YouTube Shorts rn

YouTube fired a warning short, er, shot at TikTok earlier this week, releasing an announcement outlining changes the Google-owned company is making to support individual creators. The two big takeaways:

1. Welcome to Miami the Partner Program: Shorts-focused creators that meet certain requirements can apply early next year to be part of YouTube’s Partner Program, which will pool together all of the ad revenue from Shorts, then dole out 45% of the overall pie to individual channels based on video views. This makes Shorts the first short form video platform to unveil any sort of rev-sharing.
2. More music is coming to videos: YouTube also unveiled Creator Music, which gives channels the ability to purchase music licenses directly from studios. So you can kiss goodbye to demonetization – and say hello to more dances and trends.

The driving idea behind these moves is that they’ll draw more original content to YouTube, instead of somewhere else, which in turn gives users more of a reason to open the app.

🤔 Why that’s a big deal: At the moment, original content seems to flow from TikTok → other platforms (case in point: ~1/3 of Instagram Reels originated elsewhere).

• But the Bytedance-owned app is earning a reputation as not being very creator-friendly. Critics usually point to its Creator Fund, which doles out a finite amount of money to an ever-increasing number of creators – meaning the pie actually gets smaller by the day.

🎥 The bottom line: YouTube’s new moves seem bound to leave it wearing the pants… er, shorts when it comes to original content.