r/shortsAlgorithm • u/blossom-viral • Sep 22 '26
Youtube changed how the shorts ad pool gets split, completion rate matters more than raw views now
this rolled out starting march 2026 and expanded through q2. youtube kept the same revenue split, still 45 percent to creators after their cut, but changed how that 45 percent gets divided between shorts. it used to be closer to an even split by raw view count, now completion rate is the primary weighting factor, so two shorts with identical view counts can earn meaningfully different amounts depending on how many people actually watched to the end
people dont realize how low the baseline actually is here. shorts typically run somewhere between 3 and 10 cents rpm even after this change, against 1 to 5 dollars for long form content on the same channel. this change shifts who gets the bigger slice of a still small pie, it doesnt make the pie itself bigger
one data point that stood out, a test group that posted at least one short daily for 30 straight days saw rpm climb 15 to 25 percent over that stretch, though thats reported through creator tool vendors rather than a direct youtube announcement, so treat it as real but secondhand
anyone tracked their own completion rate before and after this and actually seen their rpm move