YouTube Shorts celebrates 1 year in Nigeria, launches new features

It is one year since YouTube introduced Shorts into the Nigerian social media space. The mission was to give everyone a voice and help creators grow their audiences and be inspired by new video formats has grown into a community of more than 1.5B monthly logged-in users globally.

In a bid to drive innovation and refine product features, the community has made it one of their responsibility to incorporate the new video format – multiformat creator, into the broader YouTube experience.

As YouTube introduces new products, we’ve seen the birth of a new trend unique to the platform: “the rise of the multiformat creator and artist.” Moving seamlessly between different video formats on YouTube — from Shorts, Longform, Live and Audio — these multiformat creators and artists create an infinite flow of content combinations to maximize their creativity, reach, community connection and revenue.

This interplay between video formats mirrors the reality of today’s viewers, who expect content to suit their active lives, varied interests and wide-ranging attention spans.

Read also: Nigeria telcos gained 2.9m new telephone subscribers in May- NCC report

The idea behind YouTube Shorts

For artists, the path to success has never been more demanding, so designing products like Shorts was a way to make YouTube the place for them to connect with their fans and grow long-term, sustainable music careers.

At the heart of YouTube’s journey are the voices of these creators and artists. The introduction of these shorts marked the beginning of an important and new format to the YouTube repertoire.

Neal Mohan, YouTube’s Chief Product Officer, said:

“Shorts have become an essential part of the YouTube experience for our creators and viewers. Now being watched by over 1.5B logged in users every month, the product is growing thanks to the creativity of our community. While we’re still at the beginning of our journey with Shorts, we look forward to continuing to innovate the product so our creators can continue to express themselves, connect with their audiences, and increase their reach and revenue opportunities on the platform.”

Here are some recently launched highlights:

Video remixing

Utilizing content from the world’s largest video library, creators on YouTube can put their own spin on the content they love from YouTube using our latest video remixing features, Cut and Green Screen to Shorts on iOS (coming to Android soon).

• Cut: The ability to use a 1-5 second video segment from any eligible VOD or Short in the creation of new Shorts content.
• Green Screen: The ability to use up to a 60-second video segment from any eligible VOD or Short as the background for their original Short video.

Multiformat analytics

Also, YouTube Shorts recently rolled out a new design for YouTube Analytics which allows creators and artists to see insights and performance data for specific content across their different video formats: VOD (video on demand), Live and Shorts.

This allows them to individualize and optimize their content strategies more effectively to make the most of the platform for both reach and revenue opportunities.

Lyor Cohen, YouTube’s Global Head of Music, said:

Everybody knows that our mission at YouTube is to become the leading revenue generator for the music industry. Money is great, but it’s not enough. Building artist fandom is equally important. We want YouTube to be THE PLACE for artists to connect and create meaningful relationships with their fans and grow long-term, sustainable music careers;

“Shorts, combined with long-form video, is proving to be a critical way to do that. It’s our job to make sure that once fans find their life’s soundtrack on Shorts, they are met with prompts that encourage them to dive deeper into an artist’s repertoire. YouTube is the only platform that can bring that experience to reality and we are ALL IN on making it happen”, he further added.

Read also: Content creators can now make up to $10,000 on YouTube Shorts. Here is how!

Artists and developers of these short films are leveraging YouTube Shorts to drive the next development in the creator economy. The top 10 trending short videos in Nigeria during the past year are shown below:

With the launch of Shorts, artist and creator channels uploading both Shorts and long-form are seeing better overall watch time and subscriber growth relative to that only uploading long-form.