How YouTube’s New Creator Fund Stacks Up

YouTube is launching a fund to pay performers to make YouTube Shorts, joining TikTok and Snapchat in trying to lure creators to their platforms with multi-million-dollar funds. YouTube is tapping a decent war chest—$100 million through 2022—but it’s far from the most generous. 

Snapchat in late November pledged to pay out $1 million a day to creators through its short-form video feature Spotlight, meaning it’s already awarded around $170 million. YouTube’s payout, in contrast, would come to less than 20% of Snap’s daily pledge, or $167,000 per day. 

The smaller offering from YouTube may not matter much. While Shorts has a long way to go before catching up to TikTok in terms of popularity, YouTube has remained the gold standard in generating income for individuals thanks to its long-running practice of giving them a cut of revenue from advertisers that buy ads on YouTube videos. 

Tati Mitch, a comedy and lifestyle creator with nearly 5 million followers on TikTok, says she’s been making about $1,500 a month from TikTok’s creator fund. (The short-video app in August unveiled a $200 million-plus fund that will pay out through 2023.) 

As substantial as the TikTok money is, Mitch said she has lately switched to posting more of her videos on YouTube, where she has about 122,000 subscribers. She makes about double the monthly income on YouTube compared to what she makes from TikTok’s creator fund. “You can make a career off of being a YouTuber,” she said. 

Such feedback could increase the pressure on Snap to keep its Spotlight program going. For the last two earnings calls, executives have extolled the fund’s success while acknowledging the costs. Spotlight reached more than 125 million monthly active users in March but added $90 million in costs of revenue for the first quarter, or more than half of the $159 million increase in those costs from the year-ago quarter.  

Yinon Horwitz, who produces videos with his wife Katerina about their daily life, has been on the receiving end of some of those payouts. One of their Snap Spotlight videos made $30,000, while others have brought in a few thousand dollars. But, in a sign of the power YouTube exerts over this nimble group of entrepreneurs, the couple has been anticipating a new YouTube creator fund. “We’re going to start releasing new [Shorts] videos starting tonight,” he said. 

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