YouTube Shorts, the video platform’s short-form TikTok rival, has launched its ‘Shorts Fund’, a $100 million fund that will be distributed to its creators over the course of 2021-2022.
In September, YouTube Shorts first launched the beta version of its video platform in India. It was later rolled out across the US in March, and is available to all in both countries.
Now, in a blog post announcing the fund, YouTube details its first step in building a monetization model for the short-form platform.
The $100 million Shorts Fund will be available to anyone creating original content for Shorts, not just those in the YouTube Partner Program.
The company says “thousands of creators” will be paid for their content on Shorts through the Fund.
In the past three years, YouTube says it has paid $30 billion to creators, artists, and media companies, and the company also says it will remain similarly “committed to supporting the next generation of mobile creators with Shorts.”
Creators won’t be able to apply for the fund. Instead, YouTube will reach out and reward creators whose videos have exceeded certain milestones each month, including engagement and view counts.
According to TechCrunch, who contacted YouTube for further comment but were declined, details on how creators will be vetted, if creators could receive several payments in the same period for qualifying videos and other details are currently unknown.
However, the platform says it will share additional information as it gets closer to launching the fund in the coming months.
Alongside the fund, YouTube announced several additional features to its Shorts platform.
Earlier this year, YouTube previewed a feature that allows creators to ‘remix’ audio from the billions of videos found across YouTube.
This feature will begin to roll out to all Shorts users soon, however creators and artists do have the option to opt out if they don’t want their long-form video remixed, says YouTube.
Creators will also be able to automatically add captions to video, record up to 60 seconds with the Shorts camera, attach clips from phone galleries to recordings and add filter, effects and color correct functions.
The Shorts player will be expanded across more surfaces on YouTube, an effort to “help people find new creators, artists and Shorts to enjoy,” says YouTube.
Over the coming months, YouTube will also begin to test and iterate on ads to better understand their performance and will gain feedback from creators.
The announcement of YouTube’s efforts to monetize its TikTok clone platform for creators comes after Snapchat launched its short-form video platform ‘Spotlight’ in September, promising to distribute over $1 million every day to creators submitting videos until the end of 2020, “and potentially beyond”.Music Business Worldwide
