{"slug": "future-of-tv-briefing-youtube-shorts-gains-ad-dollars-but-needs-to-crack-social", "title": "Future of TV Briefing: YouTube Shorts gains ad dollars but needs to crack social budgets", "summary": "Advertisers are increasing spending on YouTube Shorts, but the platform still struggles to capture social video budgets, with Shorts CPMs at $4-$6 versus $7-$8 for Meta's Reels and TikTok, according to agency executives. YouTube recently raised the revenue-sharing threshold for Shorts creators, yet agencies say the format's growth is limited by bundled buys that favor in-stream inventory and by advertisers' larger allocations to competitors.", "body_md": "Join us Sept. 14-16 in Miami to connect with top publishing leaders\n\n[SECURE YOUR SEAT](https://digiday.com/events/digiday-publishing-summit-sep-26/?source=display&utm-source=display)\n\n# Future of TV Briefing: YouTube Shorts gains ad dollars but needs to crack social budgets\n\nThis Future of TV Briefing covers the latest in streaming and TV for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Wednesday at 10 a.m. ET. [More from the series →](https://digiday.com/series/tv-briefing/)\n\nThis week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at advertisers’ spending on YouTube Shorts inventory as the platform raises the revenue-sharing threshold for creators.\n\n- Coming up Shorts\n- YouTube’s view-counting change, Twitch’s AI opt-in, Apple TV’s golf game and more\n\n## Coming up Shorts\n\nYouTube [raising the bar](https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-partner-program-updates-2027-new-opportunities-earn/) for Shorts creators to join its revenue-sharing program raises the question: Is YouTube making it harder for Shorts creators to get a cut of ad dollars because there are fewer ad dollars earmarked for Shorts?\n\nThe answer is no. Actually, advertisers are increasing the amount of money going toward YouTube Shorts inventory, according to agency executives. However, that spending is being handicapped by how much money advertisers are spending on other social video platforms, namely Meta’s Reels and TikTok. But it’s also being handicapped by how the money is being spent on YouTube overall — and Shorts specifically.\n\n“It’s definitely grown considerably,” said Leah Askew, svp and head of precision media for North America at Digitas.\n\n“It’s actually starting to grow,” said Brian Binder, senior director of TV, audio and display at Tinuiti.\n\n“Shorts has been an expanding format within YouTube investment and video investment overall,” said Skyler McGill, head of programmatic and video at Wpromote.\n\nA YouTube spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment by press time.\n\nWhile advertisers’ YouTube Shorts spending is growing, they are still spending more money on other short-form video platforms. And that’s despite the fact that YouTube Shorts inventory is typically cheaper than Reels or TikTok, with Shorts CPMs ranging around $4 to $6 versus Reels and TikTok CPMs at $7 to $8, per agency executives.\n\n“If Meta and TikTok are 60% of a buy, there’s no way that YouTube Shorts is going to come close. They’re going to be at like 10%. They can’t scale yet to that exact same degree,” said one agency executive.\n\nA major impediment is that typically advertisers aren’t buying YouTube Shorts specifically. They’re buying a bundle of YouTube inventory, including in-stream inventory against traditional YouTube videos. And YouTube seems to have so much of the latter inventory that it often eats up the budget of these bundled buys.\n\nShorts is “usually more of a minority, just based off sheer volume that’s happening across in-feed and in-stream,” said McGill.\n\n“Most of the delivery still gets pushed to the in-stream ads over YouTube Shorts whenever you do group things together. So the algorithm definitely favors more of that in-stream inventory just because there’s just so much of it. But [Shorts inventory is] definitely not something that anybody’s shying away from,” Binder said.\n\nIn fact, advertisers and agencies are trying to figure out how to tailor their ad buys to YouTube Shorts.\n\n“It’s usually more beneficial to break it out as its own line item to help actually drive more scale, more targeted performance from optimization lens versus just having it sit within a bundled Demand Gen line,” said McGill.\n\nYouTube/Google representatives have pitched Shorts to advertisers and agencies as social video. That makes sense given its closest comparisons are to Meta’s Reels and TikTok. But that requires a shift in creative strategy for Shorts ads, such as by running ads featuring user-generated content and/or creators instead of cutdowns of traditional TV spots.