YouTube Shorts, YouTube’s TikTok competitor, will pay creators up to $10,000 each month for generating popular videos.
The corporation intends to pay a total of $100 million over the next year, with the first installments due this month.
The fund has the potential to pay out a lot of money to creators, but payouts aren’t guaranteed.
The level of popularity required to earn money will be determined by the number of individuals that create and view Shorts each month, as well as the location of each creator’s audience.
These must also be original videos, according to YouTube.
Reuploads and videos containing watermarks from other platforms, such as TikTok, Snapchat, or Reels, will prevent a channel from receiving revenue.
For the time being, the payouts are only available in ten regions, including the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Brazil, among others, with YouTube stating that the list would be expanded “in the future.”
Creators have traditionally gotten paid on YouTube based on the ads that run in front of their videos, with there being a direct relationship between the number of ad views and the amount of money they receive.
But with Shorts, YouTube doesn’t want to run an ad in front of every quick clip, so it’s building out this alternate form of payment to reward creators.
On today’s episode of Decoder, YouTube’s chief product officer, Neal Mohan, claimed that the Shorts Fund would eventually be replaced by a “long-term, scalable monetization model.”
The fund is “a way to get started and to really start figuring out” how monetization for makers of these films should operate. “You’re effectively consuming a feed of shorts, so the model has to function differently,” says the author.
This form of payment system is gaining popularity. Both TikTok and Snapchat compensate producers based on the success of their videos rather than ad revenue.
Although the outcome may be favorable to creators, there is less transparency about how much they may receive each month.
The fund provides a vehicle for YouTube to jumpstart its late-in-the-game push at a short-form video service.
Though TikTok has a significant head start, YouTube is, after all, YouTube — a massive and massively popular video site — which could offer it an advantage when it attempts to launch Shorts.
YouTube producers will not be required to use Shorts in order to increase their overall interaction on the platform, according to Mohan. On Decoder, Mohan stated, “Our goal there is to give every creator a voice.”
“If the creator wants to achieve it by making a two-hour documentary about a topic they care about, YouTube should be the venue to do it.
They should be able to do that through a 15-second Short that incorporates their favorite hit from their favorite music artists.”
