After five years of an anonymous existence, the possibility of creating stories on YouTube will be withdrawn from June 26.
The news, for sure, should not upset the economic or creative model of YouTube or Google, given the low interest that stories have aroused since 2018. We can also think that the platform has never really believed, in view of the little space or communication she granted them.
A Brief History of Stories on YouTube
At the end of 2017, YouTube announced in a blog post that the platform was testing a new format, the tab ” Community “, which allowed creators with at least 1,000 followers to write posts or interact with their followers. And among the options offered, one of them in particular (which YouTube incidentally named “Reels” at the time), caught the eye: stories. For context, this is the time when all social networks are trying to find a way to include such a feature on their homepage. Thus, in addition to Instagram and the success that stories have met there, Twitter and even LinkedIn had also ventured there. Before finally abandoning the idea.
For its part, from the start, YouTube never really gave a chance to the stories of its creators. Unlike the competition, which usually displayed them at the very top of the home page, “real” were quickly confined to the community tab of creators, only the latter could create them, and it was generally impossible to share them. The authors of the blog post recognize that, among creators using both stories and written posts, the latter generate the most engagement, which should be an anomaly for a video platform. .
Google is not at its first attempt
YouTube’s lack of interest in its stories had a predictable effect: almost no one used the function, even fewer viewers. The few insiders who knew of its existence will therefore not be surprised to learn that this possibility will soon be eliminated.
It’s not really a tragedy for Google, which probably has enough to recover from, and has already been there many times (remember Google Plus?). On the other hand, it is a new example of this tendency for social platforms to happily dip into the slightest feature that is gaining some success with the competition. Stories are a good example of this, as are pages “trends” Or “discover” that we now find on each social network, sometimes to the detriment of the logic of the network (LinkedIn has returned to the two functionalities).
To the point that when one of them has financial problems, it seems that the whole ecosystem is forced to lay off.
Source : Engadget, Numerama
10