How YouTube Is Changing: Short Videos, TV Screens, and New Ways to Make Money

YouTube is spreading itself across several different ways people watch video — short clips on phones, long videos, and content on TV screens. The platform is also testing new ways for creators and advertisers to make money. These changes reflect how people's viewing habits are shifting, and YouTube's effort to stay ahead in a crowded video market.

Short Videos Are Getting Huge

YouTube Shorts — the platform's short-form video format, similar to TikTok — has grown rapidly. The service now hits over 70 billion views per day and reaches more than 1.5 billion viewers monthly. This growth is a direct response to competition from TikTok, which exploded by focusing on short, vertical videos viewed on smartphones. YouTube saw this trend and built Shorts to keep people from leaving for rival platforms.

In September 2022, YouTube introduced a major change: creators can now earn money from Shorts. The platform pays creators 45% of the ad revenue Shorts generates. This is different from how YouTube pays people for longer videos, which is based on individual video performance. Shorts work more like a feed — endless scrolling — so YouTube pays based on overall Shorts performance instead.

People Are Watching on TV Now

One billion hours of YouTube content are watched on television screens every single day. This is a significant shift. For years, YouTube meant watching on your phone or computer. Now, living room TV is becoming a major place where people view YouTube, including Shorts.

YouTube partnered with Nielsen, the company that measures TV audiences, to track how many people watch YouTube on their TVs. This matters to advertisers, who want to know how many households are seeing their ads and whether YouTube is as valuable as traditional television. The partnership also accounts for households where multiple family members watch together — something traditional online video tracking struggles to measure accurately.

AI Tools Help Creators Make Videos Faster

More than 1 million creators use YouTube's AI-powered creation tools every single day. These tools help with tasks like designing thumbnails (the small images you see before clicking a video), editing footage, and suggesting ways to improve video performance. Creators are adopting these tools at scale, which suggests they find them genuinely useful rather than just experimenting.

YouTube is embedding these AI tools directly into the creation process, rather than offering them as optional add-ons. This is a significant infrastructure investment, and it signals that YouTube views AI assistance as something creators need to compete effectively.

YouTube's Four-Part Growth Plan

YouTube has identified four priorities that guide its strategy: grow Shorts, increase TV watching, expand paid subscriptions (YouTube Premium, YouTube TV, YouTube Music Premium), and develop shopping features. Each focuses on a different way people engage with video, from quick mobile scrolls to sitting down with family to watch longer content.

The subscription services, in particular, offer YouTube a new financial advantage. For decades, YouTube relied almost entirely on ads. Subscriptions — where people pay to remove ads or access premium features — create a more stable income stream that does not depend entirely on ad spending. This matters because advertising budgets fluctuate, but subscription revenue is more predictable.

Why YouTube Is Doing All of This

YouTube has been here before. When smartphones became dominant in the early 2010s, YouTube had to learn how to work on mobile devices with touchscreens and vertical video. Many platforms that thrived on desktop failed to adapt and faded. YouTube succeeded by building for mobile without abandoning the long-form video creators who made the platform valuable in the first place.

The strategy today follows the same playbook. Instead of betting everything on Shorts and ignoring long-form content, YouTube is supporting multiple formats simultaneously. Creators can earn money from both Shorts and longer videos. Viewers can watch on phones, computers, or TV. Advertisers can reach audiences across all of these contexts.

The bigger picture here is that video consumption is now fragmented. People do not watch the same way anymore. YouTube's multi-format approach acknowledges this reality and tries to remain relevant everywhere people are watching, rather than specializing in one format and hoping it becomes dominant. Whether this balanced strategy will sustain YouTube's lead as competition evolves remains to be seen, but the scale and investment suggest the company is taking the challenge seriously.

How YouTube Measures Success

The Nielsen partnership addresses a real problem in video advertising. Television companies have measured audiences one way for decades — they relied on sampling methods that watched smaller groups of viewers and extrapolated to estimate total audiences. Streaming services like YouTube measure audiences differently, through data collection at scale.

Advertisers and networks now want a common language to compare traditional TV and YouTube. Are more people watching YouTube on their TVs or network television. Which is more valuable. These questions are difficult to answer without standardized measurement. Nielsen's involvement lends credibility to YouTube's viewership numbers in the eyes of traditional TV buyers, which is important as advertising budgets shift from broadcast to streaming.

The household co-viewing measurement is technically useful because TV watching is often a family activity. Traditional online analytics struggle with this — they track individual clicks and views, but a living room where three people watch one screen together looks like three separate viewing sessions to standard tools. Nielsen's approach counts that correctly as one household watching.