Do YouTube Shorts Make Money?
YouTube will pay up to $10,000 a month to producers of popular films on YouTube Shorts, the company's TikTok competitor. The corporation intends to pay $100 million over the next year, beginning this month with the first installment.
The fund has the potential to provide a large sum of money to creators, but payouts are not guaranteed. The popularity required to earn money will vary according to the number of individuals creating and watching short films each month, and compensation will also vary according to the location of each creator's audience.
Additionally, YouTube requires that these be original videos. Reuploads of films with watermarks from other platforms—for example, TikTok, Snapchat, or Reels—will prohibit a channel from receiving remuneration. For the time being, the payouts are only accessible in ten regions, including the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Brazil, but YouTube says it aims to increase the list "in the future."
Historically, creators on YouTube have been compensated based on the advertising that run alongside their videos, with a direct correlation between the number of ad views and the amount of money they earn. However, because YouTube does not want to display ads in front of every brief clip, it is developing this new method of funding to compensate producers.
The Shorts Fund will eventually be phased out in favor of a "long-term, scalable monetization model," YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan explained on today's episode of Decoder. The fund is "a way to get started and to really begin to figure out" how authors of these films should be compensated. "You're essentially eating a stream of shorts, and as a result, the model must be altered," Mohan explained.
Such payment methods have become more prevalent in recent years. Both TikTok and Snapchat compensate producers based on the popularity of their videos, rather than on the placement of advertisements. As a result, creators may earn a profit, though there is less transparency over how much they may earn in any given month.
The cash enables YouTube to jumpstart its late-game effort at a short-form video service. Though TikTok has a significant head start, YouTube is ultimately YouTube—a massive and massively popular video platform—which may offer it an advantage as it attempts to spin up Shorts.
Mohan said that YouTube would not require producers to use short videos to increase overall platform engagement. "Our goal there is to give a voice to every creator," Mohan explained on Decoder. If the author wishes to accomplish this through a two-hour documentary about a subject close to their hearts, YouTube should be the appropriate venue. If they want to do it with a 15-second short that incorporates their favorite music artists' hits, they should be able to do so.