Exactly one year ago, we wrote that “if anyone can try to counter the overwhelming power of TikTok, it’s definitely YouTube”: it was the day of the presentation of Shorts, which is precisely YouTube’s answer to TikTok, and 12 months later, that prediction turned out to be spot on. Looking at the numbers, it was honestly not difficult to do it: every day, about 4.5 billion people access Google (which controls YouTube), and over 500 hours of content is uploaded every minute on YouTube.
And yet, it was objectively difficult to imagine that for Shorts things would go so well: during a presentation reserved for the press, the product manager of the platform, Todd Sherman revealed that “over 1.5 billion people log into Shorts every month, generating around 30 billion views every day “. Compared to a year ago, that’s a fourfold growth.
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In short: in Mountain View they understood that short videos in vertical format work, and never mind if an app had to arrive from China to prove it to them. What they seem to want to do now is exploit this trend as much as possible, with the peculiarities that only YouTube has: “For creators we are the only multi-format platform,” said Sherman. Referring to the fact that YouTube actually is the only place online where you can upload short or super long videos, vertical as the Net wants or horizontal as if they were on TV, direct or broadcast audio only. All in the same place and from the same account.
In the near future, Shorts’ intention is to still insist (with new features) on audio and video remixingie on the possibility of using clips of music or films from other clips, more or less long, to create new short or very short videos: the company explained that “only in the month of Aprilthe clips made like this, that is, starting from a long video and used for a short one, have generated over 100 billion views ”.
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In addition, the $ 100 million fund to financially support creators will be maintained, further demonstrating that the company doesn’t seem to fear Shorts will steal YouTube space as we have understood it up to now or which somehow distort it. When asked if there is this risk, Sherman was clear: “There’s not always time to watch a 10-15 minute video, sometimes you just have the desire or the possibility of a short break. Indeed, we are convinced that both methods will be able to benefit from one of the traffic brought by the other”, As demonstrated by the cases of traditional channels that have grown thanks to the audience conquered in the Shorts section.
Speaking of coexistence between short and long videos, Sherman instead agreed that it should be improved: “Yes, at the moment it is a bit confusing – he replied when we talked about it – and we are working to optimize it, to allow the viewer to distinguish well which videos are part of the Shorts family and which ones are not. Not only on the creator pages, but everywhere on YouTube, from the homepage to the various sections “.
Finally, the other coexistence, the one with rivals, with TikTok but even with Facebook and Instagram, which now decidedly focused on videos more than anything else: in particular, Sherman admitted that YouTube is “carefully monitoring” the issue of using videos created on other social networks for Shorts. A sort of digital recycling that Instagram has openly revealed to hinder (the contents that have the TikTok logo are penalized in terms of visibility), but on which those of Shorts still do not have a clear position: “We want to understand how many contents of this type really are, how much traffic they generate and how many views they collect – said Sherman – Then we will decide how to act”.