- Hello Insiders, I'm Rene Ritchie,
your friendly neighborhood YouTube Creator liaison,
and wow, but did we just announce a whole lot
of updates coming to the platform?
Everything from an expansion of the YouTube Partner Program
to Shorts ads revenue sharing,
to new music licensing options.
The YouTube Creators Channel has a video up
with the details and the timelines,
and we'll link to that right below the like button.
But right now, I want to get to our very special guest,
YouTube's VP of Creator Products, Amjad,
who's here to answer
some of our immediate Creator questions.
Can you tell us a little about your work here at YouTube?
- Well I lead the Creator Product Team,
and that includes all products that Creators rely on,
from YTA Studio, to things like our monetization program,
YPP, fan funding products like channel memberships
and paid digital goods as well.
- So, first question, why?
Why is YouTube making these updates, and why now?
- The main thing is we wanna make sure we evolve
with viewer habits and video consumption.
When we launched the YPP program 15 years ago,
it really was the first, and it kicked off
what we call today the Creator economy.
Things have changed now,
there's 10 ways to monetize, there's different formats.
Most Creators are leaning into multi-format.
We wanna make sure that we keep investing in products,
and policies and programs that continue to spur innovation
amongst Creators.
- Let's dive into the specifics.
What's happening with YPP, Shorts and music?
And what's the overall goal here?
- Well our number one goal is to make sure Creators
continue to choose YouTube
as the platform to build their audience
and to grow their business.
We've got three big changes
that are part of today's announcement.
First, we're going to be expanding the YPP program
to cover more Creators earlier in their life cycle.
For Shorts focused Creators,
give them a set of qualifications
where they can also join the YPP program
after hitting a thousand sub's
and 10 million views in 90 days.
The second thing we're doing,
is we're changing the game on Shorts monetization,
bringing back all of the amazing stuff we did
when we launched YPP 15 years ago.
And the third thing we're doing,
is we're changing how licensing works
and reinventing licensing for music,
making it much easier to use high quality music at scale.
- It's a lot of updates and a huge change to YPP.
And to be honest,
I think Creators may have a wide range of reactions to it.
I mean, I'm still an active YPP Creator,
and I'm excited about it, but I can see with others,
it might depend more on the types of content being made,
the different approaches and strategies
and maybe even how long that we've been on the platform,
like new mobile first and Shorts focus Creators,
will probably see this as the opening of the gates,
an enormous opportunity.
But OG long form Creators
may think it's more of a lowering of the bar,
or wonder how it might affect what we're paid.
- It's a good question, Rene.
So for the original Creators, folks who have been
on the platform for a long time,
nothing changes with respect to FOD earnings,
fan funding earnings.
We have not changed the bar
when it comes to brand safety as well.
All of those expectations still apply.
What we have done though,
is for Creators who are earlier in their journey,
we're gonna give them a chance to be able to earn directly
from fans much earlier than they do today.
And for Creators who are focused primarily on Shorts,
we'll give them a chance to earn an opportunity
to apply for YPP, just in the same way
long form focus Creators can do today.
- What about the 45% split though?
That's the first thing my, and I think most Creator eyes,
just locked onto from the announcement.
Why is revenue share for Shorts different
than it is for long form?
- Most folks who are in short-form today,
are earning through a fixed fund,
and a fixed fund doesn't commit a specific percentage
to the Creator.
In fact, it's up to the platform
to determine each and every month,
how they're going to divide that up.
What we wanted to do, was to be as transparent as we are
on all our other products,
and make a commitment to Creators
who are focused on short format.
And we do that based on every product's characteristic.
So, for example, in fan funding,
we share 70% with the Creators.
In long form, where a lot of the ads
are on the video itself, we share 55%.
And in short-form, we're gonna share
with all Creators who are part of the feed.
As a part of that, that means spreading it out
across all the Creators, whether it was right before the ad,
or three videos away from the ad.
Shorts is also an area where we're investing
a lot of product and engineering time
into things like creation tools,
as well as trust and safety.
And so, part of that rev share is being aware
of the investment we need to make.
- I really, really like that
we're focusing on stability, consistency, predictability
and especially sustainability here.
That's a growing issue for Creators,
especially around short form and short funds,
but it does prompt the question,
how will ads pay out compared to the funds?
- One of the key design considerations for this
was to build a model that was sustainable
and where Creators would be able to earn
just in the same way they've been able to earn in YPP
over the last 15 years.
So based on our experience this past year,
with the shorts fund, we expect more Creators
will be able to earn through rev share.
And the majority of Creators will earn more
than they did during this past year in the shorts fund.
- Okay, let's switch to music for a minute.
There's gonna be a music library for Shorts,
and Creator music for long form,
but why are they two different things?
- They're really two different formats
when you think about it.
In short form is sub 30 seconds,
where you're trying to get a quick sound bite in
to make that impactful moment.
In long form you're talking about potentially
a 10, 20 minute video where a really specific song,
played at full length,
is an important part of that conversation.
So we think that using music is really different in those,
and so we built two different models
that are really appropriate to those formats.
- For more with Amjad and what all these announcements mean
for the Creator economy.
Make sure you subscribe to Roberto Blake,
because they're gonna be doing
an in-depth interview very soon,
and we'll link to it in the description
as soon as it goes live.
And as always, we want to hear your questions,
so drop them in the comments
and you might see them in a future video.