Angela B. Tech 03.29.2024 02:Mar AM EDT

YouTube Says Over a Quarter of Its Creators Are Earning from Shorts

YouTube has been monetizing its content long before other social media giants started to do the same, and it continues to get with the times by adding new features that content creators can earn from. With the growing popularity of YouTube Shorts, more partners are earning from the video format.

More YouTube Shorts Creators

In case you haven't noticed, users are now more interested in short-form content, which is the reason why TikTok grew in popularity. YouTube has found a way to tap into that market by releasing Shorts, and the company has been successful in that as well.

In the latest announcement from the streaming site, it seems that creators are realizing the earning potential in short-form videos. More than a quarter of creators in the Partner Program are now earning from Shorts, as reported by Engadget.

That's not to say that the amount that one can earn from traditional YouTube videos is the same with Shorts. The funding comes from ads, which appear differently between the two video formats. Ads appear on each video on YouTube while shorts only get them in between each post.

That means that the share of ad revenue is distributed differently. With Shorts, all the ad revenue will be collected and divided among all eligible creators in the Partner Program, which will be based on factors like views, followers, and music licensing.

It's unclear how many creators there are in the mentioned quarter, but YouTube has mentioned that there are about three million people in the monetization program, which means that the number of Shorts creators could be around hundreds of thousands.

As for how much creators are making on the short video format, that is also still unclear. YouTube only began sharing ad revenue for that last year. With both standard YouTube videos and Shorts, the company said that it has paid about $70 billion to creators in the last three years.

YouTube Shorts Monetization

Revenue sharing on YouTube Shorts began on February 1st last year, and partners have been getting a share of the ad revenue based on the sharing model that the company has implemented. To begin, creators will first have to accept the Shorts Monetization Module.

These are terms that will allow creators to get a piece of the earnings from both ads and YouTube Premium subscription fees. Even artists can get part of the monetary reward for content if their music was used in the short-form videos.

YouTube has a lot of policies and guidelines that need to be followed to continue being eligible for the Partner Program. That includes Community Guidelines, Terms of Service, Copyright, Google AdSense program policies, and other important rules regarding content creation.

Shorts become ineligible for monetization when they are not original, meaning that they are clips from movies and TV shows and are just re-uploaded. The video won't count as well if the creator resorts to artificial or fake views using automatic clicks or scroll bots.