Google is making some headway against TikTok and Instagram in the short video war that all social media companies are fighting to win. During its most recent earnings call, the search engine giant stated that the number of daily views for YouTube Shorts exceeded 50 billion. The company previously included 30 billion daily views in its earnings for the first quarter of 2022.
While Shorts’ growth rate is impressive, it lags behind Instagram and Facebook in terms of views. According to Meta, in October of last year, Reels received 140 billion daily views on both social networks.
YouTube,has been encouraging users to watch Short videos. In 2021, TikTok attempted in a similar fashion to make its app available on a number of big-screen platforms, including Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, and select LG and Samsung smart TVs.
According to YouTube, 1.5 billion registered users watch Shorts each month. TikTok claimed to have reached one billion monthly active users in 2021. Instagram, on the other hand, is used by more than 2 billion people. Although it is difficult to escape short videos when logged into Instagram, the company has not disclosed the number of those who watch reels.
Google’s growth in short video views is encouraging, but Google must also monetize those views. YouTube made $7.96 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2022, a 8% decrease from the previous year’s $8.63 billion. The company stated that YouTube Music and Premium had more than 80 million global subscribers in November 2022. However, it did not specify the amount of revenue that YouTube receives from subscriptions.
YouTube launched a new program to share ad revenue with Shorts creators on February 1. As a result, more creators may be motivated to produce original content for the platform. Shorts joined the video platform’s testing of shopping and affiliate marketing features in November of last year.
Philipp Schindler, CEO of Google, stated on the earnings call that the company is “pleased with our continuing progress in early monetization.
The statements made by executives at Google are similar to those made by Meta’s top brass, who identified Instagram Reels and the algorithmic recommendation engine as the company’s top priorities for the upcoming months.