JAKARTA - YouTube is making history again. In a speech at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity last week, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan announced that their short video feature, YouTube Shorts, has now won an average of 200 billion views every day.
This particularly surprising figure marks the tremendous growth of a newly launched feature globally a few years ago, and is directly a serious challenge for TikTok's dominance in the short video market.
This announcement came at a special moment when YouTube celebrated its 20th birthday. In addition to the Shorts audience number, Mohan also explained other major developments that occurred in the YouTube ecosystem.
He mentioned that more and more YouTube content is consumed through television screens. In fact, more than half of the 100 most popular YouTube channels today are actually the most watched on TV screens, not via cellphones or laptops.
This shows a shift in viewing behavior, where viewers are now starting to make YouTube the main alternative to big screen entertainment at home.
Not only that, YouTube also notes that about a billion people are now watching podcasts every month on the platform. With such a large number, YouTube is starting to show that they are not only superior in long video content, but are also increasingly dominant in the short video segment and podcasts of two types of content that have been on the rise in recent years.
To support this incredible growth in Shorts, YouTube will soon launch a new technology based on artificial intelligence (AI) called Veo 3, a video-generative model from Google.
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This technology will be available to Shorts creators this summer, and is believed to allow for larger content production and shorter time. With the presence of Veo 3, YouTube hopes that the number of Shorts views can continue to increase beyond 200 billion per day.
For many people, the success of this Shorts may seem sudden. However, all of this started with YouTube's strategic steps in 2020. At that time, the Indian Government officially banned TikTok due to data privacy and security concerns.
Seeing this opportunity, YouTube immediately released Shorts for the first time in India in September 2020. Because it has the same vertical format and ease of use, Shorts was immediately adopted by former TikTok creators and its users. In no time, Shorts spread around the world and became the main feature in the YouTube app.
Now, five years since its appearance, Shorts has become a formidable competitor to TikTok and Instagram Reels. With the support of the latest AI technology, massive number of active users, as well as full integration into the established YouTube ecosystem, Shorts seems ready to take over the throne as the global short video king. TikTok should also start to be vigilant, as their dominance in the realm of short videos is now completely threatened.
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