YouTube Premium Bug: Why your Revenue will drop in March

Transcript

If your YouTube revenue suddenly drops next month, don’t panic. Twitch officially greenlights combined chat for multistreamers. Welcome to the creator news, covering everything you need to know this week as a creator.

Let’s start with the money and a heads-up for your March and April analytics. YouTube is currently sending out emails to creators regarding a premium revenue overpayment correction. A bug in the system accidentally attributed a higher amount of YouTube Premium watch time to a subset of videos, resulting in creators getting overpaid.

The good news: YouTube is not clawing back that money. You get to keep every overpayment you’ve received up until now. The bad news: they are fixing the bug. Starting March 1st, they will gradually phase out these overpayments over three months. By May 1st, your analytics will reflect the corrected lower numbers.

How much of a hit are we actually talking about? To give you some perspective, we pulled data for a full year of 2025 across five different channels in our KW Media portfolio, ranging from automotive to finance and gaming. On average, YouTube Premium revenue only makes up about 4.13% of the total channel revenue. Since this bug only affected a portion of that 4%, the actual financial drop you might see starting next week should be minimal. So, if your RPM takes a slight dip, you now know why. Don’t panic.

Speaking of ecosystem changes, let’s talk about Twitch and multistreaming. Historically, showing a combined chat from YouTube and Twitch on your stream was a massive gray area that could get you into trouble due to exclusivity rules. But Twitch CEO Dan Clansancy recently clarified in his patch notes that there will be absolutely no enforcement or penalties for showing a combined chat on stream anymore. This is a massive quality-of-life improvement for multistreamers.

If you want to take advantage of this right now, I highly recommend looking into Social Stream Ninja or Streamerbot. Both tools can be used to link your YouTube and Twitch accounts. Once set up, you can instantly read both chats in a unified window, reply to both simultaneously, use it as an OBS browser source overlay, and even moderate them from one central hub. If you’re multistreaming, this is essential infrastructure for you, and you should look into it. And if you have any questions on how to use it, feel free to drop them in the comments below; I’ll be happy to answer your questions in an upcoming tutorial on this topic.

Let’s stay on the topic of chat for a second. YouTube now offers vertical live chat translations. If you stream vertically, chats from viewers will now be auto-translated for you based on your language settings. This can be great for managing a global audience on mobile, but make sure to set up your preferred languages correctly.

Also, rest in peace, list view. YouTube has deprecated the option to toggle between grid and list view on the subscription tab on the web. It is now grid view permanently. It’s a minor UI change, but good to know if your dashboard suddenly looks different and cluttered.

That’s it for this week. I want to know from you: Have you received the premium overpayment email yet? And what percentage of your revenue actually comes from YouTube Premium? Check your analytics and let me know in the comments below. I’m Martin, covering creator news, and I’ll see you next week.