YouTube Is Giving $10,000 To Create YouTube Shorts

By Mara Anton

Posted on August 5, 2021

YouTube Shorts is out of beta and creators are pumping out video after video. It’s no wonder that YouTube has a a dedicated tab for the new, short form of video content on their mobile version or that now, the company is willing to reward handsomely those creators who put all their effort into this type of content. Up to $10,000 is promised to those who excel at YouTube shorts.

YouTube Shorts: How To Make Money

Seeing that their shorts have picked up steam and that competing platforms like TikTok are thriving, YouTube has decided to incetivizing creators even more.

The company has allocated a $100 million Shorts Fund to reward users that are making appealing, outstanding, under-1-minute videos. Up to $10,000 per month will be available for making popular videos, with the first payments going out this month.

YouTube Shorts Fund: Am I Eligible?

Of course, there are a couple of conditions to be eligible for this fund.

The most important one is the ability to make and publish original videos in the form of Shorts, not reuploads nor videos that are tagged with watermarks, that is videos that were already uploaded on a competing platform.

Then, you’ll have to live in one of 10 regions where YouTube has made this fund available. These are U.S., U.K., Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia and South Africa. However, YouTube says they do plan to expand their program to other regions soon.

Also, keep in mind that the funds will be alocated depending on the number of people making Shorts every month and the people viewing them, as well as the audience of the creator.

YouTube Shorts Fund: What Happens When It Runs Out?

The YouTube Shorts Fund will, eventually, run out. What will YouTube do then? Will there be any chance for future income from this bite-sized videos?

Neal Mohan, YouTube’s chief product officer, said that the Fund will be replaced with a “long-term, scalable monetization program,” on The Verge’s Decoder.

That program will, more than likely, consider the popularity of creators’ videos and not the ads running on them as we see a shift from ad-based monetization to view/popularity-based on, with TikTok and Snapchat having supported this payment system for a while now.