Your YouTube Shorts content could soon be racking up much more views.
YouTube announced that starting Monday, it is changing how it counts views on YouTube Shorts, its short-form video section that has a 60 second or less format. Previously, a view only counted if someone watched a Short for a certain number of seconds. Starting on March 31, a view counts instantly when someone plays or replays a Short video.
“Views may be higher moving forward,” YouTube wrote in a statement.
That means that even if a user scrolls past a video within a few seconds of it playing, it still counts as a view. This is also how Instagram and TikTok calculate views for short-form videos.
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YouTube stated that it was making the update in response to feedback from creators who expressed that they wanted to know how often their Shorts were seen, not just how many people watched a substantial portion of a Short.
“We hope that this deeper understanding of your Shorts performance will help you inform your content strategy,” YouTube said in the statement.
YouTube is still keeping track of how many people choose to keep watching a Short under a new metric called “engaged views,” which pinpoints the number of views from people who watch a Short for a certain length of time. YouTube will base earnings and eligibility for its monetization path, the YouTube Partner Program, on engaged views.
More engaged views could also mean more earnings for entrepreneurs.
Since YouTube Shorts launched in 2021, it has allowed more than one in four creators in the YouTube Partner Program to earn money through the platform. The average earnings are between $0.03 and $0.07 per 1,000 views on a Short, or between $30 and $70 for one million views, per the social media toolkit site Buffer.
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Attorney and personal finance expert Erika Kullberg has over 21 million followers on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube. She noted in May that her top 10 YouTube Shorts received a range of 6.3 million to 48 million views but far less pay than her longer-form YouTube videos with comparable views.
Erika Kullberg
For example, her 48-second Short on negotiating medical bills with over four million views generated $106.85, while her 12-minute longer YouTube video on how she quit her job got slightly fewer clicks, at 3.9 million views, but yielded $45,639.14.
Kullberg says that for her, YouTube is the platform with the biggest payout and that she has made $353,000 from YouTube from 2019 to 2024.
YouTube Shorts draws an average of 70 billion daily views.