YouTube Shorts is still relatively new, and the revenue-sharing program only started in February, giving creators a 45% split of advertising dollars. Shorts are YouTube’s reaction to the TikTok craze, with a style that reinvents a large swath of the video site, owned by Google. Shorts are a roulette wheel of content, requiring a snappier mode of production and new strategies to appeal to audiences. The ad experience is different, too—ads appear as their own Shorts, not as commercials inside videos, and they run in the feed adjacent to creator content. Shorts are challenging the very definition of what it means to be a YouTuber, according to longtime partners.
“With Shorts, it’s a scroll functionality. You scroll, scroll, scroll, which is a different mentality than coming in, watching something, engaging with it, and commenting on it,” said Leslie Morgan, founder of Morganglory Consulting, who works with creators on brand deals and other parts of the business. “It’s just the scroll effect.”
For Natalie Alzate, a YouTuber with 8.35 million subscribers, that “scroll effect” means her videos are exposed to a wider audience. YouTube Shorts distributes creators' content to random people, not necessarily their base of loyal supporters. As a result, Alzate needs to recalibrate her relationship with the community she has established since 2014 on her health and beauty channel.
“The challenge right now with Shorts, because of how the functionality is, the short-form content isn’t being served the way the long-form is,” Morgan said. “It’s actually created this new audience, and an audience that [Alzate] was not expecting, that is catering to a different kind of community.”
Jonathan Paul Lambiase and Julia Yarinsky, also known as JP and Julia from HellthyJunkFood on YouTube, are feeling the Shorts effect, too. HellthyJunkFood has more than 3 million subscribers, and Shorts are paying about a penny a view, “which is better than TikTok, but not enough to sustain [on] ad revenue alone,” the duo told Ad Age by email.
HellthyJunkFood typically gets tens of thousands of views on food-hack videos that last between five and 10 minutes. Shorts, which run up to 60 seconds, tend to lead to hundreds of thousands of views, which could make it a game of quantity.
“The algorithm incentivizes short content creation, but the increasing saturation in the market makes it difficult to stand out,” Lambiase and Yarinsky said. “Despite this, YouTube Shorts seems to gain more new subscribers compared to Instagram and other platforms, but the percent of views from new followers is oddly low. Therefore, one might get a boost in subscribers, but not necessarily a boost in views, which is what ultimately pays out in terms of revenue.”