YouTube has announced that it will pay up to $10,000 to creators who create original content for its recently launched YouTube Shorts.
YouTube Shorts is a way for anyone to connect with a new audience using just a smartphone and the Shorts camera in the YouTube app. YouTube’s Shorts creation tools make it easy to create short-form videos up to 60 seconds long with our multi-segment camera.
For creators who want to earn this money, it will depend on how many people make and watch Shorts each month and where each creator’s audience is.
Additionally, Reuploads and videos tagged with watermarks from other platforms — aka TikTok, Snapchat, or Reels — will disqualify creators’ payments. The payments are only available in 10 regions for now, including the US, UK, India, and Brazil, among others.
Furthermore, YouTube says it won’t run ads in front of every quick clip, so it’s building out this alternate form of payment to reward creators.
Commenting, Neal Mohan, YouTube’s chief product officer, said that the Shorts Fund would eventually be replaced with a “long-term, scalable monetization program,” Neal Mohan, YouTube’s chief product officer, said.
The fund is “a way to get going and to start to figure out” how monetization should work for creators making these videos. “You’re essentially consuming a feed of shorts, and so the model has to work differently,” Mohan said.
Mohan indicated that YouTube wouldn’t require creators to use Shorts to boost their overall engagement on the platform.
“Our goal here is to give every creator a voice,” Mohan said on Decoder. “If the creator wants to do that through a two-hour documentary about a particular topic they’re passionate about, then YouTube should be the place for that. If they want to do that through a 15-second Short that mixes in their favorite hit from their favorite music artists, they should be able to do that.”
