What counts as a Short: YouTube’s rules on length, format and how views are counted

For most of its life, a YouTube Short was defined by a number: sixty seconds. That changed in the autumn of 2024, and a second change in the spring of 2025 altered what the view counter under every Short actually measures. Both are documented on YouTube’s own help pages, and both matter to anyone reading the numbers on a Shorts channel.

The three-minute rule

Since October 15, 2024, length is no longer the thing that separates a Short from a regular upload. YouTube’s help page on three-minute Shorts puts it plainly: “Any videos uploaded on or after this date with a square or vertical aspect ratio up to three minutes in length will be categorized as Shorts on YouTube.”

Two things follow from that sentence. The first is that aspect ratio does the sorting. A square or vertical video of up to three minutes is a Short; a horizontal video of the same length is not. The second is that the rule is not retroactive. In the help page’s words, “Any videos uploaded before this date will remain the same, as a long-form video on YouTube.”

The announcement came on the YouTube blog in October 2024, framed as a response to demand: “Starting on October 15, you can upload Shorts up to 3 minutes long. This was a top requested feature by creators, so we’re excited to give you more flexibility to tell your story.” The same post confirmed the format condition: “This change applies to videos that are square or taller in aspect ratio, and won’t affect any videos you uploaded before October 15.”

Official Artist Channels, the channel type YouTube maintains for musicians, were brought under the same rule later, with a cut-off of December 8, 2025, according to the help page.

Where the money comes from

Categorisation decides which revenue model a video falls under. The help page notes that three-minute Shorts “can be monetized in the Shorts revenue sharing model from the Shorts Feed”, while videos uploaded before the cut-off “can continue to be monetized in the long-form revenue sharing mode on the Watch Page.” A two-minute vertical video uploaded in September 2024 and an identical one uploaded in November 2024 therefore sit in different programmes.

There is a further wrinkle for Shorts between one and three minutes that use claimed material. From September 24, 2026, the help page says, “new Shorts longer than one minute (but under three minutes) with an active Content ID claim will no longer be automatically blocked and may remain playable on YouTube.”

What a view is

The second change is easier to miss and arguably more important for anyone comparing channels. On March 31, 2025, YouTube changed how Shorts views are counted. The help page on creating Shorts explains: “Views will count the number of times a Short starts to play or replay, with no minimum watch time requirement.”

Before that date, a view required some watch time; after it, a view is a start. YouTube kept the old measure under a new name: “We will keep the existing Shorts view metric, now called ‘Engaged views,’ in YouTube Analytics so you can see how many viewers chose to continue watching your video.”

The practical consequence is that public view counts on Shorts published before and after March 31, 2025 are not measured the same way. A channel’s early-2025 numbers and its 2026 numbers describe slightly different things, and any comparison across that line should say so.

What did not change

The count that matters for money did not move. YouTube states that the view-count change “will not directly impact the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) eligibility and Shorts ad revenue sharing. They will both be based on ‘Engaged Shorts views.’ So creators’ eligibility and earnings will not change.”

The Partner Program eligibility page sets the Shorts route into the programme at 1,000 subscribers with 10 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days, and adds that “any qualified watch hours from Shorts views in the Shorts Feed won’t count towards the 4,000 qualified public watch hours threshold” of the long-form route. The two routes are kept apart on purpose.

How a Short gets made

The creation page describes two paths: “You can upload vertical videos saved to your computer or smartphone as Shorts. You can also record a Short from the YouTube app on a mobile device,” using what YouTube calls its multi-segment camera. Three-minute Shorts can be uploaded “through the YouTube app and YouTube Studio.”

For channels built on the format, the three-minute ceiling is often academic. PopcornTheory, the food-story channel profiled on this site, has a median short of 32 seconds across 335 uploads, and its longest runs 63 seconds. The view-count change is not academic at all. Roughly the channel’s first 15 uploads, all from March 2025, were counted under the old definition; the other 320 have been counted under the new one. Its 685 million public views are, by YouTube’s own description, a count of starts.