How much does YouTube Shorts pay?

Shorts are the fastest way to collect views on YouTube and the slowest way to collect money. A single Short can reach hundreds of thousands of people in a day, yet the figure in Studio at the end of the month surprises most creators. The reason is that Shorts run on a completely different revenue model from long-form video. Below we walk through that model as YouTube describes it, then use our own rates and channel data to put numbers on it.

How Shorts revenue is calculated, in four steps

1. Ad revenue is pooled. Each month, revenue from ads running between videos in the Shorts Feed is added together. It is used both to reward creators and to cover music licensing.
2. The Creator Pool is set aside. If a Short uses no music, all revenue associated with its views goes to the Creator Pool. With one music track, half goes to the pool and half to music licensing. With two tracks, one third goes to the pool and two thirds to music.
3. The pool is split by share of views. In each country, you are allocated a share of the Creator Pool equal to your share of total views on monetizing creators' Shorts.
4. The revenue share is applied. You keep 45% of what you were allocated, whether or not your Short used music.

YouTube's own example

YouTube explains the model with a hypothetical. Say there are 100 million Shorts views in Country A in a month and $100,000 is earned from ads that play between Shorts. Say 20% of those Shorts use one music track. The Creator Pool is then $90,000, and $10,000 covers music licensing. If your Short was viewed 1 million times you hold 1% of views and are allocated $900. After the 45% share you earn $405.

That is a hypothetical chosen by YouTube to explain the mechanics, not a real rate. What 1 million views actually pay depends on how much ad budget reached the Shorts Feed in that country that month, and in practice it is well below this example.

What do 1,000 Shorts views pay?

Because of the pool model, niche matters much less on Shorts than on long-form. The audience's country matters most. Our calculator uses $0.03–$0.10 per 1,000 Shorts views for a US audience, $0.02–$0.06 for other countries and $0.012–$0.025 for Türkiye. The Türkiye range is the dollar equivalent of the "0.5–1 lira per 1,000 views" range quoted in Turkish industry publications; the others are Earnoscope estimates. The source of every rate is on the methodology page.

A worked example: how many Shorts views equal 100,000 long-form views?

On an entertainment channel with a US audience, 100,000 long-form views earn 100,000 × ($1–$3.50) ÷ 1,000 = $100–$350 by our rate table. To earn the same from Shorts you would need $100 ÷ $0.03 × 1,000 = 3.3 million views at the low end and $350 ÷ $0.10 × 1,000 = 3.5 million at the high end. So 100,000 long-form views are worth roughly 3.3–3.5 million Shorts views.

The gap widens with the niche. Run the same sum for a finance channel (long-form RPM $5–$20) and 100,000 long-form views equal 17–20 million Shorts views. For gaming ($0.50–$4) the figure is 1.7–4 million. The difference between Shorts and long-form is largest in exactly the niches where long-form pays best.

Our data: 63% of the views, under 5% of the revenue

We track the 250 most-subscribed YouTube channels worldwide every day. In our 30 October 2026 data those channels had about 65.4 billion views a month between them, of which 41.2 billion came from videos of three minutes or less. Applying our rate table gives this picture:

• Short videos make up 63% of all views and 4.7% of estimated ad revenue.
• 98 of the 250 channels get more than half their views from short videos. 16 had no long-form video among their recent uploads.
• The 45 channels with over 90% of views from short videos have a median of 220.6 million views a month and a median estimated revenue of $6,459–$20,283.
• The 135 channels that mix both formats have about half the views (a median of 120.8 million) and several times the revenue: $29,190–$124,144.
• The most-viewed short-video channel on the list gets about 4.33 billion short-video views a month. At our rates that is an estimated $86,700–$260,100 a month from those views.

The 250 largest Turkish channels show the same pattern more sharply: short videos are 76% of their views and 11% of estimated revenue.

In our data a "short video" is any video of three minutes or less. Most are Shorts, but short horizontal clips fall into the group too, and those are actually monetized like long-form. The short-video share is therefore a little higher than the true Shorts share. All figures are estimates, not the channels' real earnings.

Does using music cut your earnings?

Not directly. The music licensing share is taken from the pool as a whole, not from your video: the more Shorts use music, the smaller the Creator Pool is for everyone. Your allocation from the pool depends only on your share of views, and the 45% rate is the same with or without music. There is one indirect risk. A Short longer than one minute with an active Content ID claim is blocked globally and earns nothing until the claim is resolved.

Which views are not paid?

• Non-original content. Unedited clips from other people's films, TV shows or videos.
• Artificial views. Views generated by automated click or scroll bots.
• Content that is not advertiser-friendly. Views on Shorts that fall outside the advertiser-friendly content guidelines.

There is also a rule for what counts as a Short. Videos uploaded on or after 15 October 2024 with a square or vertical aspect ratio and a length of up to three minutes are categorized as Shorts and monetized through Shorts revenue sharing. Horizontal videos are long-form whatever their length.

The 2027 change: 10 million views to earn each month

YouTube has announced changes that take effect on 1 February 2027. Two of them concern Shorts. First, for channels newly entering the Partner Program through the Shorts route, the threshold rises from 10 million to 20 million views in 90 days (the 1,000-subscriber requirement stays, and channels already in the program are not affected). Second, to earn each month from the Shorts Creator Pool, creators will need to maintain 10 million Shorts views over the last 90 days.

Ten million views in 90 days is about 3.33 million a month. By our rate table that is worth only $100–$333 a month with a US audience and $40–$83 with a Turkish one. In other words, the new floor affects channels that were earning very little from Shorts to begin with. All thresholds are in the Partner Program requirements guide.

Are Shorts still worth it?

Yes, as a discovery tool rather than an income line. Shorts are the cheapest way to reach new viewers and can bring in subscribers. But Shorts Feed views do not count toward the Partner Program's 4,000 watch hours, and as the data above shows, channels that grow on Shorts alone are watched a lot and paid little. In our data, channels that combine both formats have several times the estimated revenue on a similar number of views. You can test your own mix with the "Shorts daily views" field in our YouTube money calculator.

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