First was Instagram to rip off TikTok with Reels, now YouTube is rolling out a new short-form video creator called YouTube Shorts that the company hopes will cement its position in the video space. It is clear that TikTok has set a trend and others are just following.
According to the company blog, YouTube Shorts is a new platform for creators to express themselves in 15 seconds or less, and our team is focused on building its foundation across three main areas:
ALSO READ: Why TikTok has become so popular
- Create: Creation is at the core of short-form video, and they want to make it easy and fun to create Shorts. They are starting to test just a few new tools for creators and artists with their early beta in India.
- Get discovered: With over 2 billion viewers a month, creators have built entire businesses on YouTube, and the company wants to enable the next generation of mobile creators to also grow a community on YouTube with Shorts.
- Watch: Finally, you may have recently seen a row on the YouTube homepage especially for short videos, and starting today with YouTube Shorts they are also introducing a new watch experience that lets users easily swipe vertically from one video to the next, plus discover other similar short videos. We’re also going to make it even easier to start watching Shorts.
How YouTube Shorts works
Similar to TikTok, YouTube Shorts will let people make 15-second videos that can be set to music. Music is available via an “in-product music picker feature,”. The picker currently has 100,000s of tracks, and they are working with music artists, labels, and publishers to make more of their content available to continue expanding our catalog.
The video platform is going to try to get as many people as possible to use its new YouTube Shorts feature, and that includes new “create” icon spots that will appear prominently in the app. The “create” icon rolled out with the Shorts beta on Android, with plans to bring the icon to iOS devices soon. There is currently no estimate for when Shorts may appear in other countries, including here in Uganda.
