YouTube Introduces $100 Million Fund To Advance Short-Form Video

YouTube is introducing YouTube Shorts beta to help bring short-form video to YouTube users in the U.S. and India, according to a YouTube blog post on Tuesday (May 11).

“We’ve been rolling out the YouTube Shorts beta to help bring the joy of short-form video to YouTube, and the joy of YouTube to short-form video. It’s now available to everyone in India and the U.S., and we’ve already seen many creative, awesome Shorts from our community,” according to the post.

The YouTube Shorts $100 million fund will benefit creators throughout 2021 and 2022. “Anyone is eligible to participate in the fund simply by creating unique Shorts that delight the YouTube community,” per the post.

The company said that every month, it will reach out to the creator of Shorts videos that garnered the most engagement and views and “reward them for their contributions.”

Shorts is a new way to watch and create on YouTube, and as such, the platform will also deliver a new experience for creators to promote their content.

“We’re excited to start rewarding creators for their contributions through the Shorts Fund. At the same time, we’ll expand our Shorts player across more surfaces on YouTube to help people find new creators, artists and Shorts to enjoy. We will also begin to test and iterate on ads to better understand their performance,” according to the post.

Google has been working to gain more eyeballs with features now being trialed by some creators. The resulting data will then be linked to Google’s analytics and shopping tools.

Shoppable Media is a new buzzword and a new front in the digital-first economy. By way of example, a luxury brand like Burberry wanting to use an influencer could also use shoppable media. When doing so, it would have to consider longer-length media, be it content, video, or photos.