YouTube Shorts | a new way of expansion.
As a marketing student who learns about digital marketing, It’s important to keep an eyes on news about digital campaigns and social media platforms. While I was searching about recent news, I looked at websites like Digiday, Social Media Today, and Search Engine Land. A news article at “Social Media Today” really caught my attention, with its title “YouTube Adds New Shorts Shelf in Channel Listings, Continuing its Push on Short-Form Content”.
This news article grabbed my attention firstly because I was familiar with YouTube and wanted to see what happened to its new campaign or strategy. In my leisure time, I sometimes watched YouTube videos and had fun. I enjoyed watching daily vlogs, cooking videos, music videos, and fashion & makeup videos.
Before YouTube introduced its short-form content, it only had channels with relatively long videos. There’re numerous YouTubers on the platform, including areas in music, fashion, news, education, makeup, food, travel and so on. The video quality and content creation on YouTube are pretty good. You can find whatever you like.
YouTube has been working on short-form contents. This time, it adds on “Shorts” as a separate element of the channel page. By this way, it provides “Shorts” more focus and enables viewers to know a YouTuber better and in a more casual, daily format. A person, who randomly watches videos and wants to find some new channels, can simply scroll down the page and check for the Shorts to get a first impression about the YouTuber.
In the news article, it claimed that Short clips had cumulated and enhanced about 5 trillion views already. This newly adding function also helped YouTubers to attract viewers and thus increase their followers. Besides, the Shorts on YouTube placed huge pressure for Tik Tok who mainly focused on short videos. Different from Tik Tok, YouTube added on Shorts as supplement to the channel. Linking the two components, both YouTube platform and its YouTubers can garb more attention and generate more profits.
The article also mentioned the Shorts as a way YouTube shows its “monetization potential to top video stars”.
Moreover, Youtube has updated its mobile version webpage and app towards editing process. Also, the article included that there was an updated analysis of the gender distribution among YouTube users. We can see from the graph that there’re more female viewers on YouTube with relatively longer watching time.
Go back to my discussion about YouTube Shorts.
After I read the news article, I opened YouTube and checked for the channels and bloggers I followed. I saw that some bloggers began using the Shorts segment and posted short clips about their daily lives. I felt it like the Ins story on Instagram. For example, Jihyunkkung is a Korean YouTuber who posts weekly vlogs about her daily cooking menu and routines. Her videos make me feel comfortable and pleasant, and I’ve learned some menu from her. She posted a short video clip about her cutie cat. I love cat too, and I felt a connection with her.
Another example is planD’s Shorts. planD is one of my favorite YouTube bloggers. Her videos of weekly vlogs are creative, interesting and enjoyable. She is also Korean. I like the way Korean bloggers record their lives, including the style and the contents. She posted a short video clip about making colorful gummy bear soap. It’s interesting and indeed catches my attention.
Except the YouTubers that I’ve already followed, the “Shorts” help me to find out some new channels that I may like. For example, when I randomly looked at the videos that were recommended on my home page, I scrolled down to the Shorts and watched them. I was attracted by the beautiful, delicious ice cream. It was in Choirang’s channel. Then, I took a look at her videos and followed her because of interests.
Overall, I felt that YouTube Shorts enable YouTubers to show their creativity and attract more viewers and subscribers. For us, it opens a new way to think of YouTube. We can watch both short video clips and long videos. It also saves time to find out surprising bloggers or channels. For YouTube platform, this endeavor of adding short-form video is beneficial to increase views and bring about profits.
