The online video portal YouTube announced Tuesday the creation of a fund endowed with 100 million dollars that will be used to pay influential content creators in its new Shorts platform, designed to compete with the popular application TikTok.
These 100 million dollars will be distributed among an as yet undefined number of users throughout 2021 and 2022, and will be received by those chosen by the company based on their popularity, explained from YouTube on its corporate blog.
“Each month we will target thousands of creators whose videos have achieved the most views and popularity to reward them for their contributions,” said the Google-owned Internet portal.
The contents that will be eligible to receive the money, in addition, will have to be original creations and respect YouTube’s community rules.
The Shorts service was launched on March 18 and differs from the main YouTube portal because its contents are of short duration, in the style of the Chinese application TikTok, very popular among teenagers.
Shorts allows the recording and editing of videos of up to 60 seconds with a musical background, and before its launch in the United States it was running for several months in test mode in India.
Encouraged by the success in the Asian country, where the number of channels publishing through the service tripled in just four months, they decided to take the step to the US.
To this end, YouTube has agreements for the use of music from the country’s major record labels, such as Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and Warner Chappell Music, Believe, Merlin, 300 Entertainment, Kobalt, Beggars, CD Baby, Empire, Peer, Reservoir and OneRPM.
In the last months of the Donald Trump Administration (2017-2021) the future of TikTok in the U.S. was put in doubt because of political pressure, but since the arrival of President Joe Biden’s Administration the pressure on the Chinese platform disappeared.
