A friend of mine, Tootsie Rollingstone-Travels, recently mentioned hearing about YouTube #Shorts being released in beta app form over in India and it got me curious to find out whatever I could. Although it's only released to YouTubers in India right now via the app on their smartphones, everyone else can try it out another way. See my video on that here.
This new YouTube feature sounds and looks a lot like Instagram's Reels, the "is it banned?" TikTok, and the old Vine which is supposed to come back as Byte. All of these platforms offer a short video sharing style that is currently trendy with YouTubers and youth, but they can also become a valuable marketing tool for businesses and entrepreneurs of all ages.
This is an excerpt directly from YouTube's blog post about the new feature's release.
What is Shorts?
Shorts is a new way to express yourself in 15 seconds or less, and our team is focused on building its foundation across three main areas:
Create: Creation is at the core of short-form video, and we want to make it easy and fun to create Shorts. We’re starting to test just a few new tools for creators and artists with our early beta in India:
A multi-segment camera to string multiple video clips together,
The option to record with music from a large library of songs that will continue to grow,
Speed controls that give you the flexibility to be creative in your performance,
And a timer and countdown to easily record, hands-free.
Although YouTube has spent the last several years trying to get content creators to post longer videos of 10 minutes or more for the sake of popping more ads on monetized videos, apparently the lure of competing with TikTok has made an impression. I look for this to be a fun addition like Reels is at Instagram which may be a nice way to snag attention to the main advertiser-friendly and longer videos. I don't believe the YouTube platform will get totally abbreviated, but then again...attention spans are short. lol.
Check out my first vertical #shorts test shown here & let me know what you think of it. Also, if you're already testing this new YouTube feature at your own channel and want to share your experience, please leave a comment here on this post or at my YouTube channel video. I'd love to know how it's working for you and if it has helped your channel with more views as suggested by VidIQ's video.
I hope this sort of information is helpful to you. I'm not certain how this shorter style of content creation will help my teaching style, as it's hard to make tutorials brief. I may be able to use this as a promo tool or announcements feature though. Please see my full video demo below.
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