Hello Insiders
I am your friendly neighborhood Creator Liaison
and today I'm talking to Todd Sherman.
Todd, what do you do at YouTube?
I am the Product Lead for YouTube Shorts.
A lot of questions we get from creators around Shorts
first involve the Shorts algorithm.
Is it the same as the long form algorithm?
And when we say things like "don't think algorithm, think audience"
does that also apply to Shorts?
It really does.
I think that that is a durable
mental construct way to think about it.
The audience is the algorithm.
We do do different things in short form because it is a different format.
For example on long form
a lot of the times people are choosing which video
by tapping on it on their phone or clicking on it on the web
and that choice is something that drives a lot of engagement on long form.
On short form you think that people are swiping through a feed
and they're discovering things as they go and so that's one important difference
and that leads us to need to measure in different ways
and at the core of it we're, in long form and in short form,
trying to get videos to people that they value.
We want them to feel satisfied with it
but there's a lot of things that we do in short form
that are different and are focused on the fundamentals of short form
for example how diverse the feed is is a little bit different
when you have hundreds of videos versus maybe 10 or 20 videos.
What counts as a view in Shorts?
If I'm just flipping through the feed is every video I'm flipping through
does that count as a viewed video for me?
It doesn't and across the industry at large
I think different platforms count views differently
so some platforms treat a view as the very first frame
where if you were to just flip through a feed
- you would just be accruing lots of views - Basically Impressions
Yeah they're basically Impressions.
What we try and do with a view is
have it encode for your intent of watching that thing
so that creators feel like that view
has some meaningful threshold that the person decided to watch it.
It doesn't mean it's their favorite video ever
it just meant that they are deliberately watching it.
There's a bunch of different logic behind the scenes
that goes into this like whether or not you explicitly
took an action to watch it is different than if you found it in a feed
and how much time you spend on it
all that goes into whether or not
the view threshold is met.
We don't publish it because every time we look at a new surface
or there's some new interaction we may tweak that.
We don't want people to try and game it
and we have a metric in YouTube analytics now
with view versus swiped away which is not the same as click through rate
but it's a way you can get an idea of how many people are viewing your Shorts.
We've heard from creators that a lot of them
will be comparing that metric across lots of their Shorts
and they'll see which ones are grabbing the audience
versus people maybe just deciding to swipe past them
and whether you're making a 15-second video
or a 60-second video
grabbing people in the first few seconds tends to be important.
Is there an ideal length for a Short to be?
Like if your short is shorter will people watch more of it
and they'll count higher
or if it's longer is holding their attention that long
impressive to us and then it'll get promoted?
The thing to really think about here is
to what length do you need to tell your story?
Opposed to trying to target an exact length
what we're trying to do as a platform is over time,
videos of any length, to make sure that they
get the audience they deserve
Is there any thoughts to making Shorts longer?
Longer shorts is an odd word
like the capri pants maybe?
We have talked about it and where we've ended up
is that YouTube already has a bunch of great longer videos
and I think that this is
sometimes people bring up slippery slopes as if it's a fallacy
I think this is actually a slippery slope because when I've talked to creators
it's like "can I just get 90" and then other people are like
well 2 minutes would be great well I could do 5 minutes over here
and then eventually we're just kind of recreating
all of the greatness that YouTube already has
and so to date I'd say that we are going to remain focused
on 60 and under.
Thumbnail customization, there's sort of two camps on this.
There's one Camp who's like "I want to control every aspect
of the experience that I present to people on YouTube"
and the other Camp is "I am making 30 different variations
of this thumbnail already, it's taken me eight days to get it done
I don't want that to be part of my Shorts pipeline."
How do you think about and balance those?
I've heard it from a lot of creators and I think that it's worth thinking about
that being in the shelf on Shorts is not really
where most of the traffic comes from on Shorts
it's being in the feed and the shelf on Home happens to be an entry point
and thumbnails are seen there but most thumbnails are
never seen because people are in the feed
and they're swiping and consuming and enjoying Shorts
So where we've ended up on this is opposed to
opening up to custom thumbnails allowing you to select the frame
from your video on iOS and Android
aligning with the observation that most thumbnails are not seen
we really don't want creators to over-invest in thumbnails
and that work that effort is probably better invested in making another video.
Do hashtags matter on Shorts?
Because we've seen this inconsistently across other platforms
that you have to do 30, you have to do three,
Do people want to be on the hashtag pages or have the hashtag in their title?
If the question is are they required: no, of course not.
Are they meaningful? I think they they could be
but it's hard to generalize across every vertical for every creator.
Sometimes a hashtag can be associated with a real world thing that's happened
and in that way it's like an event and you want to associate it with it
other times they're focused on topics
and I think in both those cases creators should consider using them.
Does the time of day play any factor?
No, it's not something that we think about optimizing for.
I think that for certain things freshness may be more of a factor
for example if somebody's focused on news then the timeliness of that could matter,
that's a little less about time of day and more about quickly responding.
