Editorial article

Do YouTube Live Streams Count Toward 4,000 Watch Hours? A Complete Guide to Getting into YPP with Vertical Live Streams

There are two familiar paths to getting into the YouTube Partner Program (YPP): push your Shorts to 10 million views, or rack up 4,000 watch hours on long-form videos. Few people mention that there's actually a third path: live streaming.

Author · ShortsMonkeyPublished · October 16, 202621 min read

Around Chinese New Year 2025, we started testing YouTube live streams across a total of 100 accounts. Three months later, nearly 80 of them had reached 4,000 watch hours and gotten into YPP. Anyone who has worked on YouTube knows what that ratio means.

Of course, numbers like that couldn't last forever. The golden window, when it felt like picking money up off the street, was concentrated between February and April 2025. After more than a year of trial and error, here's my take: YouTube live is no longer at the early stage where you could stream almost anything and get hundreds of thousands of views pushed your way. But in the second half of 2026, it's still a blue ocean with plenty of room left to explore. You'll see quite a few examples below, and all of them are content an ordinary person could make.

This article covers four things: why live streams can get you into YPP, how to find a niche, where to get content, and how long it takes to start getting traffic once you go live.

Part 1: Why Live Streams Can Get You into YPP

1. The YPP Thresholds

First, a quick look at YouTube's monetization thresholds. To earn ad revenue from your views, you need to meet two conditions at the same time:

At least 1,000 subscribers;
10 million valid public Shorts views in the past 90 days, or 4,000 valid public watch hours on long-form videos in the past 12 months (Shorts watch time doesn't count).

Once you meet both, you can apply for YPP. If your application is approved, you get a share of the ad revenue.

2. Does Live Stream Watch Time Count Toward the 4,000 Hours?

Live streams are neither Shorts nor regular long-form videos. So does their watch time count or not?

The official supplementary notes we've seen say only two things: watch time from long-form videos counts, and unlisted live streams don't. Whether public live streams count isn't spelled out anywhere in the rules. That's also why there's so little public discussion of "using live streams to get into YPP".

We ran tests during Chinese New Year 2025, and our conclusion was this: live stream watch time does count toward valid watch hours, but not in every case. We narrowed it down to three conditions:

The stream must be set to Public. Some accounts default to Private when going live, so you need to switch it to Public manually.
A single stream can't exceed 12 hours. If it runs longer than 12 hours, none of that stream counts toward your YPP watch hours.
No violations. For example, if you play copyrighted music on the stream and it leads to a Community Guidelines warning, that stream won't count toward your watch hours.

3. Why Ordinary Content Can Get Millions of Views per Stream

Now that the rules are clear, the natural next question is: live streaming doesn't sound easy at all, so how do you rack up 4,000 hours?

Let's start with a few recent streams:

One person filming themselves on camera, a 4-minute stream, brand-new channel, 1.8 million views;
The same person filming themselves again, this time outdoors, still a brand-new channel, a 4-minute stream, 2 million views;
A street food stall in China making egg burgers, new channel, 12 million views;
A street stall making jianbing (Chinese savory crepes), small channel, 3.2 million views;
A street stall making fried rice, small channel, 9 million views.

Set the content aside for a moment and look only at the views and subscriber counts. If you've ever live-streamed in China, you know what a million views on a single stream means. These channels have only one or two thousand subscribers, ten or twenty thousand at most. On Douyin, a creator with 10,000–20,000 followers simply couldn't get 10,000 people watching at once and a million views on a stream, not unless they rode a massive trending topic.

Now look at the content. If you filmed these streams yourself, could you pull them off? Yes, anyone could. This isn't scarce content with a technical or filming barrier; it's ordinary selfie footage and staged street-stall shots. Post the same content as Shorts or long-form videos on YouTube, and it probably wouldn't even reach 1,000 views.

But on YouTube Live, they're massive breakouts. Here's why: YouTube is boosting live streaming and has put vertical live streams into the Shorts traffic pool, and vertical live streams are badly short of content. Every example above is a vertical live stream.

