In mid-June, YouTube announced that more than 1.5 billion people watch its Shorts video service each month. That means TikTok’s dominance in the short video field is changing.
YouTube Shorts (YouTube’s short video community) was launched in March last year and aims to create videos of 60 seconds or less. In more than a year, YouTube Shorts has reached 1.5 billion monthly users with YouTube’s own traffic. TikTok has not yet released monthly active user numbers for this year. Last September, TikTok announced that it had surpassed the 100 million monthly active users milestone. Analysts expect TikTok’s monthly active users to exceed 150 million in the first half of this year. In terms of scale, YouTube Shorts has caught up with and even surpassed TikTok in terms of monthly activity.
TikTok has the first short video creators, and those KOLs are starting to show up on YouTube as well. Since last year, YouTube has launched a $100 million fund to reward creators to attract more short video “experts” to YouTube. It also gives the short video community more resources on YouTube. YouTube encourages long video creators to achieve “multigenre profitability,” meaning the same video content can be created twice for short and long videos.
After the setback in the Indian market, TikTok’s short video market in India has declined. Other global Internet companies are trying to fill the gap in TikTok’s Indian short video market. In addition to Instagram’s top position in the Indian market, Google has also decided to invest in Mohalla, a local short video platform in India. TikTok is also trying to save itself. Not only to defend its leading position in short videos but above all to ensure the sustainable development of the video platform.
In terms of attracting users, TikTok is still in a favorable phase. In 2021, TikTok far outpaced its competitors in terms of screen time, with 26 hours per month. This year, TikTok adjusted its video length limit from 60 minutes to 10 minutes, expanding content creation from short videos to medium videos. From another perspective, this move by TikTok is also a concession to the status of short videos – there is no consistent winner on the Internet, and it’s more common to be overtaken.
