Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Linus Agrees With YouTube on this One”.
This is straight out of the YouTube blog, but this week YouTube announced that starting early 2023 creators will be eligible for Revenue sharing on shorts. But it’s going to work really differently from the way that the revenue share works for the traditional YouTube Partner program and there’s some actually pretty good reasons for it. I don’t agree with everything YouTube does I think I’ve made it very clear to everyone. I think internally here I talk about it, a lot I think outwardly on the land show and in our videos. I talk about it a lot and I definitely talk about it to YouTube employees and Executives a lot. I do not agree with everything YouTube does, but this I’m looking at going.
I actually do not have a better solution to this. It’S pretty smart so with traditional VOD or a live stream like this one on YouTube. The ads that run against your video uh are credited to you, and then you split it.
I forget what exactly the split percentage is, but you split it with YouTube and you keep your part. They keep their part and everybody’s happy, but here’s the problem with shorts. You don’t have an ad like against your short. The ad is going to be between some shorts and not all of them, and not all of them.
So it can’t be just like luck of the draw. You happen to get ads in front of your shorts and then you get paid, and so what the next three people that didn’t get ads. They just don’t get paid.
Well, that’s stupid right! So um the revenue from ads that run between shorts are going to be put into a pool okay, but it’s a little complicated because there’s kind of two pools there’s one pool for shorts that do not have licensed music and there’s another Pool for shorts that contain Licensed music so like popular music and we’ll talk about why they have to do that in a little bit so of the pool. Creators will keep 45 of the revenue so of that bucket, based on their share of total shorts views and that’s the same whether they use music or not. The difference is that in the music bucket, the rights holders for the music get paid first before the split between creators and YouTube, and the reason for that is that YouTube and the music industry had to do something about tick tock. It’S clear that one of the most compelling things about Tick Tock is that you can use popular songs and dance to them or lip sync to them or do whatever else. It is with them as your soundtrack um for no cost, and the reason for that is that bite dance just doesn’t respect copyright, so they just are like yeah um pretty much.
So I guess in a way you could look at that as a positive overall. For the industry, because it forced it forced the recording industry to come to the table and find a solution which is good because we’ve actually looked into licensing real songs for our videos before the costs make no sense. There’S all this just stupid red tape like it’s utterly unattainable for anyone who’s, not a fairly large scale. Production like it just doesn’t make any sense. If I’m only going to make 400 on this video, no I’m not going to pay you ten thousand dollars for an expiring license for the music. So what up to take the video down after what are you an idiot like? No, I’m not going to do that! It’S not like people are using this video to listen to the song.
It’S just from like Montage like go touch grass like it’s just dumb get out in the real world: it’s not how this works yeah. So what it did is it forced the music industry and YouTube. Didn’T tell me any of this. This is all speculation, but it’s just very obvious: it forced the recording industry to come to the table and make a deal because otherwise Tick Tock is just going to run a mock forever and there’s going to be no way to combat that aspect of the platform.
So this is a super smart way to do it because it rewards creators, no matter what whether they license music or don’t license music, whether they get an ad in front of their video. They don’t get an ad in front of their video and what it looks like, at least on the surface. I haven’t seen the payout rates yet, but what it looks like is that compared to tick tock, it is going to all of a sudden, become sustainable to make short form videos, and not just have to do sponsorships like to actually actually enjoy a share of the Ad-Based revenue from the platform which Tick Tock famously does not give anyone, so they just steal music uh, take all the revenue from their users and are like well yeah, no screw. You too like why.
Why are we tolerating this? I don’t get it. It’S been very weird, you you were talking to uh call me Chris and you, you talked about Revenue, share stuff right, yeah like that’s like it’s a it’s, a joke on Tick Tock. They get like nothing. Yeah crazy, um, shorts creators are added to the partner program. If they get 10 million shorts views in the last 90 days and have a thousand subscribers, um creators can still get into the YouTube Partner program with 4 000 watch hours over the last year as well. So there’s there’s two paths into the partner program.
It’S a lot of watch hours on shorts content, so it’s going to result in you being a big Creator either way. I’M also launching next year is Creator music, which will allow creators to purchase a license or opt for Revenue sharing for commercial songs. They might want to use in their long format, videos which is super cool, really cool. Our discussion question here from Jonathan Horst is: is there a place for commercial, music and LTT videos? Yes, um? I was about to say well, I’m sure, as hell not sharing my Revenue with them and I’m probably not going to pay whatever they’re going to ask.
So probably not we pay very little for our existing music library and we’ve never had a complaint about our music. I guess I’d have to narrow it down. There’S one specific uh, I almost said create a warehouse. I don’t know why one specific Channel super fun, video yo. Yes, that one yeah – I I yeah – I I you know what I even re-upload it with the proper Kenny Loggins Playing with the boys song yeah I’ll pay, for it sure yeah, okay I’ll, commit to that. If there, if there was a way to effectively do it, that you knew was good, and maybe the pricing wasn’t just literally the worst thing in the world uh, I could see it being used for hyper-specific content, but that’s about it. Yeah uh samjoe X asks why can’t YouTube remove these dumb monetization requirements, since they did it to prevent ads from showing on Stolen videos and they monetize everything anyway now uh. The answer is because it’s a it’s a ton of administrative work to pay people out and sorry, but like the four dollars or whatever is just not actually worth the administrative burden for them.
That’S my that’s my best guess, but I’m guessing uh as for like shorts, I could see us using it since there doesn’t really seem to be a penalty for just using it um. If we’re, if we’re gon na, have to like kind of pay for it anyway, then I guess we might as well just go for it, but I don’t know what kind of shorts that I would do that would require licensed music. It’S just one of those things that I’m so conditioned to avoid yeah, you know, even if I’m, I don’t think it’s needed anyways for the type of content that we do. I, whatever .