Below is the traffic sources breakdown for one of our streams that got 300,000 views. The traditional way horizontal live streams get distributed, meaning clicks from thumbnail impressions, brought in just 71 views. 41% of the traffic came from the Shorts feed, which shows that YouTube is handing part of the Shorts traffic pool over to vertical live streams. YouTube Shorts gets more than 200 billion views a day, so that's an enormous base.

The other 57% came from "Vertical live feed", a traffic source YouTube added specifically to promote live streams. Compare that with a stream from late January 2025: back then, 96% of the traffic came from the Shorts feed, and "Vertical live feed" accounted for only 0.4%.

To sum up, live streams can get you into YPP for two core reasons:

Watch time accumulated on vertical live streams counts toward the 4,000-hour requirement;
Vertical live streams are short on quality content and the platform is pushing them hard, so even simple content can pull in huge traffic.

Below is real analytics data from single streams that each racked up three to four thousand watch hours. Both streams were kept under 12 hours.

Part 2: How Long Do You Need to Stream to Reach 4,000 Hours?

The math behind watch time is straightforward: concurrent viewers × stream length = watch time.

If a stream holds a steady 100 concurrent viewers for 1 hour, that's 100 hours of watch time. How long each individual viewer stays doesn't change the result. By this math, streaming for 40 hours with 100 viewers online gets you to 4,000 hours.

But keep two things in mind:

The concurrent viewer counts that streams display these days are inflated, so I suggest cutting them in half. At a real 50 viewers online, you'd need to stream for roughly 80 hours.
A single stream can't exceed 12 hours, so you'll need to split that across at least 7 or so streams.

Raising your concurrent viewers and keeping viewers around longer will both get you there faster.

Part 3: How to Find a Live Stream Niche with Potential

Before you go live, the most important step is choosing your niche. Get it right, and even a new channel can rack up several million views within a month. Get it wrong, and no matter how many accounts you run or how long you stream, you're just racking up stream time for zero views. This part covers five things: what a niche actually is, what a niche with potential looks like, where to find one, how to break it down and evaluate it, and how to validate it at minimum cost.

1. Get This Straight First: A Live Stream Niche Is a "Format", Not a Broad Category

When most people talk about a niche, they mean a broad category like "food", "gaming" or "outdoors". For vertical live streams, though, that's far too coarse. What actually drives traffic is a replicable format: what's on screen, what the person is doing, and what outcome viewers are waiting for.

For example, "outdoors" isn't a niche. "Burying snacks in the mud, watering them, and digging them back up, or using effects to grow a tree covered in snacks" is.

We compiled 100 replays of low-subscriber, high-view vertical live streams from the past month: all of them went live between September 12 and October 10, 2026, every channel had fewer than 10,000 subscribers, and replay views per stream ranged from 2.84 million to 24.68 million. A single format, "outdoor skits", accounted for 41 of them, from 34 different channels, and for 46% of total views.

When 34 channels all get views in the millions with the same format, it means the platform is pushing the format itself, not any one channel. So finding a niche is essentially about finding "a format the platform is pushing right now".

A format you can actually put into practice needs to nail down at least four things:

Element	Question to answer	Example: "outdoor bury-and-dig treasure hunt"
Main visual	What's always in the shot	Red dirt, a mud pit, a pair of hands
Action	What action viewers are watching	Digging a hole, burying something, watering it, digging it back up
Hook	Why viewers don't swipe away	What gets dug up, and whether something will grow
Loop unit	What one segment covers, and whether the next one can follow right after	One segment covers one bury-and-reveal; swap the prop and you have the next segment

Only when you can describe a stream clearly with this table have you truly found a niche.

2. Niches with Potential Usually Share Six Traits

① Long-term demand. Most live stream niches always have traffic; only the level of competition rises and falls over time. Sleep aids, stress relief, the weird and bizarre, animation for young kids, cooking: these needs aren't going away. Rather than chasing a trend that suddenly pops up, it's safer to look for new formats within long-standing demand.

② Low-subscriber channels can break out too. This is the most direct signal that "the platform is pushing the format". Across the 100 streams above, views were a median of about 1,400 times the subscriber count. In this sample, subscriber count made almost no difference to views: for channels with under 3,000 subscribers, the median views per stream was 3.7 million; for those with over 5,000, it was 3.99 million. Thirty-seven streams came from channels created after July 2026, with a median of 4.18 million views, no worse than older channels. And for another 19, less than 30 days passed between the channel being created and the stream going live. If only big channels break out in a niche while small channels generally get no traffic, that niche isn't newcomer-friendly.

