The strategy put in place by YouTube with its Shorts to compete with TikTok seems to be paying off. The streaming video platform now has more monthly active users than TikTok.
Less than two years after launching its short-form video format, YouTube is poised to beat TikTok on its home turf. In any case, this is what Alphabet, Google’s parent company, indicates after revealing the number of monthly users watching its YouTube Shorts: in total, of the 2 billion monthly users logging into an account on the platform, some 1.5 billion users watched at least one short video in April. According to Google, 30 billion Shorts videos are watched every day.
Inaugurated in 2020 to try to compete with the insolent success of TikTok, the Shorts short videos were first tested in India before being deployed in a hundred countries in 2021.
But faced with the Chinese giant ByteDance, by far the leader in the field of short videos, Google had to step up its efforts. To catch up with TikTok, which a few months ago occupied the place of the most consulted Internet domains, YouTube has rolled out a multitude of new features, most of the time directly inspired by what already exists on TikTok.
The winning strategy of Shorts
To attract content creators to its platform, YouTube has spared no expense. The American giant had, for example, planned a fund of 100 million dollars to remunerate the creators who would come and publish Shorts videos on its service. Some content creators reportedly earn up to $10,000 a month for posting short videos on the service.
But this compensation model cannot last over time. YouTube has explored several avenues to help creators earn money, such as allowing them to create sponsored content or even sell goods directly from their videos. Hoping to find a lasting solution to monetize this short content, the platform began to deploy advertisements on its Shorts a few weeks ago. It now remains to convince the advertisers.
The impressive rise of YouTube on a TikTok which seemed unbeatable until now could be explained by the recent strategy put in place by Google. Indeed, last April, the platform tested the display of Shorts videos by default when opening the YouTube mobile application, which could explain these 1.5 billion monthly users.
Source :
The Verge