\n\n“You really should not be taking the long-form video and applying that there. You really shouldn’t even be thinking vertical video goes there. You really need to be bringing social strategy and social assets to it,” Askew said.\n\n“What we’re seeing more conversation happen around is this lift-and-shift strategy. Being able to take what you’re currently doing over on the traditional social side of the house and just move that into YouTube Shorts,” Binder said.\n\nBut complicating matters, it’s not always a brand’s or agency’s social team that is responsible for buying YouTube, according to agency executives.\n\n“We called an ‘all hands on deck’ conversation to sort that out within our brand and also across the organization and have agreed that where we buy it needs to take place within programmatic because of the platform and the skills that we already have built there with programmatic, but it’s on us as an investment org to really collaborate strategically with social. So the lanes become blurred,” Askew said.\n\n“One of the things I feel like brand and agencies are trying to grapple with is where does YouTube live from a management standpoint versus where social lives. A social team will manage Meta and TikTok, but sometimes YouTube’s managed by a search team or a programmatic team. So it’s starting to think about where does this actually live and what is the baseline that we’re going to start comparing to,” Binder said.\n\nWhich gets at the final limiter at the moment to Shorts ad spending growth. For as much as advertisers are spending more money on Shorts, they’ve been spending even more money on Meta’s Reels and TikTok.\n\n“YouTube Shorts as a standalone is much more nascent and early days and a smaller amount versus what we see from just traditional social,” said Binder.\n\n“The bulk of the investment is still being driven by TikTok and Reels. That’s just due to overall maturity and understanding that the investment and strategies happening in those platforms, especially in social environments, are still leading,” said McGill.\n\nTherefore, as they start to treat Shorts more like Reels and TikTok, they need to see Shorts not only on par with the competition but outperform those other platforms to the extent that advertisers can be convinced to move money away from Reels and TikTok in favor of Shorts.\n\n“Performance is comparable to TikTok and Reels. But given those platforms operate at higher spend levels, we’d expect Shorts to deliver stronger efficiency since it’s at a lower investment,” said one agency executive. “I don’t have the argument to scale it fully yet because it needs to come in as ultra-efficient. It needs to be the best performer for us to route dollars that way.”\n\n## What we’ve heard\n\n“What’s the commission rate? Are there tiers now, or will there be? Does any of this happen on the clock, or is it all on the employee’s own time?”\n\n—[GRIN’s Ben Zawacki on brands’ employee-creator programs]\n\n## Numbers to know\n\n[ 450,000:](https://news.thepublishpress.com/p/youtube-just-made-it-twice-as-hard-to-monetize) Number of “clippers” in YouTube creator Eric “Airrack” Decker’s clipping network ClipFarm.\n\n[ $500 million:](https://www.axios.com/2026/08/12/alex-cooper-unwell-500-million-valuation-investment) Valuation of Alex Cooper’s Unwell after its latest funding round.\n\n** $12.99: **New monthly subscription price for Peacock’s Premium ad-supported tier.\n\n## What we’ve covered\n\n**TV measurement’s competitive reset gathers pace (with more job cuts):**\n\n- Nielsen’s acquisition of DoubleVerify immediately reignited discussion over whether the future of measurement lies less in standalone verification or audience currencies and more in bringing together multiple signals across planning, activation and attribution.\n- Meanwhile VideoAmp and Comscore have each announced employee layoffs in the past two weeks.\n\n*Read more about TV measurement’s reset here.*\n\n**Creators build GEO strategies to get discovered by brands and agencies in AI search:**\n\n- Brands and their agency partners are turning to AI chatbots to determine which creators are being cited the most to strike partner deals, agency execs told Digiday.\n- Agency execs say they’re starting to include AI visibility efforts in briefs.\n\n*Read more about creators’ AI search visibility here.*\n\n**USA Fencing relies on creators to attract new fans ahead of the 2028 Olympics:**\n\n- Since USA Fencing started its creator program in December 2025, average monthly impressions are up 36.9%, totalling 4.75 million a month.