I get this question from small business owners far more than from creators, and that matters because the answer is not the same for the two. The owner is asking something specific: should I put time and money into a YouTube channel, or has that moment passed?
The short answer is that YouTube is worth it, usually for a different reason than the one people have in mind. Most who try it go in expecting one thing and come away disappointed, because they were measuring something else entirely.
So let us separate the things that get conflated, and then look at numbers that come from YouTube itself.
Three different goals, not one
When someone tells me they want a YouTube channel for their business, I ask what they want out of it. There turn out to be three different answers, treated as if they were the same thing.
One: ad revenue. YouTube pays you. This is a separate business rather than marketing for yours, and below I will show why the road is longer than people assume.
Two: awareness and an audience. People know who you are. This is what most have in mind, and it is also the hardest to measure and the slowest to pay.
Three: answers that keep working. A video that answers a question your customer asks before buying, and keeps answering it for years. This is the least glamorous of the three and the highest return for most small businesses.
If you have not picked one of the three, you will end up judging the channel by views, and views are the worst number to judge a business channel on.
If you are in it for ad revenue, read the requirements first
This part has published numbers, so there is no need to guess. YouTube's own help page sets out eligibility for the YouTube Partner Program, and you need one of two routes:
Route one: 1,000 subscribers with 4,000 qualified watch hours in the last 12 months.
Route two: 1,000 subscribers with 10 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days.
And there is a detail on the same page that changes the whole calculation: watch hours from Shorts in the Shorts Feed do not count toward the 4,000. Those hours come from public long-form videos only.
Read that again if your plan was to use Shorts to reach the threshold faster. That route exists, but its price is ten million views in ninety days, not four thousand hours.
The page also notes updates to the programme starting 1 February 2027, and says creators who want to keep fully monetizing must review and accept the updated terms in YouTube Studio by 31 January 2027. If you already run a channel, that is a diary entry rather than trivia.
The conclusion is blunt: if ad revenue is the goal, you are starting a project that will take at least a year before the first payment, and that is a different decision from a marketing one.
The number that says the platform still matters
Now the other side. In May 2026 TechCrunch reported a figure from YouTube itself: viewers watch over 2 billion hours of Shorts on TVs every month. Kurt Wilms, senior director of product management for YouTube on TV, said the living room is YouTube's fastest-growing screen.
Why does that matter to a business owner? Because it says viewing behaviour changed location rather than size. People who watched on a phone are watching on a bigger screen, and that changes what kind of video works: small on-screen text disappears, audio matters more, and a video built to be watched with the phone in your hand is not the one that holds up on a television.
Worth noting the provenance: that number is YouTube's own, relayed in a news report, not independently audited. I am citing it because it is the most recent figure with a traceable source, not because it settles anything.
The third goal is the one that actually pays
This is the part I like saying because it runs against the usual advice. Most small businesses I have seen do well on YouTube did not do it with a channel. They did it with five or ten videos answering specific questions people ask before buying.
The difference is large. A channel needs a publishing rhythm, a following and sustained effort. Those ten videos need you to write down the real questions your customers ask and answer them honestly, and then they keep working for years without you publishing anything new.
There is a simple reason. YouTube is a search engine and an archive, not only a feed. A video answering "how do I choose X" gets found when somebody searches, not when you post it. That is the same logic behind evergreen content.
When not to start a channel
If you will not film regularly for at least six months. A channel with three videos from a year ago does more harm than good, because it suggests the business stopped.
If the only reason is that a competitor has one. That is anxiety, not a reason. I went through that specific decision in do you need to be on every platform.
If your product sells on a fast, cheap decision. Long video works when the decision involves thought and research. Something seen and bought in a minute does not need an eight minute explanation.
If you cannot measure anything but views. Without a way to know somebody came from it, you are publishing in the dark. That is not a YouTube problem specifically; it is the same distribution-versus-quality issue I wrote about in why your content is not reaching people.
When to do it
If customers ask you the same five questions every week before they buy. That is the clearest signal on this list, because it means demand for the answer already exists and you are hearing it with your own ears.
If your product or service needs to be seen to be understood. Some things are unconvincing in words and convincing in thirty seconds of video.
If you already have raw material you can turn into content without filming anything new: calls, walkthroughs, the things you explain to clients anyway. That is the cheapest way in, and it fits into a plan as simple as the one in the monthly content plan.
Long or short?
This gets asked as though there is one answer, and there is not. Shorts reach new people quickly; long video builds trust and ranks in search. They serve different goals out of the three above.
If you are weighing short video against other formats on paid performance specifically, Mostafa Faried has a practical review in Arabic, short video versus image performance (in Arabic), which sticks to what the platforms document. Useful before you put budget behind any format.
The honest limits
First: there is no documented figure for what a YouTube channel returns to a small business. Anyone quoting you a confident return is making it up. Everything above is either a published YouTube requirement or a number attributed to a source you can open yourself.
Second: programme terms change, and these ones change in February 2027. Any number here is today's state, so open the page yourself before building a year's plan on it.
Third, and most important: YouTube will not fix a business whose problem is the offer. If the product is unclear, the price is confusing, or nobody has a reason to buy from you, video will just deliver that problem to more people. That is not pessimism, it is ordering. Fix the offer first, then turn up the volume.
Every channel ends up sending people to a place where a decision gets made, and a channel with no clear role in that journey is just spending. Part 5 of my book Growth Engine is about those roles, and about choosing one channel to go deep on instead of being everywhere: Part 5, Digital channels: how you reach them. The book is free and written in Arabic.