YouTube will set up a $100 million fund to pay for Shorts creators

YouTube announced a $100 million fund to pay people who post videos on its TikTok competitor, Shorts. The fund will be launched in the next few months, and the funds will be distributed to creators around the next year.

This is the "first step in our journey to build a long-term monetization model for Shorts on YouTube," Amy Singer, director of global partnership enablement for YouTube Shorts, wrote in a blog post. "This is a top priority for us, and will take us some time to get it right. We are actively working on this, and will take the feedback gathered from our community to help develop a long-term program specifically designed for YouTube Shorts."

Anyone who creates Shorts can participate in the fund, not just those who are enrolled in the YouTube Partner Program. As long as you stick to the community guidelines and create original content, you'll be eligible. YouTube will "reac

Shorts has only been available to creators in the US since March (and before that in India). Anyone can watch the videos, and Shorts are already garnering more than 6.5 billion daily views, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said last month. YouTube could be using the fund to lure away top creators from the likes of TikTok and Snapchat.

The service will soon add an option to allow creators to extract audio from other YouTube videos into their Shorts. This feature sounds similar to TikTok Duet, but users can access a large number of videos from YouTube. The Shorts team has also been working on adding automatic subtitles, the ability to record up to 60 seconds of footage through the Shorts camera, color correction filters, and methods for adding clips from the phone gallery.