Ever since Google launched YouTube Shorts last year, it has been aggressively pushing for more engagement and content on the platform. The company has, in the past, tested a Shorts button in the navigation bar, as well as a dedicated create button for Shorts in the YouTube player interface.
Now, however, Google is attempting to make YouTube Shorts even more enticing to creators. The company has set up a $100 million fund to pay creators that make engaging content on the Shorts platform. The fund will be paid out over the course of 2021-22 and any creator will be eligible for the payouts, regardless of their involvement in the YouTube partner program.
In its blog post announcing the fund, Google said “Each month, we’ll reach out to thousands of creators whose Shorts received the most engagement and views to reward them for their contributions.”
In order to be eligible for payouts from the new fund, you simply need to make engaging, original content, and adhere to the community guidelines. This is just YouTube’s first step towards monetising YouTube Shorts, which means we should be seeing more about ways to make money from creating Shorts in the near future. “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,” says the company.
Meanwhile, the company has also announced a couple of new features for Shorts. Users can now add automatic captions to Shorts, and the recording limit has been increased to 60 seconds with the Shorts camera. You can now also add clips from your phone gallery to Shorts, and add basic filters (more are planned for the future).
