Anyone who wants to watch short videos on YouTube may soon have to do some filtering themselves. The site shows the videos in one feed.
Whenever YouTube tests new features, it does so first with a small number of users. This time, they report a very remarkable change: the videos app shows entirely YouTube videos among the Shorts.
Almost every video or photo platform now also offers short films. TikTok became big because of it, and on Instagram and Facebook the films are called ‘Reels’. On YouTube they chose the name ‘Shorts’, as a reference to the length of the videos. In almost all apps you watch the videos in the same way: they all fill your screen, and to watch the next film you only have to scroll down.
In this way, the platforms serve a lot of short videos in a short time. At the moment, they do this mainly because users stay active on the platform longer. The more videos someone watches, the more advertisements can of course be placed in between, and those advertisements generate a lot of revenue for the platforms.
YouTube will now also show videos of full length in the Shorts overview. The site hopes that this will introduce users to more content, and especially that they watch longer videos more often. Whether the change will subsequently come to all users will depend largely on how successful the tests are. If the first users spend more time on YouTube thanks to the long videos? Then the function will almost certainly come to other users.
Whether that will happen is questionable. Many users prefer to watch short videos. Moreover, Shorts are always recorded vertically, but that is not the case for normal YouTube videos. There is a big chance that users will be put off by that content mix: not only because it looks a bit silly, but also because users are used to the Shorts feed.
