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YouTube shorts. It’s like TikTok.
Ron Amadeo
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You can swipe vertically to switch videos or view YouTube comments full of profanity.
Ron Amadeo
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Here is a page from the Shorts channel. All of the content suggested for my test account appeared to have been stolen from TikTok or Instagram.
Ron Amadeo
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Shorts can appear in the Shorts interface (on the left) or in the normal YouTube interface (on the right). Shorts are indistinguishable from normal YouTube videos when you’re watching a channel.
Ron Amadeo
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The YouTube Shorts editor. It is like TikTok without all the effects.
Google
The TikTok clone on YouTube, “YouTube Shorts”, is being released in the United States right now. The feature was launched in India in September and was first detected on US devices by XDA developers. Like TikTok, Shorts allows users to create and share short, one-minute videos, and users can slide between them on the mobile app.
The YouTube Shorts section appears in the mobile apps section of the YouTube home screen and, for now, has a “beta” label. It works just like TikTok, starting a full-screen vertical video interface, and users can slide vertically between videos. As you would expect, you can like, dislike, comment and share a short. You can also tap on a user name in the Shorts interface to see all of that user’s shorts. The touch of YouTube is that shorts are Furthermore regular YouTube videos and appear on traditional channel pages and subscription feeds, where they are indistinguishable from regular videos. They have the normal YouTube interface instead of the TikTok sliding interface. This seems to be the only way to view these videos on the desktop.
A big part of TikTok is the video editor, which allows users to make videos with tons of effects, music, filters and varying playback speeds that contribute to TikTok’s unique video style. The YouTube Shorts editor seems almost without features in comparison, offering only speed options and a little bit of music.
TikTok has only about 40 million users in the United States, but worldwide, it is expected to reach 1 billion users in 2021, according to App Annie. The majority of these users are from TikTok’s home country, China, where there are 400 million active users daily.
YouTube is the largest video platform in the world, and the site’s action plan to take down entry-level competitors with a new video format is almost always to clone them. YouTube did it most famously in 2015, when it launched YouTube Gaming, a live gaming platform on Amazon’s Twitch.tv line. The YouTube Gaming standalone interface was closed after four years, but the live streaming and chat features have spread across several different communities and there is still a small live gaming community on YouTube. In 2017, YouTube released its photocopiers on Snapchat and created YouTube Stories (originally released as “YouTube Reels”), which allowed channels to create short update videos that disappeared after seven days. Now he’s aiming for TikTok with these one-minute videos. Facebook also went after TikTok with Instagram Reels.
YouTube Shorts launched in India in September – a smart move, as TikTok has been banned in India since June. With no competition from the incumbent in India, YouTube Shorts took off in the country, with YouTube recently announcing that Shorts was having “more than 3.5 billion daily views”. TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, and this has given it (and more than 100 other Chinese services) a ban in India. TikTok was also under attack by the Trump administration and, for a while, we expected it to be purchased by Oracle. After losing the election, the Trump administration lost interest in TikTok and now it looks like the company may continue to operate in the United States.
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