YouTube Shorts surpasses 15 bn daily views: Sundar Pichai

YouTube Shorts, a TikTok-like short form video app that was launched first in India last year, has surpassed 15 billion daily views, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said.

“The app continues to gain momentum. We’ve been rolling it out everywhere YouTube is available, in more than 100 countries worldwide,” Pichai said during the company’s earnings call late on Tuesday after Alphabet posted a record June quarter.

The YouTube Shorts platform recently added the ability for Shorts creators to sample audio from YouTube videos and says it is exploring ways to offer quick links from Shorts to YouTube videos they’ve taken samples from.

In April, the platform announced that it continues to gain popularity with over 6.5 billion daily views as of March, up from 3.5 billion at the end of 2020.

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

In the June quarter, YouTube’s advertising revenue nearly doubled to $7 billion compared to $3.8 billion from the same quarter last year.

Pichai said that the global shift to online video and streaming continues with over 2 billion monthly active users now and 1 billion-plus hours of video watched every day on YouTube.

“Advertisers have increasingly needed to look beyond linear TV alternatives to achieve their reach and awareness goals. And as I said earlier, Nielsen’s Total Ad Ratings report found, on average, that 70 per cent of YouTube’s reach was delivered to an audience not reached by TV media,” he informed.

As a result, many advertisers are re-evaluating their media mix and increasing their investments in our platforms, Pichai added.