TikTok rival short form videos app YouTube Shorts hits 6.5 bn daily views

YouTube Shorts which is a TikTok-like short form video app continues to gain popularity with over 6.5 billion daily views as of March, up from 3.5 billion at the end of 2020, the company has announced.

YouTube had rolled out Shorts app feature in India in September last year.

Shorts is a new short-form video experience right on YouTube for creators and artists who want to shoot short, catchy videos using nothing but their mobile phones.

The company later rolled out the video streaming service on its platform in the US in Beta.

With over 2 billion monthly logged in users and over 1 billion hours of video watched every day, Google-owned YouTube is offering advertisers efficient reach to large audiences which are incremental to those found on TV.

“With respect to YouTube, people continue to find all types of informational content, from educational videos to podcasts,” Alphabet and Google CEI said during the company’s earnings call on Tuesday.

According to the company, it is also seeing strong growth in YouTube’s brand business, fuelled by global consumer trend from linear TV towards streaming video.

“YouTube is offering advertisers efficient reach to large audiences which are incremental to those found on TV. Large brands are benefiting from this trend,” the company informed.

The company said that YouTube advertising revenues of $6 billion in the January-March period of 2021, up 49 per cent, is driven by exceptional performance in direct response and ongoing strength in brand advertising.

YouTube recently added a new metric to its transparency reports, called the Violative View Rate, which will help it estimate what percentage of views on YouTube come from content that violates its policies.

In Q4 of last year, YouTube’s Violative View Rate was between 16 and 18 views out of every 10,000.

“This is down over 70 per cent compared to the same quarter in 2017, in large part, thanks to our investments in machine learning,” Pichai informed.