\n- 49% of Gen Z sports fans became interested in a new sport or athlete through fan-created content.\n\n*Read more about USA Fencing’s creator program here.*\n\n**An anatomy of the creator brand trip’s midlife crisis:**\n\n- The backlash to OpenAI’s creator-brand trip exposed that brand trips can work, but the format needs to change.\n- If brands continue to rely on in-your-face luxury or overly curated events as ways to activate creators and reach their loyal (and increasingly discerning) audiences, they could end up facing online backlash, too.\n\n*Read more about the creator brand trip here.*\n\n**Brands can’t just flip the ’employees as creators’ switch:**\n\n- Some retailers like Gap Inc., are inviting employees to apply into an existing creator program, rather than building something bespoke for staff.\n- Others, like Starbucks, are building new programs from scratch to elevate employee creators, which is a slower, costlier route.\n\n*Read more about the employees-as-creators push here.*\n\n## What we’re reading\n\n**YouTube’s view-counting change:**\n\nWhat counts as a view? Not much anymore. Starting Aug. 24, the Google-owned video platform will lower its threshold and start counting a view as soon as a video starts playing, just as Instagram and TikTok do — and as YouTube already does for Shorts — according to The Verge.\n\nThe Disney-owned TV network has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Federal Communications Commission alleging the regulator has violated the First Amendment with its early broadcast license renewal and corresponding investigation, according to CNBC.\n\nThe Amazon-owned video platform will use creators’ livestreams to train Amazon’s AI models by default unless streamers take action to opt out, according to TechCrunch.\n\nApple is taking a swing at securing rights to stream professional golf’s Open Championship after NBC’s deal runs out in two years, according to The Guardian.\n\nPromise is one of many AI film studios looking to use the technology to undercut traditional production costs despite the absence of evidence that there’s much appetite for AI-generated movies or TV shows among audiences, according to The Guardian.\n\nTop industry executives seem to agree — ominously — that cable TV’s subscriber base has yet to hit bottom but keeps heading in that direction, according to CNBC.\n\n### More in Future of TV\n\n####\n[\nAd Tech Briefing: TV measurement’s competitive reset gathers pace (with more job cuts) ](https://digiday.com/future-of-tv/ad-tech-briefing-tv-measurements-competitive-reset-gathers-pace-with-more-job-cuts/)\n\nComScore and VideoAmp confirm large job cuts, just days after rival Nielsen makes bold M&A move.\n\n####\n[\nFuture of TV Briefing: In TV ad market’s swing to streaming, cheap inventory is in demand ](https://digiday.com/future-of-tv/future-of-tv-briefing-in-tv-ad-markets-swing-to-streaming-cheap-inventory-is-in-demand/)\n\nThis week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at how TV and streaming companies’ advertising businesses fared in the second quarter of 2026.\n\n####\n[\nFuture of TV Briefing: Why Aéropostale is investing in creator-led episodic shows ](https://digiday.com/future-of-tv/future-of-tv-briefing-why-aeropostale-is-investing-in-creator-led-episodic-shows/)\n\nThis week’s Future of TV Briefing features a Q&A with Catalyst Brands evp and chief customer and marketing officer Marisa Thalberg about Aéropostale’s recent creator-led episodic series.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/future-of-tv-briefing-youtube-shorts-gains-ad-dollars-but-needs-to-crack-social", "canonical_source": "https://digiday.com/future-of-tv/future-of-tv-briefing-youtube-shorts-gains-ad-dollars-but-needs-to-crack-social-budgets/?utm_campaign=digidaydis&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=general-rss", "published_at": "2026-08-19 04:01:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-19 04:12:19.952963+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-products"], "entities": ["YouTube", "Meta", "TikTok", "Digitas", "Tinuiti", "Wpromote", "Leah Askew", "Brian Binder"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/future-of-tv-briefing-youtube-shorts-gains-ad-dollars-but-needs-to-crack-social", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/future-of-tv-briefing-youtube-shorts-gains-ad-dollars-but-needs-to-crack-social.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/future-of-tv-briefing-youtube-shorts-gains-ad-dollars-but-needs-to-crack-social.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/future-of-tv-briefing-youtube-shorts-gains-ad-dollars-but-needs-to-crack-social.jsonld"}}