Short answer: long-form earns far more per view. Most faceless niches see long-form RPM between about $2 and $12 per 1,000 views, while Shorts RPM usually sits between $0.03 and $0.10, so a long-form view is worth somewhere around 30 to 150 Shorts views. Shorts are still worth making, because they grow subscribers much faster than long-form does. The setup that works for most faceless channels is both formats in one niche: Shorts to find the audience, long-form to earn from it.
This question gets asked as if it had one answer, and the internet answers it with screenshots of a single viral Short. The honest answer depends on what you want the channel to do in the next six months, so here is how the two formats actually pay, and three channels worked through with numbers.
How each format pays
The two formats are not paid the same way, which is the root of the whole gap.
| Long-form | Shorts | |
|---|---|---|
| How ads are attached | Ads run on your video | Ads run between Shorts in the feed |
| Revenue model | Your share of ads on your own videos | Share of a pooled feed revenue, split by views |
| Creator share | 55 percent | 45 percent, after music licensing costs |
| Typical faceless RPM | $2 to $12 | $0.03 to $0.10 |
| Counts toward YPP as | Watch hours | Shorts views (10 million in 90 days) |
Long-form is simple. Advertisers bid to appear on your video, you keep 55 percent of what they pay, and a longer video can carry more ad breaks. Niche matters a lot here: personal finance and software audiences sit at the top of the range, while entertainment and kids content sit near the bottom. We went through niche RPMs in the niches post.
Shorts go through a pool. Ads shown between Shorts in the feed go into one pot, a portion covers music licensing, and what is left for creators is divided by each channel's share of engaged views. You keep 45 percent of your slice. Because the ad is not really "on" your Short, there is no way to make a Short worth more by making it longer or placing more ads in it.
One detail that confuses people: since 2025 the public view count on a Short counts every start and replay, but revenue and the monetization threshold use engaged views, which is a smaller number. If your Shorts analytics look better than your Shorts income, that is usually why.
The ratio that decides everything
Take a middle of the road faceless niche, $5 long-form RPM and $0.06 Shorts RPM.
$5.00 ÷ $0.06 ≈ 83
One long-form view earns about what 83 Shorts views earn. A Short with 500,000 views and a long-form video with 6,000 views paid out roughly the same. That is the number to keep in mind every time a Short goes viral and the dashboard looks exciting.
It does not mean Shorts are pointless. It means Shorts are paid in a different currency: attention and subscribers, not ad revenue.
Three channels, worked through
All three are faceless, in the same mid RPM niche, publishing for six months. The numbers are illustrative, but the shape of the result holds across niches.
Channel A: Shorts only, two a day. Around 360 Shorts in six months. Say the average Short gets 8,000 engaged views, with a handful breaking out. That is roughly 2.9 million engaged views, which at $0.06 RPM is about $170 of ad revenue for the whole period, and only once the channel has passed the Shorts threshold. Subscribers, on the other hand, could easily be in the tens of thousands. Lots of audience, very little money.
Channel B: long-form only, three a week. Around 78 videos of 10 minutes. Growth is slower: plenty of videos sit at a few hundred views for months. Say the library averages 2,500 views per video by month six, which is 195,000 views. At 50 percent retention that is about 16,000 watch hours, well past the threshold, and at $5 RPM roughly $975. Fewer subscribers than A, much more money, and the library keeps earning after month six.
Channel C: both, three long-form a week plus one Short a day, all cut from the long-form. The Shorts bring subscribers at close to Channel A's pace. Some of those subscribers watch the long-form, so the long-form library averages more views than Channel B's. If it averages 3,500 views, that is about $1,365 from long-form plus a small Shorts amount on top, and the channel reaches 1,000 subscribers months earlier than B.
The pattern in C is the one to copy. The Shorts are not a separate content stream. They are 45 second pieces of videos that already exist, each with a reason to go watch the full thing.
What makes Shorts actually feed long-form
Shorts that grow a long-form channel have a few things in common.
- Same niche, same promise. A Short about a random trending topic brings viewers who will never watch your 12 minute history video. A Short that is the most surprising 40 seconds of that history video brings the right viewers.
- An open loop. The Short sets up a question and the long-form answers it. "This is where the story gets strange" at the end of a Short does more than any call to action.
- The related video link. YouTube lets you attach one of your long-form videos to a Short. Use it on every Short. It is the only direct path from the feed to your library.
- Consistent narrator and look. If the Shorts and the long-form sound and look like the same channel, viewers recognise it when they land on the long-form page.
When Shorts only is still the right call
There are real cases for leaning on Shorts.
If your niche is built around one moment, like a fact, a satisfying clip or a quick tip, long-form may never fit it naturally. If the plan is sponsorships or affiliate links rather than ad revenue, Shorts reach is valuable in itself, because brands pay for audience and clicks, not RPM. And if you are testing ten niches to see which one gets traction, Shorts are the cheapest way to get a signal in weeks rather than months.
What does not work is expecting the Shorts ad share to replace a salary. At $0.06 RPM, $2,000 a month takes roughly 33 million engaged views every month.
Where this leaves a faceless channel
For most faceless creators the decision is not Shorts or long-form. It is whether you can produce both without it becoming a second job. Long-form is where the money is, Shorts are where the audience is, and the channels that do well treat one as the funnel into the other. Our monetization timeline post covers why this combination also reaches the YPP threshold fastest, and the earnings post covers what the long-form side is worth once you are in.
The cost is production. Three long-form videos a week plus a daily Short cut from them is a heavy schedule if every piece is made by hand. PostFaceless makes both formats from the same niche, narrator and script, cuts Shorts from the long-form, and posts to YouTube, TikTok and Instagram on your schedule. Join the waitlist and the founder pricing holds for the first 100 paying members.
Egemen, founder