On February 1, YouTube will start paying producers of Shorts, a portion of the advertising income, the company announced on Monday, 10th of January 2023. YouTube is beginning to push out new terms for all producers in the YouTube Partner Program to get ready for the impending transition. Creators who choose to continue in the programme must accept the new conditions by July 10th of the same year.

What’s in it for the creators?

Creators will be able to make money from adverts that are seen in-between videos in the Shorts Feed thanks to the significant update to YouTube’s Partner Program. The YouTube Shorts Fund will be replaced by the new revenue-sharing model, although according to the business, most of the recipients of the Shorts Fund would make more money under the new scheme.

As previously announced by the company, creators who fulfil the new Shorts-specific requirements of 1,000 subscribers and 10 million Shorts views over a 90-day period are eligible to apply to the programme.

Creators are required to agree to particular monetization modules as part of the new agreements. The “Watch Page Monetization Module” is the first module which enables producers to monetize their long-form videos and YouTube Premium content with advertising. The next module, dubbed “Shorts Monetization Module,” enables you to monetize your channel by running adverts between YouTube Premium and Shorts in the Shorts Feed. The “Commerce Product Addendum,” the final module, is for features like Channel Memberships and Supers.

In order to get the full benefits of the platform, the company suggests that the creators accept all of the upcoming modules.

Keys points to note

Due to music licencing, the specifics of the Shorts income share are a little complicated. But let’s try to understand it more simply.

So, the combined monthly earnings from the adverts that run in between the Shorts will be used to pay the creators of that Shorts and music licencing. According to views and music usage across all watched Shorts, a share of the overall earnings will be distributed among the creative pool.

All the money associated with views of a Short that is uploaded without music goes to the creator only. Whereas, if a creator uploads a Short that includes music, the Creator Pool and the music partners will divide the revenue from views of the Short according to the number of tracks used.

The creator pool is then distributed among the creators. According to YouTube, money will be distributed to monetized Shorts creators based on their proportion of all Shorts views in the Creator Pool. A creator will receive 5% of the money in the creator pool if they received 5% of the eligible views out of all the Shorts uploaded by monetizing creators. 45% of the revenue allotted to creators for shorts will go to them. Let’s say, that $100 is allocated for a creator from the creator pool, in that case, the creator will be paid $45.

A game changer in the short industry

With these planned modifications, YouTube Shorts will likely overtake TikTok as its main rival. Creators are encouraged to produce original material for the YouTube platform if they can earn more money through YouTube Shorts than via TikTok. Up until this point, no short-form video platform has completely figured out how to split ad income, giving Shorts a sizable advantage over the competition.