YouTube to share ad revenue with 'Shorts' creators

YouTube has announced that creators can start making ad revenue on ‘Shorts’ starting from February 1st, as promised last year in September that the monetization option will be launched soon.

The change is coming as part of a broader update to YouTube’s Partner Program, which required currently YouTube ‘partners’ to sign new agreement terms, whether or not they’re looking to make money from Shorts.

Creators can make some revenue from the format that released back in 2021 via things like Super Chats and shopping integrations, as well as a creator fund that the company had set up, but that model wasn’t all that much better than TikTok’s monetization scheme.

What TikTok doesn’t do, though, is directly share ad revenue with creators — something that YouTube has been doing for years for traditional videos and that it’s now bringing to Shorts.

Creators have option not to opt in shorts monetization if they don’t want to. According to Youtube, it is introducing a modular system for the partner program’s terms — everyone in the program will have to sign a base agreement that dictates things like what you can post on the site and how payment works.

That only implies for the content creators who are already partnered with Youtube, the company says that the partners have a deadline of July 10, 2023 to accept the new terms, or else they are penalize by turning off the monetization and they’ll have to reapply to the program.

an additional agreement for “Watch Page” and Shorts monetization, which the partner have to agreed separately. The Shorts agreement, available on February 01, is basically what is says on the tin, giving content creator a cut of the revenue from “ads viewed between videos in the Shorts Feed.” Meanwhile, the Watch Page agreement essentially covers the other stuff; livestreams and traditional “long-form” videos on YouTube, YouTube Music, or YouTube Kids.

Basically, content you watch on a page that looks something like this:

There’s also an addendum for “commerce products” like memberships, Super Chats, Super Stickers, and Super Thanks, though the company says that you won’t have to re-agree to those terms if you’ve already turned the features on for your channel.

YouTube says this modular approach will let it “add new monetization opportunities in the future without having to update or amend the entire monetization agreement.” The company also says that you can opt out of certain monetization modules after you sign up for them.

ELIGIBILITY:

The announcement comes as YouTube is revising the requirements to join the YouTube Partner Program. One of the requirements used to be that you had to get 4,000 public watch hours on your content within the past 12 months. Starting in October 2022, Shorts counted toward that number.

As of January 2023, though, that’s no longer the case, according to the YouTube latest Partner Program overview & eligibility support page. Instead, that part of the eligibility requirement has been tweaked; you now have to get the 4,000 hours on non-shorts content or get 10 million views on your public Shorts within the past 90 days. (Either way, you also have to have at least 1,000 subscribers to be eligible.)