YouTube Shorts vs long videos: which should you make?

If you want money per view and videos that keep getting found, make long videos. If you want reach, quick feedback and less work per post, make Shorts. Most growing channels do both, because the two do different jobs: Shorts bring in people who don't know the channel, and long videos turn them into viewers who stay and subscribe. Here's how they compare:

The rates are what creators and analytics companies report: YouTube doesn't publish one. Each row is explained below.

Long videos, by a wide margin. The two are paid in different ways:

• Long videos earn from the ads shown on them. Once you're in the YouTube Partner Program, YouTube pays you 55% of the net revenue from ads on your public videos. Videos 8 minutes or longer can also show ads in the middle (mid-rolls), so one view can carry more than one ad, if people are still watching.
• Shorts don't carry their own ads. Each month, YouTube pools the revenue from ads that play between Shorts in the feed, sets part of it aside for music licensing, and splits the creators' pool by each channel's share of engaged views in each country. You keep 45% of what's allocated to you.

Neither has a set rate, so the numbers come from creators and agencies sharing their own: about $1.00 to $6.00 per 1,000 views on long videos, and $0.03 to $0.20 per 1,000 engaged views on Shorts. AIR Media-Tech, which tracked 274 channels (September 2026), found the Shorts rate was 3 to 14% of the long-video rate in most niches: a long-video view pays about 7 to 33 times as much as a Shorts view. Here's what the same views pay at the reported rates:

A worked example. Say a channel in the Partner Program gets 50,000 views a month on its long videos and 1,000,000 engaged views on its Shorts (both are assumptions). At the typical rates, the long videos pay about $115 a month and the Shorts about $70, though the Shorts had 20 times the views. And from February 1, 2027, those Shorts would earn nothing from the pool: a million views a month is about 3,000,000 in 90 days, under the 10,000,000 qualified Shorts views every channel will need to share in Shorts revenue (assuming every view counts as qualified). The long videos would pay just as before.

Put in your own numbers with the YouTube money calculator and the YouTube Shorts money calculator. What moves the rate (where viewers are, the topic, the season) is in how much YouTube pays per view and how much YouTube Shorts pay.

Both formats can get you into the YouTube Partner Program, but they're counted apart: watch time on Shorts in the Shorts feed doesn't count toward the watch hours, and long-video views don't count toward the Shorts views. You need 1,000 subscribers either way, plus one of these:

Channels already in the program keep their place in 2027, but each needs to accept the updated terms in YouTube Studio by January 31, 2027 to keep all its ways to earn.

Which route is closer depends on your channel. 4,000 hours is 240,000 minutes: at an average view duration of 5 minutes, that's 48,000 views in a year, about 4,000 a month (8,000 a month for 8,000 hours). 10 million Shorts views in 90 days is about 111,111 a day, every day. Public live streams kept on your channel count toward watch hours too; unlisted or deleted ones, and ones not kept as a video, don't. Work out your own timeline with the YouTube watch hours calculator, and see how to get monetized on YouTube for the review and why channels get turned down.

Shorts reach more people; long videos hold them. YouTube said in August 2026 that it sees over 200 billion Shorts views a day, and the Shorts feed puts a Short in front of people who've never seen your channel: there's no search to win, just the swipe. A long video is found mostly through search, the Home page and suggested videos, which take longer to build but bring people who chose to watch for minutes. Two things YouTube says about how videos get shown:

• No format is favored. In YouTube's words: “Our system has no opinion about what type of video you make, and doesn't favor any particular format.” Each video is shown on how viewers respond to it: whether they choose to watch, how long they stay and whether they enjoyed it.
• Search weighs relevance, engagement and quality: how well a video matches what was typed, how viewers interact with it for that search, and signs of the channel's expertise on the topic. That's what keeps a good long video coming up.

