youtube merging short and long videos

Watch: YouTube Is Trying An All-New Method To Improve Video Viewing In The Platform In testing the ability to intermix longer clips and reach an even wider audience, popular outlets such as Shorts feed (a collection of fast cuts) would allow users to lengthen their pieces. Shorts currently fetches an incredible 70 billion views daily, and YouTube wants to capitalise on that mileage by introducing more video types in different formats.

YouTube said if its statement about the experiment, “To help viewers more easily find new content from across channels, formats and lengths on YouTube we are running a few experiments on the Watch Page as well with Shorts. If part of the test, you will see a combination of videos types on pages where typically just shorter ones appeared in only.

This marks a departure in YouTube strategy: to leverage the massive audience for Shorts as an on-ramp to longer form content. That does, however, beg the question — doing so would make for a round peg in the square hole that is Shorts’ vertical feed structure.

In the case of YouTube Shorts, they have been a juggernaut for engagement—an antidote to long and often slow-moving content—attracted many users who love fast-food format. Since the primary reason you would want to recommend more video types is because it can help keep folks engaged in other formats as well, but we have yet to see how people actually respond.

And more broadly, potential harm for creators. YouTube also said that long-form videos appearing in the Shorts Feed, would be detected by YouTube Analytics as a Short (a move which may potentially make it hard for creators to track performance of their shorts) That ambitious long-term vision of creating a 100 percent vertically-aligned viewing experience — essentially none of what we’re testing today, but it does set the table for future updates.

It will be worth keeping an eye on whether moving in this direction prompts more engagement with long-form videos, or if users continue to consume content from the Shorts feed due to its short format.