Chatspace Now Requires Creators to Hit 2x Watch Hours Before Monetizing

Chatspace notified creators on Monday that the watch-hour requirement for its revenue-share program will rise from 4,000 to 8,000 hours over a rolling twelve months, effective September 21. Subscriber and posting-frequency requirements are unchanged.

The company frames the change as quality control, pointing to a surge of low-effort uploads after it opened monetization broadly last year. Internally, according to two people familiar with the discussions, the more pressing issue is payout cost: Chatspace's creator fund grew from $4.1 million to $19 million in a year while advertising revenue per hour watched fell.

"I crossed four thousand hours in March and I have been building toward my first real payout since," said Tolu Adeyemi, who makes street-food videos in Ibadan for about 62,000 followers. "Now the finish line moved to eight thousand with six weeks' warning. I am not angry that the rules changed. I am angry about the six weeks."

Creator programs everywhere tighten as they mature, and Chatspace's revised threshold is still below several international platforms. But mid-tier creators are the ones affected — big accounts clear either bar, small ones clear neither — and they are precisely the cohort a platform relies on for consistent uploads. Several told Afrikons they are already cross-posting elsewhere.