YouTube plans to take on TikTok, Snapchat with creator payment scheme

YouTube is treating short video platforms as its competitors, but they are increasingly posing to be an existential crisis for the social media giant, apparent by its desperate move of paying creators.

YouTube Shorts, YouTube's TikTok rival, will pay content creators up to $10,000 each month for producing popular short videos. YouTube intends to pay a total of $100 million over the next year, with the first installments due this month.

The fund has the potential to pay out a lot of money to creators, but no guarantees have been made. The level of popularity required to earn money will be determined by the number of individuals that create and view Shorts each month, as well as the location of each creator's audience.

These must also be original videos, according to YouTube. Reuploads and videos with watermarks from other platforms will disqualify a channel from receiving payments.

On YouTube, creators have traditionally been compensated based on the advertisements that appear in front of their videos, with a direct correlation between the number of ad views and the amount of money received. YouTube, on the other hand, doesn't want to put an ad in front of every quick clip, so it's developing this alternate method of payment to compensate creators.

YouTube's chief product officer, Neal Mohan, said that the Shorts Fund would eventually be replaced by a "long-term, scalable monetization program." The fund is "a way to get started and actually really start figuring out" how monetization for creators of these videos should work. "You're essentially consuming a feed of shorts, so the model has to work differently," said Neal in a recent conversation on The Decoder.

TikTok and Snapchat both pay creators based on video popularity rather than ad revenue. The result could be lucrative for creators, though there is less transparency about how much they might earn each month.

The fund provides a way for YouTube to jumpstart it's late-in-the-game effort at a short-form video service. Though TikTok has a significant head start, YouTube is, after all, YouTube — a massive and massively popular video platform — which could give it an advantage as it attempts to launch YouTube Shorts, it's own version of TikTok.

For the time being, the payments are only available in ten regions, including the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Brazil, among others.