Each month, over 1.5 billion users watch YouTube Shorts, according to Alphabet Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Google, showing that the short-video platform has grown to a similar scale to competing app TikTok after just two years.
The data sheds light on the fiercely heated quest for dominance in the short-video genre, which has become crucial to how many users consume social media.
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YouTube is a cornerstone of Google’s operations, producing close to $28 billion in ad revenue in 2021. However, TikTok, controlled by Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd., and competitor services like Meta Platform’s Instagram Reel have recently threatened the site’s dominance.
Advertisers looking to attract young folks have found those competing services particularly appealing. In Q1, ad income on YouTube increased by 14% relative to the comparable period the year before, missing Wall Street’s estimates and indicating a dip from Q4 2021.
Google didn’t separately report YouTube revenue until 2020, and shareholders have sometimes urged the corporation for additional information on its success.
YouTube Shorts was initially launched in India in late 2020 before making a debut in the United States the following year. Officials from YouTube marketed the product to producers as a component of the multiformat strategy that included longer films, which are the service’s main part, as well as fresh outlets like live streaming. Shorts can last around 60 seconds.
YouTube’s VP for the Americas, Tara Walpert Levy, said:
Our creators want fame or fortune or creative expression, or ideally all three. This is the best way to deliver against that.
Whereas apples-to-apples statistics aren’t publicly available, YouTube’s recently released viewership numbers suggest that Shorts has a comparable viewership to TikTok and Douyin.
In September, TikTok announced that the application had surpassed 1 billion active monthly users. According to third-party projections, the number was around 1.6 billion by March 31. Douyin had over 600 million active daily users in 2020, according to ByteDance.
The parent company of Instagram and Facebook, Meta, hasn’t revealed how many people use Reels per month.
According to the company, YouTube’s audience figures are based on logged-in viewers who viewed at least one clip on the Shorts site in April. However, it refused to provide user data from the past.
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