YouTube wants to lure creators away from TikTok with cash, but it won't say how much

In 2007, YouTube made a decision that created a career out of what was previously just a hobby: the company announced it would give over half of the revenue it earned running ads on videos to creators themselves. Fifteen years later, that creator cut—55%—supports the nearly 400,000 people in the US working 40-hour weeks as YouTubers. Now, YouTube is trying to pull off a similar revolution in how people are paid for making short-form videos—which, despite their wild popularity, have never earned their creators any share of the platform’s lucrative ad revenue. On September 20, the company announced it will for the first time share ad revenue with creators of YouTube Shorts, the under-60-second videos the company launched in 2020 to compete with TikTok.  It’s a big ploy to pull even more creators away from that rival platform; on TikTok, creators make less than a nickel per thousand views, on average, through a monetization scheme that has frustrated creators. YouTube’s promise is that, starting in 2023, it will divide Shorts ad revenue into two separate pools: one to pay video creators and one to pay record labels to use their music, because so much of short video is built on their…
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