Most of the tech giants now are trying to create the next TikTok to get a piece of that lucrative video-sharing market. YouTube recently launched their own short-form video feature called Shorts although it’s available in the U.S and in India where TikTok is still banned. Now to get more creators to upload their own, original content, they’re announcing a $100M YouTube Shorts Fund where they will reward those whose original Shorts get the most engagement and views.
Anyone who uploads their short-form videos on Shorts from 2021-2022 will be eligible to get money from the $100M fund. The only conditions are that the videos have to be original content and of course the videos need to abide by the community guidelines of YouTube. They will directly contact creators on a monthly basis but how the money will be divvied up among those that get the most engagement and views every month is still unclear.
YouTube says that this is just the first step in creating a monetization model for the Shorts feature. They will also be expanding the Shorts player not just in more countries but also across more surfaces on YouTube. They will need to do both the expansion and the monetization if they want to be able to compete with TikTok. YouTube seems to have a good record in giving money to creators as they say they’ve paid out $30 billion to creators, artists, and media companies in the past three years.
YouTube Shorts has also been adding new features that will make it easier and more fun for people to use. This includes automatic captions, recording up to 60 seconds with the Shorts camera, adding clips from your phone’s gallery to add to recordings using the camera, and adding basic filters to your Shorts. They plan to add more features including more effects to the videos. They need to have feature parity with TikTok or even come up with better ones to get a piece of their market.
We’ll know more about the mechanics of their $100M YouTube Shorts funds when they roll it out to users in the U.S and India. Hopefully, we know more about when and where they will be rolling out Shorts in the future.