③ Competition isn't saturated yet. Look at how many streams are running the same format and how their concurrent viewers are distributed. If the top stream has several thousand viewers online and the rest are in the single digits, traffic is concentrated in a handful of accounts. If multiple streams each have dozens to a hundred-plus viewers online and none of the channels have many subscribers, traffic for that format is still spreading out.

④ It can be produced continuously. Live streams run for hours, so your footage has to keep up. A good format supports lots of variations: among the outdoor skits in the 100 cases, there's burying snacks, growing snack trees, cola trees, cookie trees, candy plants, digging up toys and digging up colored eggs. Same structure, different props. If a format only gives you one or two clips, it can't sustain a stream.

⑤ It suits the way people watch live streams. Vertical live streams are discovered while people scroll the Shorts feed, and viewers decide within a second or two whether to stop. Formats that work for live streams usually share these traits: you don't need to understand the language, you can tell what's going on at a glance, the process has suspense or is satisfying to watch, and the visuals can loop indefinitely. We've broken down a miniature-village white-noise stream on our site that got 12 million views in a week, and its keys came down to three things: a stable scene, continuous natural sounds, and visual motion that can loop (Miniature Village Livestreams: ASMR White Noise Reaches 12 Million Views in a Week).

⑥ The risks are manageable. Copyrighted music, unauthorized footage, and looping the same clip over and over with only the colors changed can all cause problems later during YPP review. When you pick a niche, figure out up front where your footage will come from.

3. Where to Find Candidate Niches: Five Sources

Source 1: Search YouTube and sort streams by popularity

Search for a keyword on YouTube, click "Filters" in the top-right corner, select "Live" under "Features", and choose "Popularity" under "Prioritize". The live streams for that keyword will be ranked by popularity.

There are three kinds of keywords to search:

Content keywords: terms like street food, cooking, fishing, cartoon and toys, to first get a feel for which live streams exist in a broad direction.
Format keywords: terms like ASMR, satisfying, survival skills, bushcraft, DIY and trap. Many vertical live stream titles are stuffed with these words. Of the 100 cases, 65 had survival or bushcraft in the title, even when the content was really a fantasy skit about planting snacks and growing a snack tree. Streams in the same format use strikingly similar wording in their titles, so following those words in search will often turn up every stream in that format.
Long-tail keywords: add a specific object to the first two types of keywords, such as crab hole, bird trap, seed peeling or soap. The more specific you get, the easier it is to find sub-formats that haven't been saturated yet.

Once you have results, look at streams that are "live now" and "past live streams" separately: concurrent viewers on a live stream tell you whether the format has traffic right now; cumulative views on a replay tell you whether it took off over the past while. Look at both, and you'll know whether the format is on the way up or already past its moment.

Source 2: Scroll the Shorts feed directly

Most of the traffic for vertical live streams comes from the Shorts feed and "Vertical live feed". So the most direct approach is to scroll Shorts like a regular viewer. Whenever a vertical live stream comes up, stop and note what it's streaming, how many viewers are online, and how many subscribers the channel has.

Whatever comes up in your feed is what the platform is pushing right now. I recommend scrolling with an account that's close to your target audience: for example, if you want to reach viewers outside China, don't use an account whose recommendations are wall-to-wall Chinese content. Scroll for a fixed 20 minutes a day for a week, and you'll develop a very intuitive sense of which formats are being pushed.

Source 3: Revisit niches that have taken off before

As mentioned earlier, most live stream niches always have traffic. Put together a list of formats that have taken off in the past, search them again every so often, and see whether people are still streaming them and how many viewers they have online. Examples include the street-stall food, merge-style mini games and handmade mochi mentioned in this article, or the cases we recorded in our September topic trends roundup: a malatang street-stall live stream that drew 12 million views in 4 days, a street fried-fish ASMR stream with 8 million views in 10 days, and a real-footage toy ASMR stream with 10 million views in 2 days (YouTube Topic Trends, September 2026: 15 High-View Shorts and Live Stream Case Studies).

