YouTube Shorts Revenue Share for Creators 2026: The 45% Explained

YouTube Shorts revenue share operates through a pooled model. Every month, YouTube tallies all revenue from ads served in the Shorts feed globally (and by region for some calculations). YouTube keeps 55% of this total. The remaining 45% is divided among all YPP creators who had eligible Shorts views that month, proportionally to each creator's share of total monetized Shorts views. Example: If the global Shorts pool is $10 million in a month and your Shorts account for 0.001% of all monetized Shorts views, you earn 0.001% of $4.5 million — roughly $45.

Long-form YouTube videos use a direct revenue model: each view generates a specific ad impression, and you receive 55% of the revenue from that impression. There is no pooling — your earnings per view are directly tied to the CPM of the ads shown on your specific videos. Shorts use a pool model because ads in the Shorts feed are not directly attached to individual videos — they appear between Shorts from different creators. The pooled 45% is YouTube's way of distributing that collective ad revenue. This pool model results in lower and less predictable per-view earnings for Shorts compared to long-form.

The 45% pool share translates to roughly $0.03-$0.08 per 1,000 Shorts views in the US market in 2026. For Indian audiences, this drops to $0.003-$0.015. For UK and Australian audiences, it is approximately $0.02-$0.06. A Shorts creator generating 1 million views per month on US-audience content earns approximately $30-$80 per month from Shorts revenue share alone. A creator generating 10 million views earns $300-$800. These numbers explain why Shorts-only creators in most markets cannot rely on revenue share as their primary income source.

Since your Shorts earnings are proportional to your share of total views, there are two levers: increase your views, or target higher-CPM audiences (US, UK, Canada, Australia). Targeting high-CPM audiences means creating content that resonates with Western markets — English-language content on finance, tech, business, health, and lifestyle tends to attract US/UK advertisers with higher CPMs. Increasing views means consistent daily posting, strong hooks, and optimizing for watch completion. FluxNote helps with both — produce more Shorts per week (volume) with professional captions and stock footage that increase completion rates (quality).