YouTube Expands $ 100 Million Fund for Short Films to 30 More Countries

After announcing his ‘Shorts Fund‘in May, which will see the platform pay out $ 100 million to top short film creators over time, to provide additional support and motivation for their efforts, YouTube has now announced an expansion of the funding program to creators of short films in even more regions.

According to Neal Mohan, YouTube product manager, the Shorts Fund is now available in more than 30 new regions.

Creators in these countries will now be able to get some of that big funding, YouTube will pay between $ 100 and $ 10,000 per month to channels depending on the performance of their TikTok-type clips.

But the “performance” in this context is not entirely clear:

“There is no specific performance threshold to qualify for a bonus. The level of performance required to qualify for a bonus payout may change from month to month depending on a variety of factors, including the location of your viewers and the overall growth of shorts.

So YouTube can’t say what you need to do to get that Shorts money. But the idea is that by offering the carrot of immediate cash payments, it will get more YouTubers to at least try Shorts, which could get them posted on YouTube, instead of migrating to TikTok instead.

Facebook is also trying the same thing, with a new Reels fundraising program, while Snapchat has had good success with its Spotlight funding, which initially allowed it to pay $ 1 million per day to incentivize Spotlight content.

But it also soured pretty quickly. Within months of starting the program, Snapchat slashed its payout amounts, which impacted creators who had quickly built a dependency on funding. Some Spotlight creators have since reported late payments and other issues, which left them feeling rejected by the app. So while this may be a solid decoy (Spotlight has reached 125 million users), these programs can also backfire if the creators end up working. specifically for these payments, and platforms, when looking to reduce the associated costs, have not established processes that can effectively replace these reduced revenues.

Which is an inherent challenge with the short video. You cannot add pre or mid-roll ads to the 30 second clips, so in order to generate more interest from creators, platforms depend on direct funding like this, in order to stimulate interest in such options. Ideally, this also gives them time to establish new avenues of monetization – like brand partnerships or ecommerce listings – but if those avenues don’t solidify, there will come a time when creators will lose revenue as a result. such changes.

But all the same, the potential of $ 10,000 per month will undoubtedly generate major interest. And maybe if YouTube can get more people to post clips of Shorts, that will increase the option and make it a more important consideration, which, again, will keep its best stars at home, instead of consider TikTok instead.

And with TikTok reaching a billion users, its appeal is strong, and you can bet that many creators, many platforms, are also at least dipping their toes in the waters of TikTok and considering its next developments to monetize their efforts. .

Can shorts offer similar reach potential – and will creators even care about shorts, when they have TikTok instead?

I mean, youtube say shorts already generates 6.5 billion daily views, so the potential is there. Perhaps, then, with more funding options, it will become a more important part of the app, and maybe YouTube will be in a better position to steer the Shorts Fund towards higher paying options built into its platform offering. -wider shape.

You can read more about the YouTube fund for short films here.