Source 4: Work backward from Shorts formats that have already taken off

Many vertical live streams are really just short clips of a Shorts format stitched together and looped. Among the 100 cases, the "medicine or shot" cartoon streams carry the #shorts tag right in their titles. Once a format has been validated on Shorts, moving it to a live stream gives you much better odds of success.

To find breakout Shorts formats, you can use the trending charts and keyword search on ShortsMonkey, focusing on videos from small channels whose views far exceed their subscriber counts. When you see a format getting high views again and again across multiple small channels, it's worth checking whether there are live streams doing the same thing.

Source 5: Find sub-niches and variations within existing niches

Take "chinese food" as an example. It's already a high-traffic live stream niche, but nearly all of its streams are street food, meaning roadside stalls. So what about handmade food, the back kitchen of a proper restaurant, or traditional street snacks like sugar painting and sugar-figure blowing? Nobody can answer that for you directly; you have to test it yourself. Luckily, testing is cheap. For example, we tested handmade mochi streams, and those took off too.

There's a very handy method for making variations: break a format down into a few variables and change only one at a time. For example, a game mod live stream can be broken down into three variables: characters, vehicles and tracks. Keep two and change one, and you'll see which variable is actually driving the traffic (How to Find Opportunities in Your Niche: A GTA Superhero Mod Case Study). Outdoor skits work the same way: keep the action structure the same and swap the props from snacks to cola, cookies, candy, toys or colored eggs, and you've got a new set of variations.

4. Breaking Down a Benchmark Stream: What to Look at and What to Record

Once you've found candidate streams, don't make a decision after a single glance at the view count. I recommend logging each benchmark using the table below:

Dimension	What to look at	How to judge
First second	What you see first when it appears in your feed	It only suits the Shorts feed if you can follow it without sound or captions
Content structure	Is it "process to reveal", "choice to outcome", or a pure loop	Structures with a hook keep viewers watching longer
Loop length	How long one segment is and how often it repeats	Shorter loops make variations easier, but replaying the same segment over and over can easily get flagged as repetitive
Language dependence	Is there dialogue, and what language are the captions in	No dialogue makes it easiest to reach a global audience; with language, it depends on your target region
Resolution and aspect ratio	Is it 9:16, and at what resolution	A third of the 100 cases are 720×1280: resolution isn't the barrier, the vertical aspect ratio is
Title tags	Which words keep appearing in titles	Note this format's "stock words" and use them in your own titles too
Performance	Concurrent viewers, replay views, channel subscribers, channel creation date	If low-subscriber and new channels also get high views, the format itself is being pushed
Consistency	The same channel's last few streams, and other channels in the same format	A single breakout could be luck; only when multiple streams and multiple channels break out is the format doing the work

One more word on consistency: 11 channels appeared more than once among the 100 cases, breaking out two or three times within a single month. Breaking out repeatedly on the same channel shows the format can keep earning recommendations.

5. Deciding Whether It's Worth Doing

Size up the competition. Here's an example. If you search "squid game", the term itself is too broad to count as a focused niche. But among the results was a vertical live stream of a mini game, a live or pre-recorded stream focused on one specific mini game, with 200 viewers online, which is a solid showing. Next, check how many other streams are playing the same game:

Under the entire keyword there were fewer than 20 streams, and 5 of them were playing this game. Every one of them had traffic: even the smallest had 9 viewers online, and two streams were at around 30, while their channels had only 360 and 90 subscribers. A niche like this is definitely worth doing. If you bring in 5 accounts, the field becomes 10 streams, and you could take as much as half of the existing traffic.

Do the watch-hour math. Using the method from Part 2, halve the concurrent viewer counts of streams in this format and multiply by the number of hours you can stream each day, and you'll get a rough estimate of how long it'll take to reach 4,000 hours. If it works out to more than six months, the format is better suited for practice than as your main play.

