Hello Aubrey! You’ve brought up an interesting question about whether YouTube Shorts are worth investing time and effort as a content creator.
To monetize YouTube Shorts and earn ad revenue, you need to follow YouTube’s channel monetization policies, including guidelines on repetitious and reused content, as well as YouTube’s Community Guidelines, Terms of Service, Copyright, and Google AdSense program policies.
To enable ad revenue sharing for Shorts, monetizing partners must accept the Shorts Monetization Module, which allows them to earn from ads and YouTube Premium in the Shorts Feed. Revenue sharing for Shorts applies to eligible Shorts views on your channel starting from the date you accept the module. Views accumulated before accepting the module are not eligible for revenue sharing.
For ad revenue sharing, Shorts must follow advertiser-friendly content guidelines. Only views of Shorts that comply with these guidelines will be eligible for revenue sharing.
Shorts ad revenue sharing occurs through a four-step process:
- Pool Shorts Feed ad revenue: Revenue earned from ads displayed between videos in the Shorts Feed is collected and used to reward creators and cover music licensing costs.
- Calculate the Creator Pool: Shorts Feed ad revenue is allocated to the Creator Pool based on views and music usage across Shorts uploaded by monetizing creators. If a Short doesn’t include music, all revenue associated with its views goes to the Creator Pool. If music is included, the revenue is split between the Creator Pool and music partners based on the number of tracks used.
- Allocate the Creator Pool: Revenue from the Creator Pool is then distributed among monetizing creators based on their share of total views from monetizing creators’ Shorts in each country.
- Apply revenue share: Monetizing creators receive 45% of their allocated revenue, regardless of whether music was used or not.
The Creator Pool does not include revenue associated with views of Shorts uploaded by creators who haven’t accepted the Shorts Monetization Module or aren’t eligible to monetize their Shorts. This revenue is used for music licensing costs or retained by YouTube. Revenue associated with views of Shorts uploaded by music partners or determined to be ineligible is also excluded from the Creator Pool.
Regarding the use of third-party content in Shorts, the allocation of views and revenue will be divided between the uploader and any third-party rightsholders (owners of other content used in the Short) based on specific policies. YouTube credits music content from its music industry partners or generated by Dream Track in reducing the views and revenue allocated to the Creator Pool, but other categories of third-party content are not credited at this time.
You can view estimated daily Shorts Feed ad revenue and other performance metrics in YouTube Analytics once they become available, or from the day you start monetizing with Shorts ads. Studio Content Manager users will have downloadable reports available for non-music partners by mid-March 2023, containing revenue details segmented by date and country/region for monetizing Shorts.