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YouTube Now Rewards Top Performing Shorts Video Clips With Up to $10k Every Month

Isabel Encinares

With Snapchat’s Spotlight creator program showing amazing success, YouTube has decided to release their own version in the form of the Shorts Fund. This new program will see various Shorts creators awarded up to $10k per month, depending on their performance.


According to YouTube:


"Each month, we'll reach out to thousands of eligible creators to claim a payment from the Shorts Fund - creators can make anywhere from $100 to $10,000 based on viewership and engagement on their Shorts. The Shorts Fund is the first step in our journey to build a monetization model for Shorts on YouTube and is not limited to just creators in YPP - any creator that meets our eligibility criteria can participate."


The money for the Shorts Fund will be coming from the broader $100 million Shorts fund, which YouTube first announced back in May. This will allow YouTube to monetize short video creators, which is a big help especially as Shorts are not currently compatible with ads.


As previously noted, Snapchat’s monetary rewards program for Spotlight, a feature acting similarly to TikTok clips, has become a big hit, with the app initially paying out around $1 million per day. Moreover, with the establishment of the program, Spotlight saw the number of monthly active users rise to 125 million, and gave a number of active creators the opportunity to earn big money from their content.


Snapchat has since lowered the amount of money allotted for the program, as they are looking to develop a more sustainable way of monetizing their creators. However, they have provided YouTube with a framework to create their own form of the program, and that framework may be exactly the reason why YouTube is starting up their program with much lower reward amounts. While YouTube’s Shorts program may be offering less that Snapchat’s initial Spotlight one, $10k per month is definitely enough to grab creator attention, which may result in YouTube having to shell out quite a lot of money, especially considering the amount of users the platform has.


Whether or not the new Shorts program will allow it to compete with TikTok is still unknown, however YouTube sure looks keen to find out. As of writing, Shorts are already reporting 15 billion views daily, which is a major improvement from the 6.5 billion daily views from back in April. Moreover, as Shorts are now available in all regions, the future is looking quite bright, and Shorts are showing an amazing amount of potential.


On another note, YouTube has claimed that they started the short-form video trend, not TikTok.

In an interview with The Verge, YouTube’s Chief Product Officer, Neal Mohan, recently stated that:

"The way I would give you some insight into how [Shorts] came about is actually going back 15 years to the very first video that was uploaded to YouTube, which is kind of a canonical, famous video now: “Me at the Zoo.” That was an 18-second video that was uploaded in the San Diego Zoo, and it was the genesis of YouTube."


According to this, Shorts and short-form videos came more from YouTube, and it was due to those ideas that TikTok suddenly gained billions of users and became popular in basically every important market. Sure.


While it's up to you to believe whatever you want, TikTok is still currently, as it has been for the past 18 months, the most downloaded app. In fact, TikTok’s dominance over the video market has led it to become a direct threat to both YouTube and Facebook.

Because of this, YouTube has recently been trying to push and boost Shorts. And while YouTube regularly posts reports boasting ‘billions of views’, it should be noted that YouTube counts not only the views in the Shorts player, but counts the views of all short content within the app.


As of now, TikTok is definitely winning, and because of that, YouTube needs to take more measures to compete with it head-on. With the newly introduced creator fund, YouTube is looking to lure a number of users and creators away from TikTok, hopefully eventually beating it, such as was done with Vine. With the increase in monetization pathways and the promise of a broader reach, YouTube is trying to tempt a number of creators to switch over to their platform, turning them into major stars.

Which is something that is definitely plausible. YouTube has repeatedly turned a number of nobodies into some of the biggest Hollywood stars. As of now, TikTok has yet to establish themselves as a star producing platform, and cannot give creators the same amount of funding, meaning YouTube has the upper hand.


If TikTok fails to keep their users, they could still possibly fail as an app, despite being so big, which is exactly what YouTube is aiming for.


Will the new Shorts fund greatly impact TikTok, or possibly stunt the app's growth? Stay tuned and wait patiently to see.


If you are curious about the YouTube Shorts fund, you can check it out HERE.


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