YouTube Shorts
Shorts is the short-form section of the American video-sharing website YouTube, hosting content much like YouTube’s primary service but with a focus on vertical videos at a maximum length of 60 seconds. Videos with a square aspect ratio are also accepted. As of January 2022, Shorts have collectively earned over 5 trillion views since the platform was made available to the public on July 13, 2021 which include video views that pre-date the YouTube Shorts feature.
History
In 2019, as a response to competition from TikTok, YouTube started experimenting with showing vertical videos up to a length of 30 seconds in their own section on the homepage. This early beta was released only to a small number of people. Shortly after TikTok was banned in India in September 2020, the YouTube Shorts beta was made available in the country. In March 2021, the beta was released in the U.S. Shorts was globally released on July 13, 2021.
In January 2022, a study showed that scammers were garnering millions of views by stealing popular videos from TikTok and posting them on YouTube Shorts. They pinned comments on their reposted videos containing commercial links, which generated money for them on a cost per action or cost per lead basis.
In August 2022, YouTube announced plans to make the Shorts feature available on its smart TV app.
In December 2022, YouTube published its annual blog post documenting the top videos and creators of the year, with Shorts receiving its own section of the post for the first time.