What independent data shows, as correlation rather than proof:

• A Shorts view is a glance. Metricool's study of 799,718 videos from 71,177 accounts (July 2026) found more than 61% of organic views in its sample came from the Shorts feed, and Shorts were watched for about 16 seconds on average, against about 2.5 minutes for long videos.
• Some Shorts went with more long-video views. In the same study, channels posting about 5 Shorts a month averaged 8,789 views per long video, against 4,364 for channels posting none. Channels posting 35 or more a month were back at about the level of those posting none.
• It depends on the niche. AIR Media-Tech followed 18,000 English-language channels from March 2025 to March 2026. Those mixing Shorts with long videos had more subscribers in fitness, food, business and education; long-only channels led in gaming, science and entertainment, though not at every channel size. It put the best mix at 25 to 40% of uploads as Shorts, and channels that shifted sharply toward Shorts partway through did poorly in every niche and size.

Both studies point out that channels posting more of everything may just be more active. Your own numbers beat theirs: in YouTube Studio, open Analytics, then Content, and the Subscribers report shows how many subscribers you gained from videos, Shorts, live streams and posts. For the rest of the climb, see how to get 1,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Effort. A Short is one idea: a tip, an opinion, a moment. You can film it in the YouTube app in a few minutes, or cut it from something you've already made. A long video takes a topic people search for, a plan or script, filming, editing, a title, a thumbnail and chapters. Three free tools take some of that off: the teleprompter scrolls your script at your reading pace while you film, the YouTube thumbnail maker turns a frame of your video into a 16:9 thumbnail with a bold title, up to 3840 × 2160, and the YouTube timestamp generator makes the chapter list for your description.

Per post, Shorts are less work. But you need far more of them, and far more views, to match what one good long video earns and builds.

Shelf life. YouTube publishes no figures on how long either kind keeps getting views, but how each is found points one way:

• A long video that answers a search can be found for as long as people search for it, and it earns every time it's watched with an ad. YouTube notes that interest in a topic changes over time and with the seasons, so evergreen topics last longest.
• A Short lives in a feed. It's shown while viewers keep choosing to watch it, and it can pick up again later, but you can't plan on that. It's paid a share of each month's pool, and from February 1, 2027 only in months when your channel has 10 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days.

So long videos build a library, and Shorts reward a steady stream. That's why posting Shorts by hand gets heavy: a steady stream means new ones every week, and each needs its own cut, framing and captions.

The two formats feed each other when one comes from the other. Cut Shorts from your long video and link each one back to it:

1. Pick moments that work alone: a tip, a strong opinion, a story, a question answered. Each should make sense without the rest of the video and leave people wanting it. More in YouTube Shorts ideas.
2. Make each one vertical and captioned, under 3 minutes, with whoever's talking in the frame.
3. Add the long video as the Short's related video. In YouTube Studio, open Content, open the Short, select Related video, pick the video from your channel and save. Viewers see a link to it below your channel handle in the Shorts player. It needs advanced features, and the video has to be public or unlisted.

YouTube Studio's own Clips and Shorts tool makes a Short from a stretch of your long video and adds the long video as its related video automatically, unless the Short is private, unlisted or made for kids. YouTube says you won't be penalized for using your own content in a Short. The Shorts' own watch time doesn't count toward the 4,000 hours, but the hours from people who tap through to the long video do.

The slow part is the cutting. Finding four or five moments in a 30-minute video means watching it again; then each one needs trimming to whole sentences, reframing from 16:9 to 9:16 on whoever's talking, and captions on every word. Clyper does that part from the video's YouTube link: it reads the transcript, picks moments that stand on their own, cuts each on whole sentences, scores its hook, frames it on the speaker and captions it. You choose how many, up to one for every 2 minutes of video; posting them and setting each one's related video stay with you. More on YouTube to Shorts, or do it by hand with how to turn a YouTube video into Shorts.

It depends on what you make and how much time you have:

The thread through all of them: long videos are where the money and the loyal viewers are, and Shorts are how new people find them. If you already make long videos, your Shorts are already in them, so posting both doesn't mean filming twice.