YouTube Shorts Gets Update, and It Might Benefit Everyone
By Movieguide® Contributor
YouTube recently announced a new update to the YouTube Shorts page that could actually benefit users and creators.
According to Vloggerbeat, “Shorts, which are marketed as an easy way to upload vertical videos with your smartphone, have become extremely popular since their initial launch. Knowing this, YouTube is considering testing inserting longer videos into the Shorts feed to get more eyes on them (and, ideally, more advertising dollars).”
“YouTube Shorts are viewed in a very similar way as Instagram/Facebook Reels or TikTok videos, just on a separate tab on the YouTube app,” the outlet continued. “Once you’re in the Shorts stream (similar to your TikTok feed), all you have to do is swipe up to scroll on to the next video (or down to go back to the previous one).”
YouTube explained that “to try to help viewers better discover content across channels, formats, and lengths on YouTube, we’re running a few small experiments on the Watch Page and with Shorts. If you’re a viewer in the experiment, these new discovery experiences could include a mix of video formats including long-form videos where you’d usually see Shorts (example: the Shorts Feed) or new feeds of long-form videos.”
“Creators: your videos will continue to be eligible to be recommended to viewers across YouTube, this is just an extra place for audiences to discover your content,” YouTube continued. “In some experiments, your content could be watched in the Shorts Feed and associated metrics attributed to the Shorts Feed in YouTube Analytics. We’ll be looking closely at creator and viewer feedback to hear what you think of the experiment.”
This could be a powerful change because with “Shorts generating 70 billion views daily, it also makes some sense that YouTube would be looking to use this as a means to maximize viewership across all content types, if it can,” Social Media Today reported.
Movieguide® previously reported on another new YouTube feature:
YouTube has begun testing a sleep timer feature that would pause users’ videos after a set amount of time has elapsed.
The sleep timer, which is currently being tested, would allow users to select how long they want their video to play — from 10 minutes to 60 minutes or until the video ends — before pausing playback. This would allow users who like to fall asleep to videos from keeping their devices on all night.
Once a sleep timer is set, it remains in effect, pausing the video after the selected amount of time elapsed unless the user interacts with the video.
Though only currently available to YouTube Premium subscribers, who always get to test out new features before they are widely available, a full implementation of the sleep timer will likely be available to non-paying users at some point. Premium subscribers looking to test the feature will be able to do so until Sept. 2 when it will no longer be available.
