YouTube introduces $100M Shorts Fund to pay content creators

YouTube announced on Tuesday a $100 million Youtube Shorts Fund for content creators to be distributed over the course of 2021-2022, in order to court more creators and influencers. The fund will launch in the coming months. 

As part of the fund, YouTube, each month, will pay content creators whose “unique” Shorts received the most views and engagements in order to reward them. First announced in September 2020, TikTok rival Shorts is YouTube’s short-form video experience feature which is currently available in the United States and India. 

“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.” YouTube said. 

Rewarding content creators for their contributions is not unique to YouTube Shorts. Platforms aiming to attract creators and influencers have announced such funds and features to let creators earn money from their unique content. 

YouTube Shorts rival Snapchat announced back in November that it will distribute $1 million a day to video creators to use Spotlight, its in-app feature that brings together the most liked and shared videos of the platform. 

In mid-April, Clubhouse rolled out its monetization feature Payments to more than 60 thousand creators in the United States to let them earn money.  

Last week, Twitter began to roll out Tip Jar in its Android and iOS apps to allow users to send money directly to their favorite content creators. In late April, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will build a marketplace to connect influencers with brands and new monetization features for creators to allow them to make money from the sales of the products that they recommend.