A year, after YouTube turned on revenue sharing for its short-form video feature, YouTube Shorts, more than one in four creators in YouTube’s Partner Program, are now earning money with it. Given there are over 3 million creators in YouTube’s ad-sharing program, that amounts to roughly 750,000 Shorts creators in total. The company doesn’t break out how much it has paid Shorts creators specifically. It has paid $70 billion to creators in total over the last three years, with the bulk of that going to long-form content.
The number of Shorts uploaded on YouTube has grown by 50 percent year over year, and the feature now averages over 70 billion daily views from over 2 billion creators per month. The feature first launched in 2020 and has become more integrated with the platform in the years since. Even with that growth, Shorts still lacks the influence and passionate user base of TikTok, the platform it’s imitating.
While there hasn’t been a mass exodus from TikTok, monetizing Shorts does seem to have incentivized more native YouTubers to experiment with the feature. Many of YouTube’s most subscribed-to long-form creators, including MrBeast, Like Nastya, Markiplier, and others are now posting to Shorts. Todd Sherman, the product lead of YouTube Shorts, believes Shorts’ connection to the wider YouTube ecosystem gives it an edge over competitors. Unlike TikTok, users on YouTube can hop from watching a creator’s Shorts to watching their full-length videos or subscribing to their channel — typically more lucrative opportunities for creators.
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