YouTube today extended its paid version of hype to nine more markets, letting viewers in the United States, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom spend Jewels to keep hyping videos once their three free weekly hypes run out. Each paid hype adds points toward a country leaderboard and earns the creator Rubies, a virtual currency that YouTube pays out through AdSense. The feature is limited to channels in the YouTube Partner Program with between 500 and 500,000 subscribers, according to a pinned post by JJ of TeamYouTube on the YouTube Help Community. The post does not state what a hype costs in Jewels or how many Rubies a creator receives for one.

In Short

YouTube already lets people "hype" a new video from a smaller creator for free up to three times a week, which pushes that video up a weekly ranking for their country. Starting today, viewers in the US, UK and seven other countries can pay with YouTube's in-app currency to hype more than three times, and the creator earns money each time. YouTube has not said how much one paid hype costs or how much of that money the creator keeps.

What changes in the nine markets

Hype has been free in all nine countries until now. According to today's post, viewers in these markets "could hype eligible videos up to three times a week at no cost during the first 7 days after upload." The weekly allowance stays. What changes is that it no longer acts as a ceiling. "Now, fans can go beyond that weekly limit by redeeming Jewels to keep hyping their favorite uploads - helping your videos climb the country leaderboard while giving you a new revenue stream," the post states.

The paid layer is not new to YouTube. The post says that "earlier this year" the company "introduced the ability to hype with Jewels in Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan to give fans a new way to champion emerging creators while unlocking a new way for creators to earn." It gives no month for those launches. When YouTube presented paid hypes around its Made on YouTube event in September, it disclosed neither the launch markets nor the price per hype. Today's expansion therefore brings the number of countries where hype can be bought to 13.

The post lists three components:

  • Keep the hype going: fans on mobile redeem Jewels to hype eligible uploads beyond the three free weekly hypes, "adding points toward the country leaderboard."
  • Earn with Rubies: when fans redeem Jewels to hype a video, the creator earns Rubies. "Earnings appear in YouTube Analytics and are paid out through AdSense for YouTube alongside your other channel earnings," according to the post.
  • Fan recognition: when viewers hype a video with Jewels during its first seven days, "their handles appear in a dedicated recognition section within your video description."

That last element turns a paid hype into something visible on the creator's own page. The buyer's handle sits in the description, below the video, for anyone who opens it.

How hype scores a video

The mechanics underneath are set out in YouTube's Help Center page on hyping videos eligibility, availability and policies. For the first seven days after a video is published, viewers see the option to hype it, and "when a video is hyped, points are immediately applied to the video." The ranking is national. "Videos with the most hype points each week appear on a country-specific leaderboard that's ranked by top hyped videos from the viewers in that country," the page states. Top hyped videos may also carry a "Hyped" badge across YouTube for the first seven days, and a fan who hypes a video makes a public post on their Posts tab and Community tab, if enabled.

Points are not equal across channels. YouTube's separate Hype a video help page gives two worked examples: a single hype on a channel with 500 subscribers puts 7,500 points on the video, while each hype on a channel with 500,000 subscribers adds 50 points. By PPC Land's calculation, that is a 150-fold difference per hype between the smallest and largest eligible channels. The same page says free hypes refresh on Monday mornings at 12:00 a.m. local time. The leaderboard help page describes up to 50 top videos per category, refreshed about every few minutes, with each viewer seeing only the leaderboard for their own country.

Today's post confirms that a paid hype adds points to the leaderboard. It does not say whether a paid hype carries the same points as a free one on the same channel, or whether the small-channel bonus applies to it in full. That leaves a practical question open: on a 500-subscriber channel, one paid hype would be worth 7,500 points if the bonus applies unchanged, which is the same weight that 150 hypes carry on a channel at the top of the eligible range.

