From The Verge: YouTube is gearing up to launch a beta version of its TikTok competitor, Shorts, in the United States beginning in March, chief product officer Neal Mohan announced today.
In a blog post announcing a number of features coming to YouTube in the coming months, Mohan said the YouTube team will be giving more creators access to Shorts in the United States. The YouTube team has seen success with Shorts in India, where the feature has existed for several months, according to Mohan. Since December, “the number of Indian channels using Shorts creation tools has more than tripled, and the YouTube Shorts player is now receiving more than 3.5 billion daily views globally,” he wrote.
Reports that YouTube was working on a TikTok competitor first emerged in April 2020, but YouTube didn’t roll out Shorts in India until September. While the company was trying to figure out how to extend its creator base and 2 billion monthly users to a mobile-first product in wake of TikTok’s explosive popularity, Instagram was doing the same thing. Instagram launched Reels not long before YouTube rolled out Shorts, leading two of the world’s biggest tech and social platforms racing to catch up to ByteDance’s app.
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