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Shorts will succeed by combining short-form and long-form YouTube, but doing so without complicating and destroying the rest of the program won’t be simple.
It’s working with YouTube Shorts. Todd Sherman is certain about that. Sherman, the product manager for YouTube’s short-form, endless-scrolling TikTok rival, is quick to cite the figures: Shorts has 1.5 billion monthly users who watch 30 billion videos on the platform. And those figures were from the start of the year, he adds. “Since then, things have developed.” Everything appears to be on the upswing: creators are making money, viewers are tuning in.
Now that it’s becoming more and more obvious that vertical scrolling like on TikTok is a part of the future of video and that Shorts appears to be a likely part of that future, the real challenge facing YouTube is how Shorts actually fits in. Making Shorts make sense inside the YouTube app could prove to be just as difficult as competing with TikTok and Instagram Reels because YouTube is already so much more than just a simple service for uploading videos. The company is also attempting to integrate music, podcasts, games, movies, and much more.
For instance, YouTube is adding Shorts to its TV apps this week, allowing you to watch the brief videos from the convenience of your couch. On the one hand, this is a very reasonable concept given that YouTube TV viewing is popular and shorts is a rapidly expanding content genre. Everyone benefits, right? However, because to the rapid tools for editing and remixing videos, the in-app camera, and even the vertical orientation and swipe-scrolling feed, short-form video in the TikTok/Shorts/Reels era is so strongly linked to smartphones.
All of that has to be adjusted by the YouTube staff for the bigger screen. As a result, even straightforward queries like “Should Shorts loop when they’re playing on a TV?” soon become challenging. “I believe looping is frequently advantageous for videos that are really brief, within short-form, since you really need more than one view to get the value out of it,” she said. However, a 60-second video has a beginning, middle, and end, according to Sherman. generally speaking, you don’t want to loop those as much.
The Shorts UI that YouTube tested included a version that resembled a side-scrolling queue of Shorts videos, with each film playing as the queue traveled from right to left. Another was quite straightforward: all that was on the screen was the video. The group ultimately decided to display the video in the center of the screen along with like and hate buttons and details about the sound and creator of the video. But they continue to loop and scroll vertically. right now.
Because it nearly completely defeats the purpose of bringing landscape video to the phone, Sherman claims that the UI issues are “definitely non-trivial.” According to him, there is still much to learn about how viewers want to interact with short-form video on their TVs, how those films should appear, and even whether the algorithm needs to alter based on the size of the screen. Are the things you like to watch on a gadget that normally has more than one person looking at it the same things you enjoy with a very private experience for you? he queries. He muses aloud that perhaps Shorts on TV need to favor generally well-liked videos more. or in the direction of videos you’ve already loved. He explains that everything is brand-new and that it’s important to keep in mind that no one actually understands anything.
The YouTube app faces many challenges when it comes to shorts in general. The short-form videos were initially viewed mostly like any other video and were placed into recommendations and creators’ shelves. The YouTube subreddit is flooded with people creating Chrome extensions and scripts to remove Shorts automatically, but they just don’t appear to belong next to what the company is now calling “longform YouTube,” so it hasn’t really succeeded. YouTube has shifted its Shorts section to its own tab in the app and on the channel sites of creators. The YouTube experience still heavily promotes short-form content, but it is now seen as a separate entity.
But for Shorts to function, YouTube must be integrated with it. We want to make it simple for users to access the source if, when watching short-form video, they come across someone reacting to another video (perhaps while green-screening themselves in front of it). Additionally, the team hopes to make it simpler to convert a long-form video into a short film and vice versa.
In addition, Sherman adds, “We want to make it simple to access all those Shorts if you find yourself on a long-form watch page and that video has been remixed numerous times. He continues riffing, saying that if you’re viewing a video with Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” as the soundtrack, you should be able to view all the other Shorts with that sound as well as the full music video and any other Swift videos you desire.
In a very ambitious implementation of what Sherman is describing, Shorts might one day replace the YouTube homepage as a more immersive, interactive method to browse content that then naturally guides you through the rest of the website. YouTube sees Shorts as a doorway into YouTube, much how TikTok is constructing a music app to assist fans in moving from popular clip to complete album. Sherman appears to be both intrigued by and frightened of this concept, but he mostly believes that it is too early to know much for certain. “We are on this frontier, staring out at something that nobody has really nailed,” the speaker said.
The opportunity for YouTube in practically every category is the same: figure out how to create an excellent gaming, music, kids, podcasts, or other product, and then integrate it into the rest of YouTube in distinctive ways. There doesn’t seem to be any way for YouTube to compete with TikTok’s algorithm when it comes to Shorts, but if it can make Shorts into both an entertaining feed of its own and a directory of everything else on the platform, it might have something that is truly both YouTube- and TikTok-like. The only thing left to do is determine the optimum method for delivering all of that video to you, on every device, everywhere. The largest one you have is being worked on, but there will be a lot more after that.
