The news: Neal Mohan, chief product officer at YouTube, announced that the platform is bringing its Shorts Fund, a $100 million fund for creators, to over 30 new countries.
More on this: YouTube created the Shorts Fund in May to attract more creators to its platform, but it’s not the only of its kind—and other platforms have much more money to throw around.
- The Shorts Fund is $100 million shy of TikTok’s $200 million Creator Fund, which was introduced last July amid TikTok’s popularity boom.
-
Facebook and Instagram also announced earlier this year that they'll be investing $1 billion by the end of 2022 to introduce new methods for creators to generate and track income on their platforms.
Emphasis on new content: TikTok’s hold over short video bleeds onto other platforms, and they're looking to creator funds to generate new content.
- Scroll through YouTube Shorts and you’ll see that many videos are beset with watermarks from TikTok or other short-form video services.
- Many other creator funds stress the importance of original content, but YouTube’s is especially explicit and addresses many issues with content on the platform.
- The Shorts Fund guidelines say that Shorts channels with videos containing “watermarks or logos from third-party social media platforms, non-original videos … or videos re-uploaded from other creators’ channels” will not be eligible for the Shorts Fund.
The competition: Creators don’t just bring an audience to a platform—they also attract brand partners and open opportunities for social commerce that have platforms competing fiercely.
- Social commerce and influencer marketing have been especially effective in foreign markets, as compared with the US. Expanding the Shorts Fund to more countries will help YouTube tap into markets where competition may be less intense.