In the content creation world, short-form videos prove to remain an outlier in the fold, evidenced by YouTube's most recent milestone. Google's video curation platform boasted in an announcement on Wednesday, June 15, that YouTube Shorts has hit over 1.5 billion logged-in monthly users, setting it up for clear ascendancy over rival TikTok through its so-called "multiformat creator."
Launched in 2020, YouTube Shorts was immediately met as an obvious play against Bytedance's similar short-form platform in its own strides of dominance. TikTok announced late last year that it hit 1 billion monthly users and is projected to hit 1.5 billion by 2022, yet it has not vocalized any official numbers. These one-minute-long snippets would not officially find their home on the main feed alongside longer-form YouTube videos until 2021, thus allowing larger content creators to expand their horizons by mixing and blending their offerings with both short and long-form videos.
In late May of this year, Google announced that it began rolling out YouTube Shorts advertising, a promising prospect for both newer and older content creators building their repertoire on the site. Although YouTube Shorts monetization isn't exactly streamlined or at all convincing enough for major players to dive headlong into the arena, Google has put forth a rather large purse of $100 million in its YouTube Shorts Fund, a project intended to draw more creators under the YouTube Partner Program into the short-form fold.
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As of yet, it's rather unclear if YouTube Shorts monetization is better in regards to TikTok's own monetization parameters, given that YouTube Shorts advertising only just started earlier this year and TikTok itself started an ad revenue program in May. That being said, though, most seemingly consider YouTube Shorts as a better avenue for top earnings, given its wide reach (YouTube boasts an average of 2.6 billion daily active users) and overall transparency.
In its announcement, the video hosting firm drew considerable attention to the capacity of the YouTube Shorts algorithm to draw users to longer-form content, coining this tendency as "the rise of the multiformat creator." It harkens specifically to YouTube's own internal musings in the announcement as the platform's ability to reach audiences in all varied circumstances, whether for short bouts of quick information, mid-to-longer YouTube videos, and finally, hours-long live streams amid YouTube Gaming.
But TikTok is catching on, evidenced in its most recent announcement of allowing users to publish videos up to 10 minutes long. While TikTok experiments with newer options for its creators, allowing them to post far more lengthy tutorials and cooking excerpts, YouTube is taking a more strategic approach in that the YouTube Shorts algorithm will essentially do all the heavy lifting for the right creators. Leveraging YouTube Shorts alongside long-form content, creators will be able to not only diversify their talent but also build an audience through both video streams.
"Long-form content remains the best way for creators to deeply engage and develop long-term relationships with their audiences. But Shorts offer an exciting, new way to be a part of a viewer's journey and to introduce themselves and their whole portfolio to new audiences," explains YouTube's Vice President of the Americas, Tara Walpert Levy. "This approach is yielding results; channels uploading both short and long-form content are seeing better overall watch time and subscriber growth than those uploading only one format."
However it's important to note that ad revenue fetches far higher on long-form content. Thus, in YouTube's own guise, while Shorts is making major strides, the feature itself proves to be only but a gear in the ways the platform is building out more support for its tried and true long-form, ad-heavy videos. The firm noted in the announcement that 50% of ad-supported streaming watch time of YouTube videos remains on the traditional TV screen, highlighting the fact that mobile screens aren't exactly at the heart of the company's major business plays, despite the major milestone.
