YouTube Expands Shorts Fund to More than 70 New Regions, Adds New Shorts Analytics Features

YouTube has announced some new updates for Shorts, including an expansion of its Shorts Fund, enabling more creators to get paid for posting highly viewed clips, and new Shorts analytics tools within YouTube Studio.

The main announcement is the expansion of YouTube’s Shorts funding. Back in May, YouTube announced that it would pay out $100 million over the course of 2021-22 to top Shorts creators, based on a range of criteria, in order to provide additional support, and motivation, for their efforts. 

Initially, that funding was only available to creators in the US, then in September, YouTube expanded access to the program to an additional 30 regions.

YouTube is now adding another 70 markets to the eligibility list, meaning that creators from many more markets will now be eligible for Shorts bonuses.

Creators in these countries will now be able to claim a piece of that funding, with YouTube paying out between $100 and $10,000 each month to channels based on the performance of their Shorts clips.

Though the factors YouTube takes into account on this front are not entirely clear:

“There’s no specific performance threshold to qualify for a bonus. The level of performance needed to qualify for a bonus payment may change from month to month based on various factors, including the location of your viewers and the overall growth of Shorts.”

Creators that are eligible to claim Shorts funding will be notified by YouTube, based on the performance of their content in the previous month. YouTube’s hoping that by adding additional motivation to the process, that could help it grow Shorts adoption in more regions, and get more creators aligned to YouTube instead for their creative efforts.

You can read more about the specifics of YouTube’s Shorts fund here.

YouTube’s also adding new Shorts-specific analytics elements to YouTube Studio, including a new card that will display how many of your Shorts have been remixed, as well as your most popular Shorts clips.

YouTube’s also added the Shorts ‘Align’ tool on Android, previously only available on iOS, which enables you to see the previous frame you recorded to help line up your shots.

Finally, YouTube’s also added a new Shorts grid view on channel pages, making it easier for visitors to get an overview of your Shorts content.

As you can see, the grid view is very much like TikTok, with view counts on each clip. Creators will be able to choose how their Shorts grid is displayed by changing the order of the shelves within YouTube Studio on desktop.

While it may be a direct copy of TikTok, Shorts has been a winner for YouTube, with Shorts clips now generating over 15 billion global daily views, which is more than double what it was seeing in March (6.5 billion views). It seems that the appetite for short-form content, sparked by TikTok, has spilled over to every other app, and YouTube has been able to capitalize, and fend off at least some competition from the rising app, by replicating its key features, and boosting them through adoption by its top stars.

Which is where YouTube has a distinct advantage. YouTube has a much more refined revenue share system in place for creators, and eventually, when the top stars look to move beyond short-form content, and onto bigger, better things, that’s where YouTube welcomes them in, and uses the audiences that they’ve created in other apps to turn them into millionaires.

And now, it also has Shorts too, so they can create all of their content on one platform, and use it to build their audience, and revenue, in the app.

It may seem like a questionable tactic, copying the top features from other apps. But it works, and YouTube Shorts is another example of this

Socialmediatoday.com

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