Founders keep asking me the same question in different words: should I be posting Shorts or long form videos for my business. Wrong question. The real question is what each format is actually for, because right now most founders are using both wrong. They’re posting Shorts hoping for revenue and long form hoping for reach, when it’s the exact opposite.
I’ve spent years running YouTube strategy for founders and business owners, growing channels to 10M+ views, 67K+ subscribers, and 73M+ impressions, including one client whose YouTube presence helped them raise $1.4M. Every one of those results came from knowing exactly which format does which job. Get that wrong and you’ll burn months chasing the wrong number.
What Does The Money Actually Look Like Between Shorts And Long Form?#
AIR Media-Tech ran the numbers on 274 channels across 13 niches, and the gap is not small. Shorts RPM, that’s revenue per mille, what you actually get paid for every thousand views after YouTube takes its share, comes out to somewhere between 3% and 14% of what the same channel earns on long form RPM. In most niches, you need 11,000 to 34,000 Shorts views to match the revenue of 1,000 long form views.
Read that again. A single long form video with 1,000 views can beat the earnings of a Short with 30,000 views. That’s not a small gap. That’s a different business model wearing the same platform’s logo.
One entertainment channel in that study watched its RPM fall from $4.58 to $1.84, then down to $1.15, and the timing lines up with the channel posting 21 or more Shorts a month. The more Shorts they pushed, the more their earnings per view collapsed. Volume didn’t save them. Volume buried them.
Why Is The Shorts RPM So Much Lower?#
Here’s the thing. A long form video can carry multiple ads spread across eight, ten, twenty minutes of watch time. A Short is gone in fifteen to sixty seconds, there simply is not enough time on screen to sell the same ad inventory. You’re getting paid for attention, and a Short by design gives an advertiser very little of it per view.
This is not YouTube being unfair to short form creators. This is math. Advertisers pay for the chance to hold someone’s attention, and long form gives them more of it to buy.
Think of it like the difference between a billboard on the highway and a commercial that runs on television. The billboard gets seen by everyone driving past, thousands of eyeballs in an hour, but nobody’s pulling over because of it. The commercial holds you in your seat for thirty seconds and actually gets to make a case. Both are advertising. Only one of them gets paid like it’s selling something. Shorts are the billboard. Long form is the commercial.
So Are Shorts Worthless For A Business?#
No. And this is where founders get it backwards. Shorts were never built to be your revenue engine. They’re built to be your reach engine.
Sproutsocial has tracked 70 billion Shorts views a day across the platform. That’s a firehose of attention that does not exist anywhere else on YouTube. And vertical short form ads convert 10% to 20% better per dollar than landscape ads, which tells you something important. People respond to short form when it’s built for the format they’re already scrolling through.
So the contrast is simple. Long form is where the money lives. Shorts is where the crowd lives. Treating them as competitors is the mistake. They’re not two roads to the same destination. They’re two different jobs on the same team.
If you’ve been getting views without leads showing up in your inbox, I broke down exactly why that happens here, and it’s usually because a founder is expecting a reach format to do a revenue format’s job.
How Do You Actually Connect The Two?#
[NEEDS REAL EXAMPLE]
This is the part where I’d normally hand you a client story, a channel that used Shorts to feed long form and watched the numbers move. I don’t have one locked in for this piece yet, so let me give you the mechanism instead, because the logic holds regardless of whose channel you plug it into.
A Short’s only job is to stop the scroll and earn a click somewhere else. It should never try to close the sale, explain your offer in full, or build deep trust in fifteen seconds. That’s not enough time, and forcing it will just make the Short worse at its actual job. What it can do is take one sharp idea from a long form video you already made, the strongest twenty seconds of it, and use it as a hook that sends people to the full video, your channel, or your offer.
Long form is where that stranger becomes a lead. It’s where you have the time to teach something real, show your face for more than a few seconds, answer the objection they didn’t know they had, and point them toward working with you. Shorts fill the top of the funnel. Long form does the actual selling.
Break the mechanism into two jobs and it gets simple. Shorts job one, interrupt the scroll with one sharp idea. Long form job two, prove you’re worth someone’s time and money once you’ve got their attention. Neither job works if you ask one format to do both. A Short trying to sell loses the scroll. A long form video trying to just get discovered wastes the depth it’s built for. Keep the jobs separate and each format gets stronger, not weaker.
If you’re building this whole system, not just posting random videos, here’s how I break down converting YouTube attention into actual paying clients, and it leans heavily on this same distinction.
When Should A Founder Actually Use Shorts Vs Long Form?#
Two situations, two answers.
If you have no audience yet and nobody knows your channel exists, use Shorts to get discovered. You need volume of exposure before you need depth of connection, and 70 billion daily views is the fastest door into that exposure.
If you already have an audience finding you and you need that audience to convert into clients or customers, invest in long form. That’s where the RPM lives, that’s where trust gets built, and that’s where a stranger becomes someone who books a call or buys your product.
Most founders get this backwards. They post Shorts once they already have an audience, chasing more views on a format that pays them 3% to 14% of what they could be earning, and they skip long form when they’re just starting out, exactly when reach should be the priority. Flip it around and both formats start pulling their weight.
A simple way to check where you actually stand. If people find your channel and leave without knowing what you sell, that’s a reach problem, lean into Shorts. If people already know who you are but never book a call or buy, that’s a conversion problem, and no amount of extra Shorts fixes that. More reach on a broken conversion path just means more people seeing the thing that isn’t working.
The Operator Take#
Shorts and long form are not in competition, stop treating them like a fight you have to pick a side in. Shorts get you seen. Long form gets you paid. If your business needs both attention and revenue, and it does, you need both formats doing the specific job each one is actually good at.
This piece is one part of a bigger system. If you want the complete picture of how YouTube fits into your customer acquisition, I laid out the full guide here. And if you want the exact framework I use to build this out for founders, from the first Short to the client that books a call, that’s what’s inside my YouTube Guide.
FAQ#
Do YouTube Shorts pay less than long form videos?#
Yes, and the gap is bigger than most founders expect. Across 274 channels in 13 niches, AIR Media-Tech found Shorts RPM sits at 3% to 14% of long form RPM, meaning most niches need 11,000 to 34,000 Shorts views to earn what 1,000 long form views bring in.
Should a business stop posting Shorts because they pay less?#
No. Shorts were never meant to be your revenue format, they’re your reach format. With 70 billion Shorts views happening across the platform every day, they’re one of the fastest ways to get a new audience to discover your channel. You just shouldn’t expect them to carry your revenue the way long form does.
How many Shorts equal one long form video in revenue?#
Based on AIR Media-Tech’s data, most niches need somewhere between 11,000 and 34,000 Shorts views to match the revenue of a single 1,000 view long form video. That range moves depending on the niche, but the direction is consistent across the study.
Can posting too many Shorts actually hurt my channel’s earnings?#
It can hurt your average RPM if Shorts start crowding out your long form output. One entertainment channel in the AIR Media-Tech study watched its RPM drop from $4.58 to $1.84, then to $1.15, after ramping up to 21 or more Shorts a month. That’s a real cost to chasing short form volume without balancing it with long form.
What is RPM and why does it matter more than views?#
RPM stands for revenue per mille, what you actually earn per thousand views once YouTube takes its cut. It matters more than raw view count because two videos with the same number of views can earn wildly different amounts, and for a business, what lands in your account is the number that actually matters, not the number on the thumbnail.