According to information relayed by our colleagues from the Financial Times, the Shorts, the famous short content launched by YouTube to compete with TikTok, are ruining the economic model of the platform.
Faced with the explosion in popularity of TikTok in 2020, YouTube decided to respond by launching the Shorts. A true copy of TikTok videos, these thirty-second contents were quickly a hit with users. As of June 2022, over 1.5 billion users were consuming Shorts regularly.
Since then, the Google platform has made sure to cherish Shorts users, in particular by integrating certain new features. Content creators, for example, have the possibility of integrating excerpts of licensed music into their videos, provided they do not exceed one minute.
Only, the growing success of the Shorts has become a problem. In any case, this is the opinion of several YouTube officials relayed by the Financial Times. According to the American media, some veteran YouTube executives blame the Shorts for eat away at income from long-format content classics, which has been the mainstay of the platform for over 20 years.
Also to read : YouTube will disable links in Shorts to fight spam
The popularity of Shorts becomes a problem for YouTube
Thus, we learn in particular that YouTube’s advertising revenues, despite a recent and slight jump, are steadily declining year on year for three consecutive quarters. It should be noted that YouTube has not yet found un effective way to get more ad revenue from Shorts. Of course, it is difficult to place several 10, 20 or 30 second ads on content that is 30 seconds or one minute maximum.
In May 2022, the Mountain View firm has started running ads in the Shorts feed, while specifying however that there would be no (for the moment) direct revenue sharing. “Instead, we will continue to reward thousands of creators and artists each month through the YouTube Shorts Fund as we develop a long-term model for creator monetization in Shorts.” said a spokesperson for the platform at the time.
For YouTube, the problem is thorny. On the one hand, the popularity of Shorts is exploding, which therefore induces a great financial windfall for the platform if it manages to monetize them properly. On the other hand, theContent creators are increasingly abandoning the long formatwhich is the main source of income for YouTube.
Source: Financial Times