The short-form is what viewers seem to be getting addicted to. The big boys in the space – Google’s YouTube and Meta’s Reels — are thus going long on the market for apps enabling creation of short – 60 seconds – videos, which entertain but also successfully market a consumer product or convey a social message. Homegrown apps like Chingari, Roposo, Moj, are some of the other players in this segment.
Three years back YouTube launched its short-form video platform – Shorts – in India. It now counts on it to boost its next leg of growth. The number of channels uploaded to Shorts daily grew over 80% in 2022. Today, Shorts is consumed by 2 billion people globally, every month.
“YouTube Shorts is one of our biggest product bets, and we have received positive reception. It’s encouraging to see the adoption and excitement the product brings to both creators and viewers,” Ishan John Chatterjee, YouTube India director told Fe.
“Shorts is giving established genres a fresh look. There’s a revival of interest in culture. The community of Shayari and poetry are growing and so is the case with science and general knowledge,” Chatterjee added. Lately, advertisers are also coming up to Shorts to pitch their products to users.
The short-form apps which thrived on the ban on Chinese app TikTok in India in 2020, is expected to be a $8-$12 billion monetisation opportunity by 2030, according to RedSeer.
“We saw the great potential and engagement short form content has for today’s increasingly mobile viewer. That’s why we introduced YouTube Shorts, first in India, to make it easier to watch and create short-form content on YouTube,” Chatterjee said.
For YouTube, India is an altogether different market in terms of Shorts due to its regional diversity and content creation in a variety of languages. In fact, the pop culture, superhero flicks, comics, etc and content in different languages is helping global trends find deeper resonance than ever before, according to Chatterjee.
“We continue to invest in Shorts, making it more accessible to our viewers. For instance, we launched globally on Connected TV (our fastest growing surface). We also continue to support the next generation of mobile creators with Shorts. This is bringing new creators, and new audiences to YouTube and refreshing opportunities for current creators on the platform,” Chatterjee said.
Asked if Shorts will replace long form content videos, Chatterjee said, “we are investing to give viewers even more variety in the type of content that’s available to them, and creators the broadest range of creative palettes possible from 15 second Shorts to 15 minute video to 15 hour livestreams. Creators should be able to follow their creative instincts and not be held back by format limitations”.
According to a survey by Google, 71% viewers agree that they watch videos about a specific topic in multiple different formats (eg short form, long form, podcasts, live streams).
In a bid to make earnings easy for creators who make Short videos, the platform has simplified its YouTube Partner Programme (YPP). This means that if a creator has 1,000 subscribers, and his or her short video gets either 10 million views over the past 90 days or is viewed up to 4,000 hours over past 12 months, the creator will be eligible for payments from YouTube.
YouTube has paid more than $50 billion to creators, artists, and media companies in the three years prior to June 2022. In India, YouTube has 467 million users, according to Statista.
