In April 2022, YouTube Shorts, a content form on YouTube that contains short form content sampled from long-form videos, generated over 100 billion views.
The company revealed the information during a press conference that simultaneously marked the company's one-year anniversary in Nigeria.
According to the firm, Shorts is watched by approximately 1.5 billion logged-in visitors each month.
According to the firm, artist and creator channels that uploaded both short and long-form content had higher total watch time and subscriber growth than those who exclusively uploaded long-form content.
Its stated aim was to give everyone a voice, to assist producers in growing their audiences, and to be inspired by new video formats.
"Shorts have become a crucial element of the YouTube experience for our creators and users," said YouTube's Chief Product Officer, Neal Mohan.
“Now being watched by over 1.5B logged in users every month, the product is growing thanks to the creativity of our community. While we’re still at the beginning of our journey with Shorts, we look forward to continuing to innovate the product so our creators can continue to express themselves, connect with their audiences, and increase their reach and revenue opportunities on the platform.”
“For artists, the path to success has never been more demanding, so we’re designing products like Shorts to make YouTube THE place for them to connect with their fans and grow long-term, sustainable music careers.
“We’ve been hard at work innovation and refining the product features our community knows and loves to incorporate this new video format into the broader YouTube experience.”
YouTube’s Global Head of Music, Lyor Cohen, added, “Everybody knows that our mission at YouTube is to become the leading revenue generator for the music industry.
“Money is great, but it’s not enough. Building artist fandom is equally important. We want YouTube to be the place for artists to connect and create meaningful relationships with their fans and grow long-term, sustainable music careers; Shorts, combined with long-form video, is proving to be a critical way to do that.
“It’s our job to make sure that once fans find their life’s soundtrack on Shorts, they are met with prompts that encourage them to dive deeper into an artist’s repertoire. YouTube is the only platform that can bring that experience to reality and we are all in on making it happen.”
The company said its decision to continue with the Shorts feature was as an answer to the need of creators and artists.
