm hopping my viewers are ok with, and so far it seems like they are.