YouTube is giving creators the chance to earn up to $10,000/month for posting videos on its TikTok clone, YouTube Shorts. This comes out of YouTube’s $100 million Shorts Fund that’s set to be distributed over the course of one year.
Short Videos, High Stakes
Obviously, not every creator on YouTube Shorts is eligible to receive a $10,000 paycheck. The amount of money you earn depends on community engagement and how many views you rake in.
YouTube outlined all the details in a post on the YouTube Blog, noting that creators can earn anywhere from $100 to $10,000 in a month. Besides viewership and engagement, payouts also depend on your audience’s location and how many creators are making Shorts.
In order to qualify for the fund, your uploads have to be original. This means that you can’t repost them from other platforms, like TikTok or Instagram. Creators must also be 13 years of age or older, and must with YouTube’s guidelines.
For now, only creators in the US, UK, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, and South Africa can benefit from the fund. YouTube says that it will expand eligibility to more countries in the future.
Platforms Continue to Dole Out Incentives for Creators
You may be wondering: why is YouTube paying creators so much money to make Shorts? This is all part of YouTube’s efforts to increase quality content on Shorts, and ramp up viewership to compete with TikTok.
YouTube announced the $100 million Shorts Fund in May 2021, which YouTube will split up among creators from now and until sometime in 2022. Snapchat and TikTok have already started paying their users to create content, making YouTube a bit late to the game.
Snapchat currently splits up $1 million between the top-performing creators on its short-form video feature, Spotlight. Meanwhile, TikTok boasts a $300 million Creator Fund that the platform will distribute over the next three years.
Does Paying for Content Guarantee Quality?
TikTok’s growing popularity has made other social platforms dip into the short-form video craze. Both Snapchat and YouTube hope that by providing users with an incentive, they will attract more creators to their platforms.
But even if YouTube pays creators for making Shorts, that doesn’t guarantee the platform will knock TikTok off of its pedestal. TikTok is already eons ahead in the short-form video market, not to mention that it’s a dedicated platform for these types of videos.
YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat may find it hard to compete. After all, each of these platforms tacked on short-form videos as a sort of afterthought. Will users really want to leave a dedicated short-form video platform for a stripped-down alternative?
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