Since 2019, YouTube Shorts has been the in-house TikTok competitor for Google, and it’s now grown to 2 billion logged-in users tuning in per month, the company says. Now it’s getting a host of new features that make it even more of a direct rival to the Chinese short-form video giant.
The six new tools for Shorts creators announced today that make the Google-owned TikTok competitor more closely resemble TikTok include, most notably, “collabs,” which enable Shorts creators to make side-by-side video compilations. There are also stickers that fortify audience participation through formats such as Q&As and there are two tests: one in mobile-first vertical live video that incorporates this content into the regular Shorts feed, and another intended to ease the transformation of long-form YouTube content into Shorts.
YouTube declined to make a spokesperson available for an interview with Fortune about how the features factor into the company road map.
The success of Shorts over the past four years has been in part due to YouTube’s history of meaningfully compensating creators with ad revenue sharing through its AdSense program. This has inspired creators, who are often making reliable wages from YouTube, to add Shorts to their repertoire and viewers accustomed to high-caliber YouTube content to tune in for the short-form offering.
Today’s product updates mark a new advance in YouTube’s play to win the increasingly competitive short-form video war. The August 1 YouTube announcement comes after TikTok began to meaningfully compensate creators for videos over 60 seconds through its new Creativity Program Beta (after years of meager payments via the Creator Fund). And Meta rolled out Reels templates intended to ease creation of its short-form video product in mid-July.
Still, most would say that TikTok remains the top short-form video platform. The question is: With new features that copy TikTok and streamline content creation, will YouTube be able to beat the Chinese video giant?
Introducing collaborative video to the platform is a great start, say experts. Stitch videos, TikTok’s version of YouTube’s new collab feature, have been viewed 116.1 billion times on the ByteDance-owned platform. YouTube’s addition of these features to Shorts will mean that the Shorts feed will more closely resemble TikTok’s For You page and creators will not be limited to TikTok to publish collaborative content.
“A healthy creator is someone that's collaborating with others in the space,” says Leanne Perice, the founder of creator management company Made By All that oversees the career of top comedy creator Adam Waheed, among others. “I think adding [collabs] to [YouTube’s] new features is going to be really important.”
Another new feature that may elevate YouTube Shorts is the one that enables creators to easily cut traditional YouTube content into Shorts. Ayomi Samaweera, previously TikTok’s head of global international communications and chief of staff at Jellysmack and now the founder of creator platform Canopy, calls this update a “game changer” as it simplifies the editing process. “It's hard to be editing and making both long-form and short-form—that’s a lot of time and effort,” she says. “That they're giving creators a tool to be able to do it native in the platform that’s going to be approved by the algorithm…it almost opens creators up to a different community on YouTube.”
The remainder of features in the announcement aim to fortify Shorts as a content creation hub. The most notable of these include increased discoverability of live, a tool to bundle audio and visual effects, Shorts playlists and finally, and notably, the introduction of mobile-first live video that will be integrated into the Shorts discovery feed, just like it is on TikTok.
Though Samaweera believes that TikTok remains the viral kingpin even with these changes, she labels Shorts’ push to promote live video in the feed as among its biggest hopes of edging into TikTok virality. “Live is where you go if you want to exponentially increase your audience,” she says.