Watch out for three data traps:

Don't mix metrics. Real-time concurrent viewers on a live stream, cumulative views on a replay, and a channel's total views are three completely different metrics and can't be compared directly.
Concurrent viewer counts are inflated. As mentioned earlier, I recommend cutting them in half.
Breakout lists are survivor samples. Whether it's these 100 cases or any other benchmark list, it can only tell you "which formats can take off", not "how likely you are to take off". In the data from our own portfolio of channels, the median views per stream was only 17 (see Part 6). Look at lists to choose a direction, not to estimate earnings.

6. Validate at Minimum Cost: The 15-Day Test

Once you've picked two or three candidate formats, don't go all in at once. Run a small-scale test over a 15-day cycle:

Split into groups: Use at least 2–3 accounts per format; if you have older accounts, use those first.
Make variations: Prepare around 3 variations of footage for each format, following the "change only one variable at a time" approach.
Keep a fixed schedule: Go live at the same time slot every day, with no single stream longer than 12 hours.
Log daily: For every stream on every account, record views, peak concurrent viewers and watch time.
Read the signals: Over the 15 days, if a format starts getting replay views across multiple accounts and a few streams hit hundreds or even a thousand-plus views, it's getting a response, so add accounts and variations. If every account is at zero or single digits, switch to a different format and test again.

Keep in mind that new channels take time to get recommended. In our tests, replays on new channels started getting distribution after about 20 days, and the live streams themselves only started getting distribution at around 40 days. So the 15 days tell you "whether the format gets a response", not "whether it can get you into YPP". With new channels, be prepared for a longer haul.

7. A Snapshot of Niches from the Past Month

Finally, here's a ready-made reference. We grouped these 100 low-subscriber, high-view vertical live streams by format: outdoor skits, outdoor survival crafts, "medicine or shot" cartoons, catching in the wild, close-up satisfying ASMR and more, 9 formats in all. How many cases each format has, its median views, its typical visuals and why it suits live streaming are all laid out in this article: What to Stream on YouTube Vertical Live? 9 Formats from 100 Low-Subscriber Breakout Streams in the Past Month.

Part 4: Where Live Stream Content Comes From

We now know that some very simple content, the kind of stream that's common in China, can get huge traffic on YouTube. The next question is: how do you produce this content?

Vertical live streams that take off on YouTube fall roughly into three categories.

1. Gaming

Gaming is the easiest. Screen-recording yourself playing on your phone, finding recordings of other people playing, or, if you're genuinely into a particular game, streaming it directly on YouTube are all fairly easy.

For example, Merge Fellas, a game similar to the Watermelon merge game (Suika-style), was hugely popular for a stretch in 2025, regularly topping 10,000 concurrent viewers, and it still gets traffic today. Vertical mini-game streams like this are evergreen on YouTube. In 2025, some creators also streamed screen recordings of themselves playing Sheep a Sheep on YouTube Live and likewise pulled in millions of views.

2. Street stalls, daily life and scripted content

On platforms like Douyin, Bilibili, Kuaishou and Xiaohongshu (RedNote), you can look for small and mid-sized creators who stream consistently, ask them for permission, and rebroadcast their streams live on YouTube for them. You can start by pitching them on the upside and seeing whether it gets traffic; if it does, then talk about a revenue-sharing partnership. If it's a very small stream, honestly, nobody will care if you just rebroadcast it directly, and you can talk to the creator about permission once it takes off.

In the "chinese food" niche, for example, a large share of streams since 2025 have been run by teams in China.

3. AI and image-based content

For this type, just study your benchmarks and recreate them; there's no need to copy them outright. Live streams are different from Shorts and long-form videos: as long as the topic is good and the account has authority, it's easy to get distribution, and the content doesn't need to be high quality.

For example, one new channel streaming AI content got 10 million views, and another new channel streaming image-based content also got 10 million views. What's actually on screen there is just a pre-recorded video playing on loop.

If you plan to use looping videos for your streams, you can first check ShortsMonkey to see which Shorts formats have recently racked up high views on small channels, then turn similar formats into 9:16 looping footage.

Building on these three types of content, there are three ways to stream:

Loop playback: Produce videos by screen recording, filming live action, making things by hand and so on, then loop them during the stream. Works in any scenario.
Live rebroadcast: Rebroadcast content in real time through the original stream's link. Works if you've gotten the original creator's permission to rebroadcast, or if you're not worried about the original creator coming after you.
Live on camera: Works if you want to build a personal brand as a real person on YouTube.

