YouTube Shorts vs long-form revenue

A million long-form finance views and a million Shorts views can differ by about 100× in ad revenue, even if both look like 1,000,000 views in a screenshot.

Two official splits

Watch Page ads, meaning regular videos, pay creators 55% of net ad revenue. Shorts Feed ads are pooled. Creators keep 45% of the share allocated to them from that pool, after music-licensing costs have already shaped the pool. Those percentages are from YouTube Help. They are not RPMs.

Why the RPM gap is so wide

• Long-form can run mid-roll ads. Shorts generally cannot.
• Shorts ads sit between videos in a feed, then get divided across many creators.
• Licensed music reduces what enters the Shorts Creator Pool.
• A Shorts view is cheaper for advertisers than a 12-minute watch session.

Our YouTube calculator defaults Shorts to $0.07 RPM. That is a planning mid point from creator reports, not a YouTube-published rate. If your Studio Shorts RPM is different, use the custom long-form RPM for long-form and treat Shorts as a separate, smaller line.

TikTok and Shorts are not interchangeable in a forecast

TikTok Creator Rewards also pays on a pool, on qualified views of longer videos. The dollars per 1,000 total plays are still usually far below long-form YouTube. If short video is the top of your funnel, fine. If it is meant to replace the long-form ad business, run both calculators before you burn the backlog.