YouTube's first monetization change since 2018 skips the bad-actors framing and lands squarely on the roughly 85,000 channels that made the old bar work for them

In January 2018, YouTube set the bar for monetization at 4,000 watch hours and 1,000 subscribers, and said plainly why: 99 percent of the channels the new rule would exclude were earning less than 100 dollars a year, and the goal was keeping spammers and bad actors away from ad money while legitimate creators kept…