What are YouTube Shorts?

2021 is the year of short-form video, or at least that’s what it seems like! With Tik Tok sitting on 1 billion users, Instagram Reels rising in popularity, Facebook launching Reels in the USA — it’s a competitive space. This is where YouTube comes in.

In 2020 they started testing ‘Shorts’, a Tik Tok style format that lives within a separate section of the YouTube website and app. In July this year they expanded the roll out to more than 100 countries including Australia. While it’s still in the Beta phase, it’s an inclusive part of the platform as any user can give it a go, unlike Stories which are only available to users with over 10,000 subscribers.

Here’s the lowdown on its functionality:

• This part of the platform allows users to string together multiple video clips, not dissimilar to Tik Tok.

• You can record music, use the YouTube music library and sample audio from other Shorts/YouTube videos to remix into your own video.

• You can add text to specific points in the video and utilise the automatic captioning feature.

• There are some basic filters and colour correction features available.

• You can add related tags to your short, like you would with a regular YouTube video, to make it more ‘searchable’.

• You can schedule your Short to publish at a nominated time and date of your choice.

While you can view Shorts currently from the YouTube home page, there are plans for a Shorts app to be released that will be a dedicated space for the content to live. Having used the function myself over the last few months, it seems that a lot of users are reposting Tik Tok content in the space. This is a trend we saw occur when Instagram launched Reels, so it will be interesting to see whether this behavior dies off over time making way for creators to solely use the Shorts functionality.