YouTube Just Moved the Subscribe Button Out of the Way. Then It Started Paying Creators for Showing Up.

If your course funnel starts with the words "subscribe and hit the bell," the first half of that sentence just got a little weaker.

On October 22, YouTube announced that the Subscriptions tab is leaving the bottom bar of its mobile app. It's moving out of the fourth position in the bottom bar and into the "top bar on the Home tab," where it appears as "Subs" in the second position after "Home," marked with a red underline. The tab had been in the bottom bar since 2017 — nearly a decade.

Without it, the bottom bar holds four items: Home, Shorts, Create, and You.

Twelve hours of outrage later, a second piece of news landed that almost nobody connected to the first. YouTube began testing a Shorts bonus program that pays eligible creators a monthly bonus for maintaining a consistent upload schedule, with extra earnings tied to viewership.

One move makes your audience relationship harder to reach. The other pays you to keep feeding the machine. They are not the same announcement, but they point the same way.

What actually changed on the app

The Subs tab is not gone. It is one tap further away, sitting inside a row that now includes other things competing for the same thumb. After Subs come dedicated feeds for Live, Music, and Movies & TV, the last appearing only for viewers with active subscriptions such as Primetime Channels.

The bigger change is what shares that row. The redesign coincides with the launch of custom feeds, which are also available on and sync to the web, letting viewers describe "what you want to see in your own words." Those feeds appear as top tabs after Home and Subs, so viewers can "jump back into them whenever you want." Free users can save up to three; Premium members up to eight.

So a viewer's curated follow list is now standing in line next to a prompt box that generates an infinite, obedient feed on demand. One of those requires remembering your name.

The initial rollout is limited to signed-in, U.S.-based viewers using English, with wider international availability scheduled later. YouTube calls it the start of "a series of updates to shape a more seamless Home experience," and hasn't said when the new bottom bar reaches everyone.

It also quietly cleans house elsewhere: the change removes YouTube's navigation drawer.

TubeBuddy's October creator roundup put the uncomfortable part plainly: subscribes matter less than recommendations, because Home has always been the algorithmic feed and Subscriptions was the one place where a viewer's own choices ran the show.

The bonus that pays you for frequency

The Shorts pilot was revealed the way most YouTube news is revealed. Creator Liaison Rene Ritchie announced it in a Creator Insider video, asking, "What if you could get paid a bonus just for keeping your Shorts schedule consistent?" and saying creators in the test can take home "something extra based on your viewership."

The mechanics matter more than the pitch. There are two payments: a "Promotional Offer Payment," a minimum amount for uploading at least a set number of public Shorts each calendar month, and a "Promotional Bonus," at most one per month and not guaranteed, which depends on valid, engaged Shorts views and typical earnings in your country.

A YouTube Help page explains the bonus size "will be calculated based on your total valid engaged Shorts views for that month," and participants must keep Shorts monetization enabled for the entire month to get paid.

You cannot sign up for it. The invite-only pilot is open to select creators in the YouTube Partner Program across the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea — and creators cannot apply. Eligible creators are notified by email. Posting targets vary by invitation; one example shared on X showed a target of 16 Shorts per month.

Ritchie said more creators may be invited in the coming months.

Why both moves land at the same time

The timing isn't subtle. The pilot arrives ahead of a major change to Shorts monetization: starting February 1, 2027, only creators with 10 million qualified Shorts views over a trailing 90-day period will share in Shorts ad revenue.

And in the same month, YouTube said the Shorts algorithm would prioritize "original content" over reuploads.

Stack it up. Post original. Post often. Post Shorts. Get paid for the rhythm, not the relationship. Meanwhile the surface where relationships live gets moved up and sideways into a row of tabs that also contains a machine that can conjure a feed from a sentence.

What this means if you sell courses

Most course funnels on YouTube were built on a quiet assumption: a subscriber is an owned asset who comes back on their own. That assumption has been eroding for years. This month it got a UI change to match.

Three practical consequences.

Your call to action is doing less work than it used to. "Subscribe" still counts as a signal, but a signal that routes into a tab the viewer has to remember to tap is not a distribution guarantee. The CTA that survives this is the one that moves someone off-platform — email, a free resource, a waitlist, a community. Own the list, not the tab.

Frequency is now subsidized, and your competitors know it. If YouTube is paying invited creators a floor just for hitting a monthly Shorts quota, expect the Shorts feed in your niche to get noisier fast. Bonuses attract volume. Volume raises the bar on the hook.

Shorts stop being the trailer and start being the channel. A course seller used to treat Shorts as a funnel for long-form, which was the funnel for the course. YouTube is now paying for the top of that chain directly, while making the middle — the subscriber catch-up habit — slightly harder to reach.

The honest read: nothing about this makes a subscriber worthless. The Subscriptions tab is not gone. It has just moved. But platforms tell you what they value by where they put things and what they pay for. This month, YouTube paid for consistency and moved subscriptions one tap further from your thumb.

If your launch calendar depends on a subscriber base showing up when you post, build a second road to those people before February.