TikTok seems to have taken over the general public’s interest, but that hasn’t stopped YouTube from investing heavily in its own version of the short-form video platform, YouTube Shorts. Its investment is paying off, to the tune of 30 billion views a day. This massive increase in views has now prompted the platform to start introducing ads into the YouTube Shorts experience.
The announcement came at yesterday’s Alphabet earnings call for the first quarter of 2022. It was phrased as ‘testing’; YouTube’s Phillip Schindler has made it clear that ads are a sure thing where YouTube Shorts is concerned. ‘While it’s still early days, we’re encouraged by initial advertiser feedback and results.’
YouTube is currently focused on ads that promote app installs and various promotions. Typically, YouTube plays one to two ads before every video you watch, another at the end of the video, and usually a few ads in between segments in the video, depending on how long the video is. While this works fairly well for a long video where the ad takes up very little time in the grander scheme of the length of the video, how will the new Shorts ads be received by the public?
Is it really a good idea to cram ads into every single facet of your business strategy? How will the inclusion of ads in Shorts change the way people interact with YouTube? Unfortunately, all of this still remains to be seen. Objectively, it’s difficult to imagine how successful an ad campaign during each Shorts video will be, given that the videos are only a few seconds long.
We’ll have to wait and see how this decision affects the platform and whether its daily views will continue to rise. In the meantime, why not check out our guide to monetizing your YouTube channel?
