YouTube is looking to hop on the one-minute video trend that currently has TikTok, and its parent company ByteDance, reportedly valued at $425 billion: the video giant is launching YouTube Shorts—where users can upload one-minute videos recorded on their phone, and integrate text, filters, and music to their video clips—for all U.S. users and will roll it out this week to users in more than 100 countries.
YouTube Shorts was first launched in India in September and was rolled out to a select group of YouTubers in the U.S. in March.
Taking another page from TikTok, YouTube has also announced the creation of the YouTube Shorts Fund, which will distribute $100 million to YouTube Shorts creators beginning in fall 2021 and into 2022. No details have been released on who can apply to receive payment.
How To Get Your First 100 YouTube Subscribers Though YouTubers are paid through YouTube ads, ad revenue is not an option for YouTube Shorts creators. “The Shorts Fund is the first step in our journey to build a monetization model for Shorts on YouTube,” said Amy Singer, director of global partnership enablement for YouTube Shorts, in a statement. “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.”
According to YouTube, YouTube Shorts have generated over 6.5 billion daily views globally. And similar to TikTok, YouTube Shorts creators can also insert audio from other YouTube videos into their own content; other features include adding text to specific points in the video, automatically adding captions, adding images from the phone’s photo gallery, and basic filters to color correct. YouTube said that there will be more effects in the future, as it considers YouTube Shorts as being in beta mode.
YouTube Shorts can be watched on a dedicated page on YouTube’s web browser and mobile app (where users can scroll down to watch more Shorts, similar to TikTok).
YouTube Shorts one-minute videos are launching worldwide just as TikTok has announced that it’s expanding its maximum video length from one minute to three minutes—bringing it closer, funnily, to a typical YouTube-length video.