Which videos qualify

Not every upload can be hyped. The eligibility page lists content that is excluded, "but is not limited to":

  • Age-restricted content
  • Misleading, clickbait, or sensational content
  • Unlisted videos
  • Private videos
  • Made for kids content
  • Videos with copyright claims
  • Videos with YouTube Giving fundraisers
  • Live streams or Premieres while live, which become eligible as archived long-form videos afterwards
  • YouTube Shorts

The exclusion of Shorts confines hype, free or paid, to long-form uploads. The exclusion of made for kids content and age-restricted videos keeps the leaderboard to material YouTube describes as suitable for a general audience. There is a further restriction on the leaderboard help page: viewers may not be able to hype a video for a cost if it contains third-party music, a limit the page says was tested in Brazil and Turkey on Android.

Which channels qualify

The subscriber band is the central condition. The eligibility page opens with it: "Hype is designed for up-and-coming creators in the YouTube Partner Program with 500-500,000 subscribers." It also states the consequence of outgrowing the band: "If you no longer have access to hype, your subscriber count has grown beyond this range or your channel is no longer in the YPP program."

For the paid layer, today's post adds three steps. Creators in the nine markets must sign the Virtual Items Module (VIM), complete identity verification, and make sure "Let viewers hype" is switched on in YouTube Studio. Free hype is opt-out rather than opt-in: "Hype is currently enabled by default for eligible creators," according to the Help Center, and the setting can be turned off from the YouTube Studio mobile app or on desktop. The Virtual Items Module is the same agreement YouTube required before creators could receive Jewels gifts on live streams in Japan from July.

The 500-subscriber floor matches YouTube's expanded Partner Program tier for fan funding. When YouTube announced that new channels would need 8,000 watch hours or 20 million Shorts views for ad revenue from February 1, 2027, the fan funding tier stayed at 500 subscribers plus 3,000 watch hours or 3 million Shorts views. For a channel below the new ad revenue bar, fan-paid features are becoming a larger share of what is reachable. Paid hype joins that list.

Participating creators, and multi-channel networks, must also accept YouTube's Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. The Help Center adds a reservation: "As we are developing the functionality, we want the option to hype a video that is appropriate for all audiences. Accordingly, we reserve the right to revise our policies as necessary and to remove the option to hype from channels and remove content that violates our policies from the leaderboard."

What YouTube has not published

The post is short on numbers. It states no price per hype in Jewels, no conversion rate from Jewels to Rubies for hype, no Ruby value, and no revenue share. Other YouTube documents fill in part of the picture, though none of them was written for this expansion.

On price, YouTube's virtual items policy for viewers uses an illustration rather than a rate card: a viewer trying to redeem a hype priced at 45 Jewels while holding 5 Jewels can hype once by buying a 50-Jewel bundle, leaving 10. The same page says YouTube may change the number of Jewels needed to hype. On conversion, creators earned one Ruby for every two Jewels redeemed as US live stream gifts in September 2025, with one Ruby worth one US cent. Whether hype follows the same ratio is not stated. When gifts launched in Indonesia, YouTube said there was no fixed effective revenue share of the kind that applies to Super Chat and channel memberships.

The buyer side has firmer rules. According to the virtual items policy, buyers of Jewels must be at least 18 years old and in an eligible location. Jewels can be bought on youtube.com and in the Android, iPhone and iPad apps, though today's post says redemption for hype is for "fans on mobile". Spending on Jewels, Super Chats, Super Stickers and Super Thanks is capped at a combined 500 US dollars a day and 2,000 dollars a week, or the local equivalent, and an account can hold at most 30,000 Jewels. Jewels are non-refundable. YouTube's page on refunds for hyped videos describes them as voluntary, non-refundable payments, while the virtual items policy says the program is not intended as a means of sending payment or monetary value to creators. The two descriptions sit side by side in YouTube's own documentation.

The Help Center had also not caught up with the announcement on the day it was made. Both the Hype a video page and the virtual items policy still named Brazil, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan as the only countries where viewers can hype with Jewels.

Where the expansion stops

Free hype is available in 39 countries, according to the eligibility page: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.

After today, 13 of them have the paid layer. The remaining 26 still offer only free hype. That group includes Australia, India, Indonesia and Mexico, as well as France and the Netherlands. All 27 European Union member states are on the free hype list; five of them, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland and Spain, now have hype with Jewels. The post gives no reason for the selection and no schedule for other markets.

