What Is YouTube Shorts and How Does It Work?
YouTube Shorts are vertical or square videos of up to 3 minutes, watched in a feed people swipe through and paid from a shared monthly pool.
A video counts as a Short when it is square or vertical and no longer than 3 minutes: YouTube applies that to videos uploaded after October 15, 2024, and a wider video, such as 16:9, stays a regular video. You can record one with the camera in the YouTube app (Create, then Short) or upload a vertical file from a phone or a computer, at up to 1080p and with a title of up to 100 characters.
Shorts are found mostly in the Shorts feed, where people swipe from one video to the next, so the first second decides whether a video is watched. Most songs from YouTube’s library can play for up to 90 seconds in a 3-minute Short, and a Short longer than 1 minute with an active copyright claim is blocked worldwide until the claim is resolved.
Shorts earn differently from long videos. The ads shown between Shorts in the feed are pooled each month and shared out by each channel’s engaged views and music use, and a monetizing creator keeps 45% of its share; YouTube sets no rate per view. To join the Partner Program through Shorts, a channel needs 1,000 subscribers and 10 million public Shorts views in 90 days. From February 1, 2027 that becomes 20 million, and earning from Shorts in any month needs 10 million views in the last 90 days.
For a creator, a Short is one idea built for the swipe: a hook in the first second, captions for people watching without sound, and an ending that makes someone watch again or comment. Clip-Short’s AI Clipping cuts vertical clips from your own long videos, and its AI Agent makes a narrated 9:16 video from an idea.
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