A creator's pay is a split, not a salary. On YouTube, the platform's own earnings documentation states that eligible creators keep 55% of net revenue from ads on their long-form videos and 45% of the Shorts advertising pool allocated to their views. Those percentages are platform policy, not law, and are subject to change.
That mechanic — a share, set unilaterally, of a pool the platform defines and measures — is the load-bearing part of the creator business. Eligibility thresholds decide who gets into the split at all. Advertising disclosure rules, written by a federal regulator rather than a platform, govern the other main income line: brand deals. Here is how each layer works, from the filings up.
How much does the platform take?
It depends on the earning method, and the platform publishes the numbers. YouTube's partner earnings overview sets the creator's cut at 55% of net revenue from watch page ads, 45% of the allocated pool from Shorts Feed ads, and 70% of net revenue from memberships and Supers.
Watch page ads are the ads that run against a long-form video on its own page, and the split is calculated on the revenue that video earns. Shorts works differently. Revenue from ads in the Shorts feed is pooled, then allocated to creators according to their share of qualified views, and the 45% is taken from that allocation rather than from any individual clip's earnings.
The third line — memberships, Super Chat, Super Stickers and Super Thanks — is direct audience payment rather than advertising, and it carries the highest creator share of the three at 70% of net revenue. All of these are net figures, meaning the share is calculated after the platform's deductions, not on the advertiser's gross spend.
| Earning method | Creator share | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Watch page ads (long-form) | 55% | Net revenue from ads on that video |
| Shorts Feed ads | 45% | Revenue allocated by share of qualified views |
| Memberships, Super Chat, Super Stickers, Super Thanks | 70% | Net revenue from those transactions |
Percentages published in a help center are versionless in a way filings are not: the page carries no effective date, so a share quoted today is accurate only as of the day it is read. Treat any split as a current policy position, not a contract term.
What do you have to hit before any of it pays?
A threshold, and there are two ways to clear it. YouTube's Partner Program documentation lists 1,000 subscribers with 4,000 qualified public watch hours in the previous 12 months, or 1,000 subscribers with 10 million qualified Shorts views in the previous 90 days. Applications then go through review before monetization switches on.
The two-path structure matters more than the raw numbers. A channel built on long-form video and a channel built on Shorts accumulate completely different metrics, and the second path exists because watch hours are close to unreachable for a creator posting 40-second clips. The subscriber count is common to both paths; the second half of the test is format-specific.
Once a channel is in the program, it gains access to the full set of earning methods rather than a single one — ads, memberships, Supers and shopping features — which is why the threshold functions as the industry's real entry gate. Below it, a channel can be large and earn nothing from the platform directly.
What is changing in 2027, and who does it hit?
The entry bar rises and Shorts revenue sharing gets its own gate. In an August 10, 2026 announcement, YouTube said new applicants will need "8,000 qualified watch hours in the last 365 days, or 20 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days," with the changes taking effect February 1, 2027.
Separately, from the same date, "creators who have 10 million qualified Shorts views over the last 90 days will be eligible for ads and subscription revenue sharing on Shorts," according to the post. Creators already in the program who fall below that line stay in the program but stop earning a Shorts revenue share until they reach it.
The post also describes a global rollout of Premium Lite and states that creators receive "30% of the net subscription revenue for Premium and 60% for Premium Lite," distributed according to member watch time and views, on the same 55/45 long-form-to-Shorts basis. YouTube does not break that mechanic down further in the announcement, so the figures are best read as the company's own summary of a system it has not yet fully documented. The company said it expects to pay creators more in 2027 than in 2026.
For a working creator, the practical read is narrow. Nothing changes for existing partners on the entry requirements; the Shorts threshold is the change with teeth, because it converts a revenue line that was effectively automatic inside the program into one that has to be re-earned every 90 days.
How big is the pool the split comes out of?
Large enough that the percentages carry real money, and the filings say so. In its fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 4, 2026, Alphabet reported YouTube ads revenue of $11,383 million for the quarter, against $10,473 million a year earlier.
The same release states that "YouTube revenue across ads and subscriptions exceeded $60 billion for the full year 2025." That combined figure is the closest thing the market has to a public denominator: it is the reported top line from which advertising splits and subscription allocations are drawn, before the platform's deductions that make each creator share a net number.
Two cautions apply to using it. The reported revenue is Alphabet's, not the creator pool's, and the company does not publish the pool. And a share of views is not a share of revenue, because advertising rates differ by audience, geography and format — which is why two channels with identical view counts can report very different payouts.
When does a brand deal have to be disclosed?
Whenever there is a material connection the audience would not expect. Under the Federal Trade Commission's endorsement guides at 16 CFR Part 255, most recently amended July 26, 2023, a connection that "might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement" must be disclosed clearly and conspicuously.
A brand deal is a direct payment from a company to a creator for featuring its product, and it is the clearest case. But the rule is written more broadly than cash. Section 255.5 lists business, family and personal relationships, free or discounted products, early access, prize opportunities and the chance of a media appearance among the connections that can require disclosure.
The guides also define an endorsement broadly: any advertising, marketing or promotional message a consumer is likely to believe reflects the opinions or experiences of someone other than the advertiser. That definition is what pulls creator content into advertising law in the first place, and it does not turn on whether the creator called the post an ad.
Where does the disclosure have to sit?
Next to the endorsement, and hard to miss. The FTC's disclosure guidance for social media influencers, published in November 2019, tells creators to place the disclosure with the endorsement message itself rather than on a profile page, at the end of a post, or behind a "more" click.
Format-specific instructions follow from that. For images, superimpose the disclosure and leave it up long enough to read. For video, put it in the video rather than only in the description, and use both audio and on-screen text where possible. For a live stream, repeat it periodically, since viewers arrive mid-broadcast.
On wording, the guidance endorses plain terms — "advertisement," "ad," "sponsored," or a sentence naming the brand and the free product — and warns against "sp," "spon," "collab," "thanks" and "ambassador" as too vague. It also tells creators not to rely on a platform's built-in disclosure tool alone, but to consider using it in addition to their own.
What this actually means for a working creator
Two different rulebooks govern two different income lines. Platform revenue is governed by policy a company can rewrite, with thresholds that decide access and splits that decide the amount. Brand-deal income is governed by federal advertising rules that apply regardless of platform, follower count or whether the creator considers the post an ad.
The practical consequence is that the numbers to watch are not the public ones. Subscriber counts and view totals are visible to everyone and determine nothing directly; qualified watch hours, qualified Shorts views over a rolling window, and the net basis of each split determine the payout. Anything a creator reports about their own earnings beyond that is self-reported unless it appears in a filing.
For a related fame perspective, read What creators actually have to disclose in a paid partnership.