YouTube is set to pay creators up to $10,000 per month for making popular videos on its new Youtube Shorts platform

YouTube Shorts launched as a direct competitor of TikTok, with the company holding high hopes.

The company plans to pay $100 million throughout the next year, with the first payments going out this month.

The fund could mean a whole lot of cash for creators, but payouts aren’t guaranteed.

How it works:

In order to earn a buck on the platform, you’ll have to meet YouTube’s criteria.

The popularity needed to earn money will depend on just how many people are making and watching Shorts each month, and payouts will also depend on where each creator’s audience is located.

YouTube is also requiring these to be original videos. Reuploads and videos tagged with watermarks from other platforms — aka TikTok, Snapchat, or Reels — will disqualify a channel for payments. The payments are only available in 10 regions for now, including the US, UK, India, and Brazil, among others, and YouTube says it plans on expanding that list “in the future.”

The traditional way to earn money on YouTube still remains

Creators have traditionally gotten paid by YouTube based on the ads that run in front of their videos.

There continues to be a direct relationship between the number of ad views and the amount of money they receive. But with Shorts, YouTube doesn’t want to run an ad in front of every quick clip, so it’s building out this alternate form of payment to reward creators.

But, what is the “Shorts fund”?

The Shorts Fund will eventually be replaced with a “long-term, scalable monetization program,” says Neal Mohan, YouTube’s chief product officer,

That particular fund is “a way to get going and to actually really start to figure out” how monetization should work for creators making these videos.

Earning money on social media platforms has become the new trend

Payment schemes like this have become increasingly common. TikTok and Snapchat both pay out to creators based on the popularity of their videos, rather than based on ads.