YouTube is fighting back against the popular video-sharing, social-media platform TikTok.
Key Details
- YouTube announced this week that it plans to share advertising sales with creators of Shorts, its bite-sized video feature, encouraging creators to make videos and earn money.
- Top artists can earn upwards of $10,000 per month from this program
- Similar to TikTok, YouTube’s new program will pay creators using a pool from ads that run in Shorts. Youtube describes its fund differently saying it’s the first to fund short-form online video “at scale.”
- Creators can join “whether they want to be the next big thing or just need help paying the bills,” says YouTube’s chief product officer Neal Mohan. “We want YouTube to be the place that gives them the greatest support in the digital landscape.”
Why it’s important
Since its recent inception in 2016, TikTok has dominated the social-media world with its short-length videos.
Other platforms are catching on to the short video wave and fighting back, specifically YouTube.
In 2020, YouTube introduced Shorts, a format for vertical videos that it has increasingly promoted in the company’s app. Earlier this year, YouTube disclosed that Shorts had more than 1.5 billion monthly viewers and told investors that it would bring ads to the format, reports Bloomberg.
Many people have amassed fame from TikTok after posting short videos to the platform and joining the app’s “creator fund.”
YouTube began sharing ad sales with producers in 2007 and now has more than 2 million creators in its program. Last year, YouTube reported more than $28 billion in ad sales, before creator payouts.
In order to join YouTube’s partner program, creators must have more than 10 million views on Shorts and more than 1,000 subscribers. Typically, YouTube has given 55% of ad sales to creators and kept the rest, but with Shorts creators will only receive 45%.
Many TikTok creators are making big money from the app, but not from the crestor fund. Some creators have said less than 1% of their income actually comes from the fund, but they receive millions in brand deals.
That’s what’s exciting to them about YouTube’s fund because creators will actually receive money from their videos.
Adam Waheed, who has 15 million TikTok followers, told Fortune that YouTube’s new creator payment fund could be a “game changer.”
