Adam Waheed, who has 15 million TikTok followers and has garnered 6 billion views on YouTube, is driving from his Los Angeles home to Palm Springs for the invite-only “Made on YouTube” summit. Waheed, however, was made on TikTok more than he was on any of the other platforms he uses. By posting highly produced short-form slapstick comedy sketches to TikTok, Waheed attracted 352 million likes on the platform and earned $7.3 million last year, largely from endorsement deals.
But Waheed says he’s ready to make YouTube Shorts—YouTube’s TikTok competitor—a much bigger part of his content strategy, following this week’s announcement that YouTube would start integrating ads into Shorts and share 45% of the revenue with creators. “It’s a game changer,” Waheed told Fortune.
YouTube hopes that Waheed—and others of his ilk—will be at the front of a stampede to its Shorts platform, helping it to catch up with TikTok in an increasingly pricey battle for influence and influencers. While Waheed is enthusiastic about the new YouTube program, it remains to be seen whether the revenue sharing program will actually shift the balance of power for short, viral video clips in YouTube’s favor.
Many creators are betting their livelihoods on virality, and optimization for different platforms is no small matter. While professional creators tend to post versions of the same content to every platform to maximize engagement and pay, simply choosing which platform to post a video on first is an important decision that can affect endorsement deals, viewer volume and critical reception.
Several major creators Fortune spoke to said that YouTube’s payouts were a welcome development, but showed little immediate inclination to go all-in on YouTube. There are still many questions about what a creator needs to do for their videos to qualify for YouTube Shorts’ payouts: Can creators earn on content initially posted to TikTok? How much can creators make on short-form ads? If the ads on Shorts are unskippable, why would viewers watch content on the platform when they can swipe by ads on TikTok?
“I’m questioning how good that payout can truly be,” says Vivian Tu (YourRichBFF), whose short-form personal finance videos have garnered her 2 million TikTok followers and just 55,000 YouTube subscribers. “I do think that if [YouTube Shorts] becomes a more lucrative thing, and you see your friends or other creators having success and making money, it’s definitely something to consider.”
YouTube’s move speaks to the stakes for social media companies like YouTube, Snap and Meta, whose advertising businesses are founded on attracting large audiences to their platforms. Internet influencers are a reliable draw, and short video clips—mostly under 60 seconds—are one of the hottest commodities right now.
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Source: https://fortune.com/2022/09/22/creators-react-youtube-plan-dethrone-tiktok-paying-shorts-ad-revenue/