There’s a few truisms about teenagers and technology that every company needs to remember.
Kids can often be very fickle, and if they sense that something isn’t cool anymore, or that it’s mainly a thing for grown-ups (gross) they’ll drop it like yesterday’s Netflix (NFLX) subscription.
It’s also the case that teenagers watch a lot of content on their phones, which might not be great for their attention spans and all, but it is what it is.
While teenagers do watch whole films on their phones (which absolutely just thrills directors that take time to make certain their images pop on the big screen), TikTok won a vast young audience by offering up a seemingly endless supply of bite sized videos that can be consumed in the amount of time it takes to roll your eyes at your parents.
YouTube, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet (GOOG), is very aware of the threat that TikTok poses. But so far, it seems the company’s counterattack is working.
How Is YouTube Competing With TikTok?
YouTube has created an entire industry of influencers and videocasters. Whether your interest is in politics (of literally any persuasion), film, cartoons, food, beauty or whathaveyou, there are dozens if not hundreds of creators who are making explainer videos, reaction clips, video essays, and talk shows.
Many creators became miniature celebrities, and when the actress Brie Larson began her own YouTube channel in 2020, she at least seemed thrilled to make the acquaintance of high-profile content creators like the cook Joshua Weissman. (Then again, she is an award-winning actress.)
The main problem for YouTube is that this vast ecosystem can be tough to navigate as a newcomer; trying to figure out what a vlogger’s whole deal is when they’ve amassed hundreds of videos can feel a lot like trying to catch up on a TV show that’s had eight years worth of storylines.
It’s also the case that some YouTube videos can just be oppressively long, as there’s no one forcing people to edit themselves. It’s very common to find a YouTube breakdown of an episode of television that is several times the length of the given episode.
So TikTok found a niche by offering users who just want to be distracted and diverted for a few minutes something that is much easier to wade into.
But YouTube wasn’t going to allow the vast young audience its carefully built go without a fight. After beta testing in India in 2020, Alphabet rolled out YouTube Shorts in March of last year.
The feature emulated TikTok by offering clips between 15 to 60 seconds, and creators could use music and captions, as well as respond to commentators. The service was designed to be watched on smartphones, and viewers can scroll down and keep watching videos until the inevitable heat death of the universe, if they so choose.
In order to make sure it had enough content to keep people hooked, it created the YouTube Shorts fund. Similar to TikTok's $1 billion creator fund, YouTube's $100 million fund offers incentives and rewards creators for their video. In other words, YouTube isn’t afraid to spend big to keep up with TikTok.
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So How Is YouTube Shorts Working Out?
According to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, its latest effort to fight back is so far paying off. He recently shared that YouTube Shorts averaged more than 30 billion daily views in April, and 1.5 billion users view Shorts content every month, surpassing the 1 billion monthly active users TikTok said it had last September.
As noted by the Hollywood Reporter: “YouTube figures account for logged-in users who have viewed at least one Shorts video on the platform in the span of a month.” But these counts do not factor in which users were specially watching Shorts videos and people who just happened upon them while watching something else.
The company also said that YouTubers who upload both short and long form content see better subscriber growth than those who only do one format, but the company didn’t disclose specific figures.
So it’s possible that the math here might be a bit…skeptical, as many people are no doubt just getting served shorts via the algorithm. But Google is hoping that nervous shareholders will be glad that the kids aren’t abandoning YouTube just yet.
