For the last two weeks, I have been trying to create Youtube Shorts videos. What are Youtube Shorts? They are Youtube's short videos, 60 seconds or less, similar to TikTok or Instagram Reels.

Why would I look into this? Youtube has a monetization partner program which requires (1) an Amazon Adsense account, (2) 4000 hours of watch time for existing videos and (3) 1000 subscribers to a channel. I have the first requirement.

I have had videos on my Youtube channel for over 3 years, however because I once taped a call to the FBI and later posted the video, I decided I wanted to keep my videos local, on my server. Why? The video was changed. It was shortened. I did not want Youtube to own my videos, with a legal right to do anything with the videos. So I tend to serve up videos from my own servers, which is very expensive in terms of bandwidth and storage.

If some of you recall the FBI video, you will remember is was hosted on my servers. The key here is legal right. I am sure a class action law suit might prevent Youtube from changing a lot, however videos installed on their servers are subject to their legal terms.

So this is why, I did not want to use their service. That said, I am researching different monetization avenues to see what works.

What is amazing to me? The number of "unreal" vbloggers who post to Youtube. I never understood why it was okay to lie about education or other credentials and serve up sponsored ads (started to notice this with bloggers years ago). That is fraud.

Bloggers and vbloggers tend to say a lot. Most of them negate their own lies. I say a lot. I want investigators to try and take it apart.

Anyway back to Youtube Shorts. Recently, I posted two new videos to my Youtube channel.

The mistake I made shooting the video shown above, was not made shooting the following video yesterday morning. When I initially uploaded the following video it was categorized as a Youtube Shorts video, thereby enabling automatic monetization.

Did I forget to mention that Youtube Shorts are automatically monetized whereas Youtube vbloggers have to meet certain requirements (noted above) to achieve monetization of their regular videos?

Did I crop the video correctly? I used Microsoft's Clipchamp video editor to modify the final output from Active Presenter and as I have already indicated, Youtube initially categorized the video as a Shorts. Why would it have changed?

You see, I made another mistake with the first "pancake" video and did not crop the wide black edges. When I uploaded the first version of the video- it was never considered a Youtube Shorts video. Only after I used Clipchamp to crop the edges, providing the original portrait mode- of the video as captured. Then it reverted (Youtube changed it). Why?

These videos are simply my tests and not meant to suggest anything a professional video editor might release.