Some of the excluded countries already have Jewels in another form. Gifts on live streams were available in Australia, Canada, Indonesia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and the US before Japan was added in July, and Indonesia uses a local name, Crystals, for the same currency. In Australia and Indonesia, viewers can therefore spend virtual currency on live stream gifts but not, as of today, on hype.

From free beta to paid ranking

Hype began as a free feature. YouTube unveiled it at Made on YouTube on September 18, 2024, for videos under seven days old from creators with fewer than 500,000 subscribers, with three hypes per user per week. A beta in Turkey, Taiwan and Brazil recorded more than 5 million hypes across more than 50,000 channels in its first four weeks. YouTube said at the time that it planned to let viewers buy additional hypes in the future, and that hyping would not influence recommendations or search results.

The scale has grown since. At Made on YouTube on September 23, 2026, YouTube put the total at more than 1 billion hypes across more than 75 million videos, and presented paid hypes as the next step. Jewels themselves date to November 2024, when YouTube began rolling out gifts as one of ten listed revenue streams alongside Super Chat, Super Stickers, Super Thanks and memberships.

Hype also took on part of the discovery role of a feature YouTube removed. When the company closed its trending page in July 2025 after a decade, it pointed to category charts and hype as alternative ways for viewers to find new videos. A leaderboard that was built from free votes now accepts paid ones in 13 countries.

Why it matters for the marketing community

For brands and agencies that work with creators, the subscriber band is the relevant number. Channels with 500 to 500,000 subscribers cover the long tail and much of the middle tier of the creator economy. YouTube has been lowering the entry point for monetization in that tier: the Shopping affiliate program opened to creators with 500 subscribers in March, down from more than 10,000. Paid hype adds a fan-funded income line for the same group, while ad revenue for new channels becomes harder to reach after February 2027.

The leaderboard itself changes character. A country ranking of hyped videos was, until today in these nine markets, a count of capped, free actions from viewers. From today it can also reflect how much fans are willing to spend. Hype points, Hyped badges and leaderboard positions are public, so anyone assessing a channel's momentum can see them, brands included. Those signals now mix free and paid activity, and YouTube's published documents do not show how the two are weighted against each other.

The recognition section has a commercial dimension too. Handles of paying fans appear in the description of the creator's video during its first seven days. That is a public credit, placed on a page YouTube controls, in return for a purchase.

Then there is the money. Without a Jewel price per hype, a Ruby rate or a revenue share, neither creators nor the brands that work with them can calculate what a paid hype is worth. The documents available today give an example price of 45 Jewels and, for gifts, a ratio of two Jewels per Ruby at one cent per Ruby. They do not confirm that either figure applies to hype in the nine new markets.

Timeline

Summary

Who: YouTube, through a pinned post by JJ of TeamYouTube on the YouTube Help Community. The change affects YouTube Partner Program creators with 500 to 500,000 subscribers and viewers aged 18 and over who buy Jewels.

What: Viewers can now redeem Jewels to hype eligible long-form videos beyond the three free hypes per week. Paid hypes add points toward a country leaderboard, credit the buyer in the video description during the first seven days, and earn the creator Rubies paid through AdSense. Creators must sign the Virtual Items Module, verify their identity and keep "Let viewers hype" switched on. YouTube did not disclose a price per hype, a Ruby rate or a revenue share.

When: Today. The same feature launched earlier in 2026 in Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, after YouTube presented paid hypes at Made on YouTube on September 23, 2026.

Where: The United States, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom, bringing paid hype to 13 of the 39 countries where free hype is available. France, the Netherlands, Australia, India, Indonesia and Mexico are among the 26 countries left with free hype only.

Why: YouTube describes the feature as a way for fans to champion emerging creators and for those creators to earn. For the marketing community, it adds a fan-funded income line for small and mid-sized channels just as ad revenue entry gets harder for new channels in February 2027, and it turns a free ranking into one that can also be bought.