The short video concept was popularized by Vine and that legacy was maintained by Tiktok. The Chinese owned app has been a hit and Tiktok has seen millions of people download the app and make weird cool videos daily.
We have seen companies like Facebook try to come up with a suitable competitor to Tiktok to no avail and now Google’s own YouTube is trying a shot at it.
According to the Information, YouTube is planning to release a rival to TikTok which they call Shorts. Shorts will have a feed of brief videos that are posted by users that will take advantage of YouTube’s catalog of licensed music which will be made available to creators for use in the videos.
If you look at reports made by different agencies, you will understand why YouTube or any other huge social network wants to take a piece of TikTok’s pie. TikTok has grown 1.25 times in the last two years and has approximately 842 million first time downloads on Apple and the PlayStore. TikTok allows their videos to be shared everywhere and it is not hard to spot a TikTok video on your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram feed.
YouTube has been trying to be as cool as the younger video sharing sites. The 15-year-old site added Stories to be as cool as Snapchat. YouTube has over 2 billion users and if they do it right, they can have a huge advantage and be a serious competition to Tiktok. We will have to wait and see whether they will do that.
