By Jonathan Easton

Google-owned YouTube has said that its Partner Program has surpassed 2 million creators.

The programme allows YouTubers of a certain size (at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of overall watch time within the past 12 months) to earn revenue through advertising, subscription fees, donations, livestreaming and YouTube Premium.

The news was announced by chief product officer Neal Mohan in a blog post, in which he praised the growth of the programme: “YPP continues to be one of the largest drivers of the creator economy in the world. Creators who are part of YPP can make money and earn a living from their content on YouTube with ten different monetisation features (and we keep adding more), from advertiser revenue to selling merchandise. Over the last three years, we’ve paid more than US$30 billion to creators, artists, and media companies.”

While YouTube continues to see sustained growth as one of the most-visited websites on the planet, the company has struggled between keeping creators and advertisers happy. A number of controversial episodes from top YouTubers in the past lead to what was dubbed the ‘adpocalypse’ where a significant portion of advertisers reduced or entirely stopped spending money on the site as it was deemed too much of a brand safety risk.

Mohan however remains confident that it can spin both these plates and continue to grow the number of creators and advertisers on YouTube, concluding: “YouTube is built on the premise of openness, which allows millions of creators to find a voice and a community. However, we set a higher bar for what channels can make money on our platform. We have every incentive to continue to tackle problematic content on our platform: it is not just the right thing for our viewers and creators, it’s also good for business. We’ll continue our responsibility work even as we continue to grow the YouTube Partner Programme, and we consider these investments core to the future success of the creator economy at large.”