Following months of testing in India, Google is now rolling out its TikTok competitor — YouTube Shorts — in the United States. TikTok has exploded in popularity as the go-to destination for short-form video, and with YouTube Shorts, Google is hoping to take away some of TikTok's dominance. Doing that, however, is much easier said than done.
Google has been trialing YouTube Shorts in India since September 2020, with the country being the perfect testing grounds in light of TikTok's ban from India last June. Other markets have also slowly started to gain access to YouTube Shorts, but India has been the driving force behind the service so far. In February 2021, Google announced YouTube Shorts were already seeing 3.5 billion views every single day globally. Now, Google is ready to bring YouTube Shorts to the United States.
YouTube Shorts are now live in the U.S. as part of a beta, with the videos appearing on the Home tab in the YouTube app on Android and iOS. Users may need to scroll down a bit to find them in between recommended videos and ads, but YouTube Shorts should start showing up for users as of today. Look for the "Shorts Beta" tab with the videos presented as vertical thumbnails that can be scrolled through.
What Features Do YouTube Shorts Offer?
Tapping on a YouTube Shorts video plays it full-screen on a phone. Users can swipe up and down to cycle through new videos, with buttons at the bottom of the screen allowing them to like, dislike, view comments, and share a video. And, because this is YouTube, there's also a shortcut to subscribe to a channel so users don't miss new videos it uploads. It's all pretty basic stuff right now, but the expectation is that YouTube Shorts will get new features as time goes on to be more in-line with its competitors.
As for whether or not YouTube Shorts take off in the U.S., that remains to be seen. YouTube Shorts' success in India is extremely impressive, but as noted above, that's in a country where TikTok doesn't exist. Statista predicts TikTok will have 55.8 million users in the U.S. in 2022, and while that's a lot less than YouTube's 126 million monthly viewers, the rise or fall of YouTube Shorts ultimately depends on how well YouTube can market and grow the platform. People have already seen Instagram and Snapchat struggle to dethrone TikTok, but maybe YouTube Shorts is the competitor the market's been waiting for.
Source: XDA Developers, Statista