Introducing the YouTube Shorts Fund
May 11, 2021 – [[read-time]] minute read
We've been rolling out the YouTube Shorts beta to help bring the joy of short-form video to YouTube, and the joy of YouTube to short-form video. It’s now available to everyone in India and the U.S., and we’ve already seen many creative, awesome Shorts from our community.
Since Shorts is a new way to watch and create on YouTube, we’ve been taking a fresh look at what it means to monetize and reward creators for their content. Today, we’re sharing the latest updates here as we continue to build Shorts alongside our community of creators and artists.
Introducing the YouTube Shorts Fund
We’re introducing the YouTube Shorts Fund, a $100M fund distributed over the course of 2021-2022. Anyone is eligible to participate in the fund simply by creating unique Shorts that delight the YouTube community.
Each month, we’ll reach out to thousands of creators whose Shorts received the most engagement and views to reward them for their contributions. We’ll also ask these creators to share their feedback with us so we can continue to improve the product experience.
The Shorts Fund is not limited to just creators in the YouTube Partner Program. Creators will be eligible to participate if they create original content for Shorts and adhere to our Community Guidelines.
We’ll share additional details as we get closer to launching the fund in the coming months.
The future of monetization on Shorts
The Shorts Fund is the first step in our journey to build a monetization model for Shorts on YouTube. This is a top priority for us, and will take us some time to get it right. We are actively working on this, and will take the feedback gathered from our community to help develop a long-term program specifically designed for YouTube Shorts.
We’re excited to start rewarding creators for their contributions through the Shorts Fund. At the same time, we’ll expand our Shorts player across more surfaces on YouTube to help people find new creators, artists and Shorts to enjoy. We will also begin to test and iterate on ads to better understand their performance.
YouTube has helped an entire generation of creators and artists turn their creativity into businesses. We’ve paid more than $30 billion to creators, artists, and media companies over the last three years, and we remain deeply committed to supporting the next generation of mobile creators with Shorts.
More exciting features to try with Shorts
Earlier this year, we previewed a new feature that will allow you to remix audio from videos across YouTube — which includes billions of videos — and we’re excited to share this experience is starting to roll out to everyone that has access to our Shorts creation tools soon. This means you can give your own creative spin on the content you love to watch on YouTube and help find it a new audience. We can’t wait to see what you do with it! Creators and artists are in control and can always opt out if they don’t want their long-form video remixed.
Not only that, but the team has been working to bring even more features to YouTube Shorts, with new things to try like:
Automatically add captions to your Short
Record up to 60 seconds with the Shorts camera
Add clips from your phone’s gallery to add to your recordings made with the Shorts camera
Add basic filters to color correct your Shorts, with more effects to come in the future
We’re excited to continue building Shorts as we work on longer-term monetization solutions, and will provide more updates as we go. We look forward to hearing your feedback!