Monetisation & Revenue
Music licensing cost
Also called: music licensing costs, music deduction
Shorts advertising revenue is pooled rather than attributed to single videos. Music licensing comes out of that pool first. Creators then split what is left and keep 45 per cent of the creator allocation, in proportion to their share of Shorts views. Everyone in the pool carries the licensing bill, including creators who never touch a licensed track. That structure is why the Shorts revenue share sits below the long-form one, a gap YouTube has attributed to music licensing being built into the model.