Barely two years after its arrival on the platform, the YouTube Shorts function is recording record audiences.
Very popular on TikTok and Instagram, short videos consumed on smartphones in vertical format are increasingly popular. After a fledgling start in 2020, YouTube also ended up joining the dance, by offering its Shorts. A recipe modeled on the competition, but which works: in less than two years, the platform has generated more than 5,000 billion cumulative views.
It was in a blog post that YouTube CEO Susan Wojicicki revealed the good news. After announcing the platform’s objectives for the year 2022, the businesswoman confirmed some particularly encouraging figures: “More people are creating content on YouTube than ever before. We’re seeing momentum across the platform, including Shorts. We have now reached 5 trillion views on Shorts”. To support this impressive score, remember that Shorts only made its appearance on a global scale last year. In 2020, the feature was simply rolled out in India for a preliminary testing phase.
Big plans for Shorts
Galvanized by this success, YouTube will broaden the horizons of its Shorts : while an extension called Remix will arrive this year, and should substantially take over the concept of TikTok Duos, the Google platform is also testing new ways of remunerating its content creators, beyond the financing funds available in some countries.
Because that is where the challenge lies for YouTube. At a time when all social networks want to get into short videos, the biggest challenge remains to monetize published content to enable content creators to earn a living… and thus to sustain their activity. A situation that is obviously not as simple as it seems: for a few months now, some influencers have been protesting against TikTok’s remuneration policy, deemed far too low, at a rate of barely 2 cents for 1000 views.
