Short video starts in India, which is exactly right
YouTube opened a beta of Shorts in India, where TikTok has been banned since June. Launch where the gap is, with the world's biggest music catalog behind you.
On Monday YouTube started an early beta of Shorts in India: vertical videos up to 15 seconds, a multi-segment camera, speed controls, a timer, and music you can add from a large library. Shorts get their own row on the YouTube home page, and a vertical player you swipe through.
Last month I guessed India would be the obvious place to start, and I want to explain why I think it’s the right call rather than just a convenient one.
TikTok was India’s biggest short video platform, with something like 200 million users, until the government banned it along with dozens of other Chinese apps at the end of June. Overnight, a lot of creators lost their audience and a lot of viewers lost their habit. Local apps like Moj, Josh and MX TakaTak have been growing very fast to fill the gap. But none of them has anything near YouTube’s reach in India, where YouTube is already one of the most-used apps on almost every Android phone.
Launching a new format is usually hard because of the chicken-and-egg problem: viewers don’t come without content, and creators don’t come without viewers. In India right now, both sides are looking for a new home at the same moment. That’s about as good a window as a product launch ever gets.
YouTube also has two advantages the new local apps don’t. First, music. Short video is mostly built on sounds, and YouTube has deals with essentially every label and a catalog that includes most of the songs people want to lip-sync and dance to. Licensing music is slow and expensive, and it’s where a lot of short video apps get stuck. Second, a path for creators. A creator whose Shorts get attention can pull viewers to their long videos, where YouTube already has an established way to pay them. TikTok’s weakness has been that creators have a hard time making money on the platform itself.
The question, as with Reels, is the recommender. YouTube’s recommendation system is very good at long videos, where it has decades of experience. Short video preferences are different: faster, more about sound and hook than topic, and dominated by the first two seconds. YouTube will have to learn those from its own Shorts data, starting now. India gives it a very large amount of that data very quickly.
I’d expect Shorts to launch in the US and elsewhere within a year, and to become one of YouTube’s biggest bets. The format question is settled. The next few years are about whose feed learns faster and who treats creators better.