Part 5: Pre-Launch Checklist

1. Important Reminders

Never play any copyrighted music on your stream, or you'll get a Community Guidelines warning. If you can't tell what's copyrighted, use a blanket rule: apart from AI music you generated yourself, don't use any third-party music at all.
I recommend making your own footage (filming it yourself, using friends' footage, or screen-recording games yourself), or rebroadcasting only after getting the creator's permission, so you can prove where your content comes from if you need to appeal. Recorded footage should be converted to 9:16; for rebroadcasts, pick vertical streams, or it won't be a vertical live stream.
If your goal is getting into YPP, don't let any single stream run past 12 hours, since anything over 12 hours won't count toward your YPP watch hours. If your channel has existing Shorts and long-form videos unrelated to your live content, it's best to delete them.
With an established, active YouTube channel, it's easy to start getting traffic. A newly created channel may sit at zero views for over a month before traffic starts coming in, so manage your expectations.

2. Accounts

Use your own established YouTube channel first, or create a new channel with your own Google account. Account activity has a big impact on how quickly you start getting traffic; more on that later.

3. Channel Settings

In YouTube Studio, go to "Settings" → "Channel" → "Feature eligibility" and make sure "Intermediate features" are enabled. If they aren't, follow the on-page prompts to complete phone verification.
Click "Create" in the top-right corner and choose "Go live". The first time, follow the prompts to choose streaming with an encoder (streaming software) and set your audience.
Turn on "Dual stream". Once it's on, YouTube generates a vertical version from your horizontal stream and pushes it to Shorts, so you get traffic from both the horizontal live stream and Shorts.
Write down two things: the stream key and the stream link. The stream key is what sends your video to this stream, a bit like a password for it; the stream link is what you use to open the stream and check concurrent viewers and views. Don't mix the two up.
Set the stream to Public.

4. A VPS for Streaming

To run unattended streams around the clock, 24 hours a day, you need a Linux VPS located outside China to push the stream. Requirements: it can connect to YouTube; if you're rebroadcasting streams from China, it also needs access to Chinese live streaming platforms; and it needs enough bandwidth and speed.

An entry-level plan with a single-core CPU and 1 GB of RAM is enough: it can reliably handle 1–2 rebroadcasts or 2–3 looping streams at the same time. For data transfer, a plan at around $21 a year is roughly enough for 2 streams running 24/7 for a month; the roughly $35 tier covers about 4. I recommend going straight for the $35-a-year plan. It's not much more expensive, the performance and data allowance are much better, and it's enough for one person to run four or five streams in the early days. If you run out of data, you can buy more separately.

5. Three Streaming Modes

Whatever streaming tool you use, the idea is the same: on the VPS, push the video stream to your YouTube stream key. There are three common modes:

Mode	Use case	What you need
Live rebroadcast	Rebroadcast a stream that's currently live to YouTube in real time	The source stream's address, ideally with a few backup streams
File loop	Loop existing videos	Video files uploaded to the VPS in advance
Failover to file	Rebroadcast while the source stream is running normally; fall back to a video file when it drops	The source stream's address and a fallback video file

In failover-to-file mode, the recovery order is: primary live source → backup live source → fallback video file. That way, when the source stream ends or drops, your YouTube stream keeps going without interruption.

Going live: after the VPS starts pushing the stream, go back to YouTube and wait for the preview to appear. Check that the video and audio are working, then click "Go live". When you're done, first click "End stream" on YouTube, then stop the stream on the VPS.

Part 6: Traffic Patterns and Setting Expectations

1. Four Factors That Affect When You Start Getting Traffic

Account activity: recently active older accounts > older accounts that were active in the past > older accounts that were never active > brand-new accounts.
How blue-ocean the niche is: the more traffic a niche has and the fewer competitors streaming in it, the better your chances of starting to get traffic.
Content focus: many accounts stream in one focused niche for a long time, gradually start getting traffic, and eventually lock in the top spots. Win first, then fight.
Footage repetition: direct rebroadcasts > looping and reused footage, though this isn't absolute.

2. To Get Lots of Channels into YPP, You Need a Portfolio of Channels

Here's data from roughly 20 days of our recent live stream testing.

