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YouTube shorts. It’s like TikTok.
Ron Amadeo
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You can swipe vertically to switch from video or view YouTube comments with swear words.
Ron Amadeo
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Here is a Shorts channel page. All the proposed content for my test account appears to have been stolen from TikTok or Instagram.
Ron Amadeo
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Shorts can appear in the Shorts interface (left) or the regular YouTube interface (right). Shorts are indistinguishable from normal YouTube videos when you watch a channel.
Ron Amadeo
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The YouTube Shorts Editor. It’s like TikTok minus all the effects.
Google
YouTube’s TikTok clone, ‘YouTube Shorts’, is rolling out to the US as we speak. The feature, launched in India in September, was first spotted on US devices by XDA Developers. Like TikTok, Shorts allow users to create and share bite-sized videos of one minute, and users can move between them in the mobile app.
The YouTube Shortcuts section appears on the Mobile Applications section of the YouTube Home screen and currently has a “beta” label. It works exactly like TikTok, with a full-screen vertical video interface and allows users to swing vertically between videos. As you would expect, you can like it, dislike, comment and share it. You can also tap on a username from the Shorts interface to see all of the user’s shorts. The YouTube twist is that shorts are also regular YouTube videos and appear on traditional channel pages and in subscription streams, where they are indistinguishable from normal videos. They have the normal YouTube interface instead of the versatile TikTok interface. This seems to be the only way to view these videos on a desktop.
A big part of TikTok is the video editor, which allows users to create videos with lots of effects, music, filters, and variable speeds that contribute to the distinctive TikTok video style. The YouTube Shorts editor looks almost comparable and offers only speed options and a bit of music.
According to App Annie, TikTok will have only ~ 40 million users in the US, but worldwide it will reach 1 billion users by 2021. Most users come from TikTok, China, where there are 400 million users daily.
YouTube is the world’s largest video platform, and the site’s plan to sway emerging competitors with a new video format is almost always to clone them. Most famously YouTube did this in 2015 when it launched YouTube Gaming, a live gaming platform in the style of Amazon’s Twitch.tv. The standalone YouTube Gaming interface was turned off after four years, but the live dream and chat features have gripped different communities, and there is still a small live gaming community on YouTube. In 2017, YouTube unleashed its copier on Snapchat and created YouTube Stories (originally known as ‘YouTube Reels’), allowing channels to create video updates that disappear after seven days. Now it’s aimed at TikTok with these one minute videos. Facebook is also behind TikTok with Instagram Reels.
YouTube Shorts was first launched in India in September – a smart move, as TikTok has been banned in India since June. With no competition from the current one in India, YouTube Shorts has started in the country, and YouTube recently announced that Shorts get ‘over 3.5 billion daily views’. TikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, which has banned it (and 100+ Chinese services) in India. TikTok was also attacked by the Trump administration, and for a while we expected it to be bought by Oracle. After losing the election, the Trump administration lost interest in TikTok, and it now looks like the company will be able to operate in the US.
List image by Getty Images / NurPhoto