One year ago, YouTube introduced Shorts in the Middle East & North Africa to further our mission to give everyone a voice and help creators grow their audiences and be inspired by new video formats. Since its inception, YouTube Shorts has grown a community of more than 1.5 billion monthly logged-in users globally.
At the heart of YouTube’s journey are the voices of our creators and artists. When we introduced Shorts, we knew that we were bringing an important new format to the YouTube repertoire. 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 innovating and refining the product features our community knows and loves to incorporate this new video format into the broader YouTube experience. Here are some recently launched highlights:
- Video remixing: Utilizing content from the world’s largest video library, creators on YouTube can put their own spin on the content they love from YouTube using our latest video remixing features, Cut and Green Screen to Shorts on iOS (coming to Android soon).
- Cut: The ability to use a 1-5 second video segment from any eligible VOD or Short in the creation of new Shorts content.
- Green Screen: The ability to use up to a 60 second video segment from any eligible VOD or Short as the background for their original Short video.
- Multiformat analytics: Evolving the in-depth analytics, we recently rolled out a new design for YouTube Analytics which allows creators and artists to see insights and performance data for specific content across our different video formats: VOD (video on demand), Live and Shorts. This allows them to individualize and optimize their content strategies more effectively to make the most of the platform for both reach and revenue opportunities.
As YouTube introduces new products, we’ve seen the birth of a new trend unique to the platform: “the rise of the multiformat creator and artist.” Moving seamlessly between different video formats on YouTube — from Shorts, Longform, Live and Audio — these multiformat creators and artists create an infinite flow of content combinations to maximize their creativity, reach, community connection and revenue. This interplay between video formats mirrors the reality of today’s viewer, who expect content to suit their active lives, varied interests and wide ranging attention spans.
This approach is yielding real results for both our creators and artists. New insights include:
- In April 2022, Shorts containing content sampled from long-form videos generated over 100B views.
- With the launch of Shorts, artist and creator channels uploading both Shorts and long-form are seeing better overall watch time and subscriber growth relative to those only uploading long-form.
Neal Mohan, YouTube’s Chief Product Officer, said: “Shorts have become an essential part of the YouTube experience for our creators and viewers. 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.”
Tarek Amin, Head of YouTube in MENA said: “It’s been exciting seeing the different ways YouTube has helped MENA creators to share their stories with the world and Shorts is one of the many ways we hope to continue empowering them. Our team is constantly looking at ways to support the creator ecosystem in the region”.
These multiformat creators and artists are using YouTube to lead the next wave of the creator economy. Here are four examples from MENA:
Azza Zarour (UAE) Azza is a passionate YouTuber, who used Shorts to continue sharing her stories with her community after having a baby. Despite having less long-form videos, Shorts allowed Azza to grow her subscribers by 43%.
Quote from Azza: “YouTube Shorts really gave me a new avenue of content and helped me grow my channel.”
Fatoom Dabaneh (Jordan) K-pop is growing in popularity across the region and K-Pop fanatic Fatima or as her audience call her Fatoom, was able to find her niche by recreating her favorite elements of K-pop culture and sharing it with her community. Fatoom was even featured in BTS & YouTube’s permission to dance challenge
Quote from Fatima: “YouTube Shorts helped me grow my channel faster and reach my favorite band BTS by spreading the videos widely in the world, thank you YouTube Shorts for this wonderful opportunity to realize one of my dreams to succeed in this field.
We’ve been hard at work innovating and refining the product features our community knows and loves to incorporate this new video format into the broader YouTube experience. Here are some recently launched highlights: