Youtube: will longer videos soon be over?

Youtube: will longer videos soon be over?

san francisco 5.9.2023

Several senior executives at YouTube fear that Shorts, TikTok’s short-video competitor, could cannibalize the platform’s core business.

According to sources who spoke to the Financial Times, recent YouTube strategy meetings have discussed the risk that long videos could be a dying format.

• Shorts has garnered more than two billion users since its launch in 2021, and some YouTube employees worry the space will divert attention away from longer videos.

• Short videos are popular with younger viewers, partly because they are easier to watch on a portable device.

• According to sources, longer videos tend to generate more ad revenue because they contain more product placements and can have a higher click-through rate.

• YouTubers have expressed concerns about posting long videos. “A lot of influencers and content creators don’t have that big, beautiful personality energy that lasts 30 minutes,” Fumi Desalu-Vold, who has nearly 650,000 subscribers on YouTube, told the FT.

Background:

• Last October, YouTube saw its first drop in ad revenue since 2020. The same fate befell it over the next two quarters. But ad revenue grew 4.4% in the second quarter of 2023.

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