Following in the footsteps of Snapchat and TikTok, YouTube has decided to spend $100 million to entice people to upload short videos to its newest social networking platform Shorts.
Like Reels in Instagram, Shorts is a new feature in the YouTube app platform that allows users to post a short video similar to TikTok. Parent company Alphabet says that 6.5 billion views of Shorts’ short videos are seen every day.
And to compete with TikTok, YouTube decided to set up a fund to pay video content creators with the most visitors every month. The fund initially has $100 million and will begin paying out in the next few months. This amount will attract many users and video content creators who post to Shorts, especially those who are famous, influential and have many followers. The beta version of Shorts was launched in the US at the beginning of the year and then officially opened to all US users in early May. 
YouTube earned $6.01 billion from advertising in the first quarter of 2021 Over the past few years, TikTok has achieved rapid success in popularity. This short video maker application has been downloaded more than 2 billion times globally and many tech giants are not ignoring this attractive market. As the short video market has become more and more crowded, major platforms have used creator support funds to attract more users. TikTok launched a content creator fund, which subsequently increased its investment in the US to US$1 billion over three years. Snap rewards users who publish top-level content on Spotlight with a reward of $1 million per day. Similar to TikTok, the Shorts feature on YouTube allows users to create a 15-second video, along with a lot of video editing tools, interesting effects or sounds to add to the video. In particular, the application also has a time-stop function so that the phone automatically stops the video recording mode without the content creator having to press any action. Shorts’ advantage over TikTok is that the platform already has 100,000 licensed tracks available. YouTube is also working with music artists and publishers to enrich the music store. Besides, Shorts is a function built into YouTube, so it will take advantage of the 2 billion monthly YouTube viewers. YouTube also updated a dedicated section for Shorts short videos, which can be scrolled vertically to cycle through new videos like TikTok. In its first-quarter 2021 earnings report, Google’s parent company Alphabet said YouTube earned $6.01 billion from advertising, up nearly 50% from the same period last year.
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