Big news for creators! From February 1st 2023, You can start making money from YouTube Shorts.

Until now, Shorts creators’ main source of income was through the Shorts Creator Fund. The fund allocated $100 million to Shorts creators, but similar to TikTok’s own Creator Fund, creators have long complained that these monetization programs don’t provide enough for the amount of views and engagement received.

This new program will instead share ad revenue with creators, with potentially much higher payouts.

Here's everything you need to know:

The Partner Program

Before you can begin making money off Shorts, you'll need to accept the terms of YouTube's Partner Program as well as the Shorts Monetization module. To be eligible for the program, you need to have at least 1000 subscribers and either 4000 watch hours in the last 12 months or 10 million Shorts views in the last 90 days.

Shorts ad revenue gets collected

YouTube isn’t attaching ads to individual Shorts videos and directly splitting the revenue with individual creators, like it does on its long-form content. Instead, it will collect all revenue earned across Shorts that month, and split it up among Shorts creators based on certain factors, after accounting for the platform’s music licensing costs too.

Every month YouTube will collect revenue from ads seen within the Shorts Feed, meaning viewers browsing through a creator's individual library won't contribute to the view count.

Shorts ad revenue gets allocated to different Pools

The ad revenue is distributed to different pools for creators and YouTube's music partners. The amount allocated to each pool is based on views and music usage across all monetizing Shorts.

Shorts ad revenue gets allocated to individual creators

The ad revenue from the Creator Pool is then allocated to individual creators based on their share of total views from all monetizing Shorts in each region. Because the revenue to individual creators is from the Creator Pool, and the Music Pool was already allocated separately, this means that creators will not be paid a smaller amount if their videos contain licensed music.

Creators keep 45% of the ad revenue share

Creators will keep a huge 45% of their individually allocated revenue, with 55% going to YouTube. So for example, if YouTube allocated a creator $100 from the Creator Pool, that creator would receive $45.

This new monetization program promises much higher payouts than YouTube's previous Shorts Fund and TikTok's Creator Fund, and could turn YouTube Shorts into the best platform for making money on short-form content.

Follow Genflow on Instagram for more social media news and updates.