The 76 accounts with data ran 597 streams in total, with a median of just 17 views per stream. Of those, 105 streams got zero views, and another 252 got fewer than 100. Only 14 accounts, about 18%, ever had a breakout, and 35 breakout streams accounted for 85% of all views.

If you want to get lots of channels into YPP through live streaming, you have to run a portfolio of channels. Betting on the odds with fewer than ten accounts won't work; the distribution most accounts get may stay stuck in the single or double digits.

3. What to Do About Zero Views

Live streaming depends heavily on account authority. About 95% of new channels start out at zero views. That's just how it works, so there's nothing to agonize over. If you have older accounts, definitely stream on those first; that can bring the chance of zero views down to around 50%.

Keep your streams active and your content focused, and your account authority will gradually build. The three charts below show view data for the same batch of accounts, using the same batch of content, at different points in time. At first, the vast majority of accounts were at zero or single-digit views; after sticking with it for a while, they gradually started getting traffic. This takes as little as two weeks if it goes fast, or two to three months if it's slow.

That's also why I recommend keeping extra accounts on hand and running them with automation, spending as little time on them as possible. Until an account has built up enough activity, watching the numbers every day really doesn't accomplish anything.

We've also written up a hands-on test that follows two accounts starting from zero views: how long it took before they got distribution, how long until they hit the threshold, and how they recovered after dropping back to zero. For the full cycle, see YouTube Livestreams Stuck at Zero Views: Tested Timeline and Recovery Methods.

4. How Beginners Should Get Started

Who it's for: people who are bullish on the YouTube ecosystem or already have experience running YouTube channels; who can accept 1–3 months without clear results; and who have experience running a portfolio of channels or have automation skills.

What I recommend:

Buy 1–2 VPSs, at a cost of RMB 200–300 a year;
Set up at least 5–10 YouTube channels;
Run things with automation as much as possible, spending 1–2 hours a day on live stream operations across all your accounts;
Test niches in 15-day cycles, and only after you've got the process working and gotten into YPP, figure out how to scale up.

5. Why It's Still Worth Doing

Some people will ask: YouTube live seems harder than it used to be, and it takes this many accounts to get results, so is it still worth it for ordinary people to learn about?

Let me ask a question in return: what other video platform of any real scale, in China or anywhere else, lets you run high-volume, automated, unattended live streams from a cluster of VPSs? Where else can someone who can't make videos get monetized?

The barrier really is a bit higher than before, but you can still run it at scale with automation, and it can still get you into YPP. Besides, getting into YPP is just a stepping stone to understanding YouTube and monetizing outside China. As live streaming gets explored more deeply, higher-ROI directions will definitely emerge: maybe live commerce, maybe viewer tips, maybe building your own audience overseas. The experience you build now will put you first in line for a slice of the pie when that happens.

Part 7: Other Ways to Use YouTube Live

To wrap up, here are a few directions I think have real potential, just to get the ideas flowing.

1. Live commerce and owned audiences

Some jade-selling streams have only one or two hundred viewers online. Think about whether they're making money. And some streams use ways of driving traffic that would be pretty much impossible to pull off on Chinese platforms, yet they work on YouTube.

2. Earning revenue with horizontal live streams

Lately, a large number of new channels have popped up on YouTube running horizontal live streams of things like ASMR and music, and they're getting a lot of traffic. We're testing this too, and the traffic is real. More importantly, we've found that for the same number of views, horizontal live streams have a slightly higher RPM than long-form videos. With the same content, many accounts get no traffic posting long-form videos but do get traffic from live streams. One account, at its busiest, had more than 10,000 concurrent viewers, completely out of proportion to the traffic on its long-form videos.

3. Building a personal brand and a business brand

We found a large batch of live stream accounts with millions or even tens of millions of views per stream, all from the same studio: different people filming the same content, using dozens of accounts to capture hundreds of millions of live views in a single month. Any one of us could film this kind of content. Used to build a personal brand or a business brand, the ROI would be considerable. We're lining up live-action filming tests of our own, too.

I hope this article broadens your view of what YouTube live can do, and I look forward to seeing more creators come up with new ways to use live streaming.