YouTube aims to leverage the popularity of Shorts by introducing longer videos within the Shorts feed.
While this approach seems to challenge the essence of Shorts, with 70 billion daily views, it makes sense that YouTube would explore this strategy to maximize viewership across different content types—if it works.
As YouTube explains:
“To help viewers discover content more effectively across channels, formats, and lengths, we’re running a few small experiments on the Watch Page and with Shorts. If you’re part of this experiment, you might see a mix of video formats, including long-form videos, in places where you typically find Shorts (e.g., the Shorts Feed) or in new long-form video feeds.”
It appears that YouTube is attempting to leverage the success of Shorts to enhance the promotion of longer videos, although it’s unclear how horizontally formatted long-form videos will be integrated into the vertically oriented Shorts feed.
Presumably, YouTube has considered and accounted for this, but it could be an awkward experience if non-Shorts videos are displayed in this stream.
As noted, Shorts has been a major success for YouTube, significantly boosting engagement as viewers get accustomed to quick, bite-sized clips. With this in mind, it’s logical for YouTube to align its recommendations with this format to increase overall viewership. It will be interesting to see how this rollout happens and how users respond.
YouTube also mentioned that creators might see their long-form videos viewed in the Shorts Feed counted as Shorts in YouTube Analytics.
This could be confusing, and the whole concept seems a bit unusual from both a user and creator perspective.
However, YouTube seems to have a plan, and it might help in promoting longer videos.
This experiment might eventually lead to more YouTube content being viewed in a full-screen, vertically aligned format. It’ll be interesting to see how these display experiments play out in practice.
