A Shorts creator who racks up two million views before dinner and a long-form creator whose 22-minute video takes a month to accumulate the same number are both funded, in part, by the same YouTube Premium Lite subscriber. That subscriber’s monthly fee doesn’t split evenly between the two of them, and it was never designed to.
Two pools, then a second cut
YouTube’s August 2026 Partner Program update, whose terms take effect February 1, 2027, lays out two separate revenue pools tied to its subscription tiers: creators share in 30% of net subscription revenue from standard Premium, and 60% from Premium Lite, the cheaper, ad-reduced tier YouTube has been rolling out market by market. Premium Lite still runs ads on Shorts, music and search. YouTube doesn’t explicitly tie that carve-out to the pool sizes, but by its own account the split “factors in the costs of operating and promoting the service, including amounts we pay to music partners” — leaving more of each subscription fee inside the pool creators draw from. Once that pool is allocated to individual creators based on member watch time and views, YouTube applies a second cut on top: 55% of a Premium Lite payout goes to long-form video, 45% to Shorts. Working through ppc.land’s breakdown of the announcement, that puts long-form creators at roughly a third of the Lite pool’s net revenue and Shorts creators at just over a quarter.
A ratio YouTube didn’t invent for this
What makes 55/45 worth pausing on is that YouTube didn’t design it specifically for Premium Lite. It’s the same split the platform has used for years to divide ordinary ad revenue between the two formats: per YouTube’s own Partner Program documentation, creators keep 55% of net ad revenue from a long-form video’s watch page, and 45% of the revenue allocated to them from the Shorts Creator Pool. The same announcement confirms the 55/45 formula applies to the standard Premium pool as well as Premium Lite. Two structurally different revenue streams, ads and subscriptions, spanning two different price tiers, and YouTube keeps arriving at the identical ten-point gap in favor of the longer format.
Where the raised bar fits in
The same announcement doubles what a new creator needs to enter the Partner Program at all: 8,000 watch hours or 20 million Shorts views in the trailing year or 90 days respectively, up from 4,000 hours or 10 million views, starting February 1, 2027, with the 1,000-subscriber requirement staying in place. Most coverage of that change has focused on who it locks out of the program entirely. Less discussed is what happens to the creators who clear the new bar either way. YouTube’s own announcement puts the program at over 3 million creators, and every one of them is entering, or already sitting inside, a payout structure where the format decision was made for them well before this update and simply carried forward, at the same ratio, into every new revenue stream YouTube has added since. A Shorts creator already earning has to keep clearing 10 million Shorts views every 90 days just to stay inside the Shorts Creator Pool at all — a maintenance bar that exists entirely apart from the 55/45 split waiting on the other side of it.
The dollars behind the percentage points
The pools involved aren’t small. YouTube and Google One together reported 325 million paying subscribers as of the fourth quarter of 2025, a jump of 25 million in three months, while total YouTube revenue for the year reached $60 billion, up 17% year over year; that outpaces the 9% year-over-year rise in Q4 ad revenue specifically, though the two figures span different windows — full-year versus a single quarter — and aren’t a precise apples-to-apples comparison. Subscriptions are the part of YouTube’s business expanding fastest, and Premium Lite, recently raised from $7.99 to $8.99 a month in the US, is the tier built specifically to convert viewers who’d otherwise watch free with ads. YouTube has told creators plainly that “partners, on average, earn more than when the user was watching ads” once someone subscribes, which means every point of the 55/45 split is moving money through the fastest-growing part of the business rather than a shrinking one.
The volume doesn’t match the split
That ratio runs against how people actually watch. YouTube’s own figures put Shorts at over 200 billion views a day worldwide, a volume long-form video isn’t close to matching by view count. But the revenue math doesn’t run through view count directly — it runs through watch time first, then through a fixed percentage that was set independent of how any individual video performs. A Shorts creator can out-view a long-form creator by orders of magnitude and still end up dividing a smaller collective share of both the ad pool and the subscription pool. Popularity and payout rate are separate variables here, and YouTube’s formulas have never made them move together.
YouTube hasn’t published a rationale for why long-form gets the larger cut in either pool — its own materials explain the 60/30 gap between the two subscription tiers but say nothing about why the underlying 55/45 format split exists, or why it shows up twice in unrelated systems. It may simply be inherited: once a ratio is built into the ad-revenue infrastructure, reusing it for a new subscription pool is the easier engineering decision, not necessarily a fresh statement of priorities. Whatever the reason — deliberate prioritization or simple inheritance from the ad-revenue infrastructure — a company that wanted Shorts and long-form treated as equally valuable had two separate chances, in two unrelated revenue systems, to set that number at 50/50. It didn’t take either one, and YouTube hasn’t said why.
