Important updates to Shorts monetization on YouTube (Shorts Fund & more)

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Hi everyone,
You may have seen in some of our announcements over the last few months, we’ve been rolling out the Shorts beta in both India and the U.S. We know one of the top questions for creators who make Shorts is around how you can monetize your Shorts content, so we wanted to share some updates about this with you today. 
Since Shorts is a brand new way to watch and create on YouTube, we've been taking a look at new ways to best monetize and reward creators, independent of our existing monetization programs (like our YouTube Partner Program). We’re sharing some of the latest updates here, but building a long-term monetization model for Shorts creators is a top priority for us, and will take us some time to get it right. We look forward to hearing your feedback! 
Shorts Creator Fund
Today, we’re introducing the YouTube Shorts Fund, a $100M fund that's being distributed out to Shorts creators over the course of 2021-2022. Starting later this year, we'll reach out to thousands of creators every month whose Shorts received the most engagement and views and reward them for their contributions. Anyone who creates unique Shorts is eligible to participate in the fund. We’ll also be asking these creators to share feedback about Shorts with us so we can continue to improve the product as we go.
Who’s eligible: 
We’ll be sharing additional details as we get closer to launching the fund in the coming months but we wanted to highlight that the fund won’t be limited just to creators in our YouTube Partner Program (YPP). Any creator will be eligible to participate if they create original content for Shorts and adhere to our Community Guidelines.
We won't be able to answer all of your questions today around all the specifics for eligibility – so, more to come about this in the future! 
Other Shorts Updates
We’ll also begin testing ads in between Shorts as we work to better understand their performance on the platform, while using the creator fund we announced today as a way to reward creators for their contributions to Shorts.
As we continue to build Shorts, we’re also expanding our Shorts player across more places on YouTube. The Shorts player is the vertically oriented video player that shows up when you tap into a Short from places like the Short shelf on Home. This player allows for viewers to easily scroll through multiple Shorts by swiping up or down. You may start to see more areas across YouTube direct you to the Shorts player when you click on a Shorts video in the future as we roll this out.
We’re excited to continue building Shorts alongside all of you and we look forward to hearing your feedback! We’ll be sharing more updates in the future as we go. Stay tuned! 
Jensen (TeamYouTube)