YouTube – how is the platform changing? The shift to shorter formats (YT Shorts)

2022 was the year of video content. TikTok’s rapidly growing popularity sent other social platforms searching for solutions to match the success of the TikTok app. The first online service that had for years been offering video content and drawing audiences with it was YouTube. Yet the growing need to shorten, cut off, condense and even compress published content firmly shifted online audiences’ interest towards the content-packed videos uploaded to TikTok. What does YouTube make of this? Is YouTube Shorts the right answer to audiences’ growing needs? And what do influencers make of it all?

YouTube as a powerful promotional tool

Interest in video content has created quite a buzz – creators active on several platforms at once are opening up ever wider and newer forms of publishing and channels of communication with their communities. Influencers who use YouTube as their medium have enjoyed unflagging popularity for years – they create effective audiovisual material and know how to shape the image of both themselves and the brands they advertise. As a result, they can deliver measurable benefits to a brand – financial ones included.

Short videos – a short-lived trend?

All the signs say: not necessarily. Short, lively, dynamic, colourful and interesting videos have won favour both with a wide circle of the youngest viewers and with older, busier age groups – time is money, so a short video has become worth its weight in gold. YouTube Shorts is the YouTube platform’s firm response not only to the TikTok phenomenon, but also to the popularity of Facebook and Instagram stories. Holding a viewer’s attention is not easy – it looks as though even the global giant has felt threatened in some way.

What exactly is YouTube Shorts?

The Shorts video section officially launched back in July 2021. It is a practically boundless archive of short videos designed for viewing on mobile devices – in a vertical format. When you scroll through the feed on a smartphone, Shorts appear in a separate section.

In these attention-grabbing clips, besides the picture, music plays a very big role. A well-matched soundtrack can come from YouTube’s suggestions or use audio recordings from outside the platform. All the videos are stored in the platform’s library and available indefinitely – they have no time limit on publication, unlike Instagram or Facebook stories. For creators, they can prove an effective way to grow their subscriber base.

The YouTube Shorts algorithm

Short videos, much like Google’s smart virtual ads, will find their audience. The YouTube Shorts algorithm picks its potential viewers by itself. When suggesting specific videos to a given person, it takes into account, among other things, the subject matter of the content they viewed before. The algorithm cares about viewer satisfaction, which means it will analyse whether they watch new uploads on a given channel, how much time they spend on particular activities, which video accounts they search for and whether they return to a particular channel. YouTube Shorts can be found on the YouTube home page, in the recommended section of a channel page, in the subscriptions tab and in notifications.