YouTube Shorts guides: YouTube's rules, read at the source

What these guides are for

You cut Shorts from your long videos and post them on YouTube. A one-hour video gives about 16 of them, enough to post one Short a day for 16 days. Over all that time, your channel runs on rules it does not set: how long a Short may be, what happens when a copyright claim lands on one, when a clip channel can earn money, how an upload gets scheduled. YouTube changes them: a Short can now run up to 3 minutes, for a vertical or square video uploaded on or after October 15, 2024.

Each guide starts from a question Shorts creators type into a search engine. The answer sits in the opening lines. It rests on YouTube's own Help pages, reread on the day the guide was written, and that date is shown on the guide. Links to those pages are listed under Sources at the bottom of every guide, so you can check them yourself.

When YouTube publishes nothing on a point, the guide says so plainly and gives the date it checked. It does not fill the gap with a tip that happens to circulate. No guide promises you a view count, a retention rate or an income. None of them is legal advice: on copyright, they report what YouTube enforces and point to its pages.

What Stratos·Clip does about these rules

Every guide ends with a short part: what Stratos·Clip does about the rule it explains. Two examples show the approach.

Once an active copyright claim lands on a Short longer than one minute, YouTube blocks that Short in every country. Stratos·Clip handles this before rendering: by default, it caps every clip at 58 seconds. The cap removes the block tied to length; it does not remove the claim. Rights stay with you: you only connect videos you are allowed to use, and your channel is the one that publishes, so a claim lands on its videos.

YouTube Studio schedules one video at a time: you set the date, time and time zone, and the private video goes public at that moment. Stratos·Clip schedules by channel. You set its time slots, or a number of posts per day, once, and every ready Short joins its queue. An upload that YouTube's quota turns down moves to the next slot.

These guides cover YouTube only, because Stratos·Clip posts to YouTube Shorts and nowhere else. The app interface is in French, and detection and titles have only been measured on videos in French.

Where to start

Start from what is happening to you. A claimed Short no longer plays anywhere: the guide on blocked Shorts explains the rule and your options. You are unsure how long your clips should be before you run a video: read the one on Shorts length. You edit clips from videos that are not yours and want to monetize: begin with the guide on reused content. Your question is about when a Short goes live: the scheduling guide covers what YouTube Studio offers, then the automatic posting page shows a queue you set up once.

If you are looking for how to turn your own content into Shorts, podcast, gaming or series, the Create Shorts section is organized by type of video.