What about quantity?
We have people who think that they have to post 10 shorts a day
to get any attention.
I think that it's very difficult to be prescriptive here
but there is nothing in our systems that's like
when you hit the five video or 10 Short threshold per day
that you somehow unlock a secret
that's not how it works.
If you generated a bunch of relatively lower quality videos
and then posted those and got meager engagement on them
that energy is probably better spent in just making a better video
and fewer of them.
There's also something to be said about iterating and posting a video
and learning from that what worked or what didn't.
Sometimes shorts will take off
and they'll get a few hundred or a few thousand views
and then just drop completely.
How is that working?
There are parts of the algorithm that try and find people
find creators and audience
and sometimes those algorithms will go and effectively find a seed audience
find a set of people that may enjoy your video
and depending on how that goes
it may get a lot more traffic or it may kind of taper off
and so sometimes videos can, I hear it from creators,
it feels like it gets stuck or something like that
I think that those could be some of the drivers there.
I think also for creators
we're used to Impressions, click-through rates
and that doesn't exist in a feed and so those views feel to me
more like Impressions than traditional views.
If it does increase then it's competitive
it's working really well and it's going to keep going
but if it just didn't garner any interest
it's going to drop off the way Impressions do.
That's right. I think that
especially creators starting out I think a lot of those early views
they're very exploratory as we're trying to
proactively help you find the audience that enjoys your content
If a Short doesn't take off should I delete it
and then just keep reposting it until it does?
No, don't.
I would not advise that.
I've heard people talk about this as a growth hack on Twitter or something
I think that there is a risk there that that gets seen as spam in our systems.
My advice to folks is if that didn't go how you wanted it to go
learn from it and move forward and try again.
Make a better version.
Take everything you learn from that and make a better version of it.
Is Shorts cannibalizing long form?
That's not how we think about it.
We're really trying to be responsive to users' desires.
It's unsurprising that the demand for short form video
amongst viewers has really ballooned and we follow that viewer domain
so if people are interested in watching lots of short form video
and maybe it's a testament to this conversation
they are interested in watching lots of short form video
we follow that demand and try and satisfy
the user's desire for that content.
And to the degree that creators can make lots of great videos
of all different types then that grows, right?
Speaking just for me
there are some things I enjoy watching on Shorts more
that I would love to watch 30 seconds of that,
I wouldn't necessarily want to watch 12 minutes of that.
I think that there is a lot of people like that.
They're really satisfying, I think, in some ways different needs.
There's so many early YouTube videos that by today's standards
are closer to short form video than they are to what we think about as long form video
and long form video now can be like
Marques Brownlee doing 8K video with robots filming it
and that can feel like an intimidating barrier of entry
if you're just like "I'm going to do a cold start into YouTube"
but Shorts can be those moments that you were talking about
and that just opens the gates to
we have this whole generation of creators that have grown up on YouTube
and now we have this new generation that can grow up using Shorts.
Totally, and people get started in different ways
so I think that short form deliberately has a lower barrier
so that people can participate more easily
and they might start out at something that's pretty lightweight
that's a moment or a scene
and it's only minutes creating a video that's 10 or 20 seconds long
other people are going to do that and say "I want to focus on craft here"
and they may move over to one minute videos
they may cut their teeth on the lighter-weight thing
but then decide to move into more of a purposeful craft.
Another question we get quite a lot is parody between the different surfaces.
like right now you can select a frame to use as a thumbnail on mobile
but not on desktop,
if you upload on desktop it's higher resolution than mobile
and it feels like you have to pick and choose.
Usually it's a matter of time.
Usually we we try and align our priorities where everything happens at once
but sometimes that doesn't work out that way
and so we usually work towards parody.
Shorts are often seen like they're
really really good for discovery, for reach
but not very good for community
but we've launched 'reply with a Short' now
which I think starts to bridge that gap into making Community really interesting on Shorts
I think it's going to be a great way
for creators that make very short videos that want to engage with their audience
sometimes they may take that comment as creative direction for the next Short
or if you're a long form creator and you want to use this as a tool
to engage for the style of community that you've cultivated
that's like another new sub, right?
And so I think that it has multiple uses
and you could see how both of those are a little bit different.
We're seeing whole channels now where people just reply to comment
like media commentary channels, political commentary channels,
it seems like every Short is a reply to comment and it just keeps going.
Yeah, exactly.
As you look ahead to the future of Shorts
are you thinking about more interactivity
are you thinking about more feature parody
are you thinking about- I guess AI is the giant elephant
in every room these days.
There's just so many things that I think are interesting in the pipeline
lots of things around interactivity
lots of interesting things that I will give no hint about related to to AI.
AI is something that could help creators of many different types
in many different use cases make progress toward their goals.
It's just so exciting to be building these products.
- Thank you so much for your time Todd. - It's been great, thank you so much.
And thank you so much Insiders for joining us
if you have any questions, any comments just leave them down below
and keep it real.