YouTube today announced new details around its gradual introduction of advertising on Shorts, announcing a revenue share model whereby creators will be given 45 percent of revenues generated by ads on Shorts.
YouTube will hope that ramping up creators’ ability to monetise their content on Shorts will help draw talent onto its own short-form video platform, and prevent migration away to TikTok and other rival products.
Shorts will be added to YouTube’s Partner Programme, which it uses to pay creators outside of Shorts. This means it will be instantly accessible for YouTubers who are already partnered, while non-partnered creators will have to meet YouTube’s thresholds and apply to the programme to be eligible for the revenue share scheme. Shorts-focussed creators will have a separate set of targets to meet in order to be able to apply: 1,000 subscribers, and ten million Shorts views over a ninety day period.
The 45 percent cut is less generous than the 55 percent share which creators receive outside of Shorts, but then Shorts is a fundamentally different model. On regular YouTube videos, ads are run directly alongside a specific video. This means creators are paid specifically for those ads which are run next to their content, and they’re given control over how many ads to run and where they sit in the video.
But in Shorts (and other vertical video feeds), ads are injected at regular intervals into the video feed, and sit between other videos. This makes the traditional revenue share model more difficult – it’s harder to credit ad views to individual videos, and creators have a lot less control over monetisation.
That partly why a number of other services have chosen a ‘creator fund’ model, where a specific amount of money is set aside to pay creators for content, and that money is distributed based on performance.
YouTube says for its revenue share model, it will total up ad revenues from Shorts, and the 45 percent of income set aside for creators will be handed out based on which videos have picked up the most views.
