YouTube Shorts is the short-form section of the video-sharing website

YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...

, hosting content much like YouTube's primary service but in a vertical format with a maximum length of 60 seconds. Shorts have collectively earned over 5 trillion views since the platform was made available to the public on July 13, 2021.

History

In 2019, as a response to competition from

TikTok TikTok, known in China as Douyin (), is a short-form video hosting service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from 15 seconds to 10 minutes. TikTok is an international version ...

, YouTube started experimenting with showing

vertical video A vertical video is a video created either by a camera or computer that is intended for viewing in portrait mode, producing an image that is taller than it is wide. It thus sits in opposition to the multiple horizontal formats normalised by ci ...

s up to a length of 30 seconds in their own section on the homepage. This early

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was released only to a small number of people. Shortly after TikTok was banned in India in September 2020, the YouTube Shorts beta was made available in the country. In March 2021, the beta was released in the U.S. Shorts was globally released on July 13, 2021. In January 2022, a study showed that scammers were garnering millions of views by pirating popular videos from TikTok and posting them on YouTube Shorts. They pinned comments on their reposted videos containing commercial links, which generated money for them on a

cost per action Cost per action (CPA), also sometimes misconstrued in marketing environments as cost per acquisition, is an online advertising measurement and pricing model referring to a specified action, for example, a sale, click, or form submit (e.g., conta ...

cost per lead Cost per lead, often abbreviated as CPL, is an online advertising pricing model, where the advertiser pays for an explicit sign-up from a consumer interested in the advertiser's offer. It is also commonly called ''online lead generation''. Con ...

basis. In August 2022, YouTube announced plans to make the Shorts feature available on its smart TV app. In December 2022, YouTube published its annual blog post documenting the top videos and creators of the year, with Shorts receiving its own section of the post for the first time.

Features

YouTube Shorts presents user-generated vertical videos up to 60 seconds long. It allows users to add licensed music and captions. Viewers can scroll through an endless queue of videos. YouTube Shorts offers editing capabilities and the ability to interact with viewers by responding to comments with additional videos, the latter being a feature primarily made popular by TikTok. Although intended to be watched on smartphones, YouTube Shorts can be viewed on all other devices.

Monetization

In August 2021, YouTube released the YouTube Shorts fund, a system in which the top Shorts creators could get paid for their work. YouTube described this as a way to "monetize and reward creators for their content" and said it would be a $100 million fund distributed throughout 2021 and 2022, similar to TikTok's $1 billion creator fund. YouTube told ''

The Hollywood Reporter ''The Hollywood Reporter'' (''THR'') is an American digital and print magazine which focuses on the Cinema of the United States, Hollywood film industry, film, television, and entertainment industries. It was founded in 1930 as a daily trade pap ...

'' that the fund is "just a stopgap until YouTube develops a long-term monetization and support tool for short-form creators" that will be "modeled after but differ from" its Partner Program. When the fund was released, YouTube sent offers to over 3,000 creators that ranged from from $100 to $10,000 per month. Starting in January 2023, creators who focus on making Shorts will be eligible to apply for the regular Partner Program when they gain 1,000 subscribers and reach 10 million combined views of all their Shorts in a 90-day period (a twist on the usual criteria of non-Shorts creators becoming eligible when they reach 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of combined viewing time across their videos within a 12-month period). The YouTube Shorts fund will be discontinued the following month.https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/12475004

References

External links

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YouTube Creators page

New Features and Updates for Shorts Viewers & Creators
{{Google LLC YouTube Internet properties established in 2020 2020 in Internet culture