"You are not guaranteed receipt of a Promotional Bonus," reads the programme rules under which YouTube is testing payments to selected creators for Shorts, its short-form videos. Invited creators are not entitled to the monthly views-based bonus even if they upload the required number of Shorts, and from February 2027 YouTube will grant a share of Shorts ad revenue only to channels with 10 million views in the last 90 days. Invitations to the programme arrive by email or as a notification in YouTube Studio, and creators cannot apply to join.
The invitation sets how many public Shorts a creator must upload in each calendar month to receive a minimum payment. On top of that, they can earn a monthly bonus based on the valid engaged views of their Shorts, as determined by Google. YouTube introduced the test on 16 October 2026 in a video for creators.
The test rules refer only to creators in select regions. Trade sites Social Media Today and Net Influencer, citing YouTube, report that the test is running in the US, the UK, Germany, Brazil, Japan and South Korea. Germany is the only European Union country on either site's list. Czechia is not on it. According to Net Influencer, YouTube has not disclosed the size of the bonuses, the length of the test or a timeline for expanding it.
How the Shorts Creator Pool splits the money and what changes in February 2027
In countries with and without the test, YouTube adds up the revenue each month from ads that viewers see between videos in the Shorts feed and sends part of it to cover music licensing. The rest, the so-called Shorts Creator Pool, is split in each country among monetising creators according to their share of engaged views, and creators keep 45% of their allocated share. Views lead to a share of the pool; an invitation in YouTube Studio leads to the bonus. The threshold that governs the ad revenue share from February also determines the share of YouTube Premium subscription revenue from Shorts.
Until now, the threshold has been one of two routes into the YouTube Partner Program. A channel meets it together with 1,000 subscribers and, according to MediaGuru, then takes its Shorts share without any ongoing check on viewership. From February 2027, the same number becomes a monthly check. A channel below the threshold will not, however, drop out of the programme. It continues to earn from long-form videos, memberships, Super Chat and YouTube Shopping. According to the YouTube blog, its Shorts share is restored as soon as it crosses the threshold again. New channels wanting to join via Shorts will need 20 million views over the same period from February. The new bar does not apply to existing members.
For Partner Program channels that do not hold the threshold, YouTube promised in August 2026 bonuses for YouTube Shopping, incentives for brand partnerships and higher earnings for starting and growing trends, without giving details at the time. "Creators who already earn significant revenue from Shorts are unlikely to be impacted by these changes," it wrote in the same post. According to Net Influencer, the bonus pilot is apparently one of the first promised mechanisms that YouTube has actually launched. The rules on the help pages present the bonus programme as an additional way to earn for creators whose channels are growing.
The Shorts Fund was already paying bonuses in 2021
In May 2021, YouTube announced the Shorts Fund, a $100 million bonus fund, and each month it reached out to thousands of creators whose Shorts had the most engagement and views. The fund was not even limited to Partner Program members. A bonus from this year's pilot goes only to a creator who is still monetising at the end of the month in question.
Andreas Briese, then YouTube's director for Germany and Central Europe, described the fund in autumn 2021 as a first step on the way to building a long-term monetisation plan for Shorts. From the start of 2023, the fund was replaced by revenue sharing from ads in the Shorts feed.
Short-form video funds can hurt creators when creators start working directly for the payouts and the platform has nothing to replace the lost income with when it cuts costs, the site Social Media Today warned in September 2021. Google may change or cancel the programme, whose bonuses creators have no claim to, for any reason with thirty days' notice.
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