Social-Media
In March, YouTube Shorts beta will launch in the U.S.
Beginning in March, chief product officer Neal Mohan announced today, YouTube is gearing up to launch a beta version of its TikTok competitor, Shorts, in the United States.
Mohan said the YouTube team will give more creators access to shorts in the United States in a blog post announcing a number of features coming to YouTube in the coming months. With Shorts in India, where the feature has existed for several months, according to Mohan, the YouTube team has seen success. "The number of Indian channels using Shorts tools has more than tripled since December, and the YouTube Shorts player is now receiving more than 3.5 billion global daily views," he wrote.
In April 2020, reports that YouTube was working on a TikTok competitor first emerged, but until September, YouTube did not roll out Shorts in India. Instagram was doing the same thing while the company tried to figure out how to extend its creator base and 2 billion monthly users to a mobile-first product in the wake of TikTok's explosive popularity. Not long before YouTube launched Shorts, Instagram launched Reels, leading two of the world's biggest tech and social platforms to race to catch up with the ByteDance app.
No wonder YouTube is trying as quickly as possible to get shorts into the hands of creators and users. TikTok was seeing continuous growth spikes by November 2020, tripling the user base it had in 2018. Like other businesses, the pandemic helped TikTok's company, giving individuals stuck at home the ability to engage with a never-ending stream of new, short videos and make their own. It is expected that TikTok will also cross the 1 billion monthly active user line this year.
All this helps explain why YouTube is finding new ways to provide features for creators that will keep them making videos for the platform (instead of pivoting entirely to TikTok or Reels).
Mohan's blog also announced new features of monetization, including applause, enabling fans to purchase a one-time clapping animation that appears on top of the video. A certain percentage of the revenue from each applause purchased is given to creators. There are already similar instruments like this, including Super Chat. Mohan did not say when creators will be able to access the feature, only that individuals should be able to "unlock" it later this year.
YouTube is beta testing a "new integrated shopping experience" on top of that, which will be launched later this year. The concept is that people can buy products from channels whose views they trust.
According to a YouTube spokesperson, creators can tag items in their videos to allow viewers to buy them if they want. As long as the product is in the catalog of YouTube, creators can tag them and those products can be bought by viewers. These products are currently restricted to the categories of beauty and electronics. If a product is purchased from their channel, The Verge has asked YouTube for more information about the breakdown of revenue for creators.
The company is rolling out a few product features that will directly impact what and how they watch in an effort to give people more control over parts of YouTube and how they watch videos. The product team will offer new parental tools on the YouTube Kids app that will enable parents, according to the blog, to add specific videos and channels from the main app. This will allow kids to watch videos that parents think are acceptable, but that may not appear in the YouTube Kids app due to restrictions in place.
Finally, the YouTube team is also extending its "chapters" function, which adds videos to specific timestamps. They will soon be added to relevant videos automatically, which may require chapters (like lo-fi chillhop channels). In Mohan's blog, more detailed information about all the changes can be read alongside the videos that the product team of YouTube will release throughout the year detailing what is to come.
