Vertical video formats and social media has been blowing up recently. Google and YouTube have been a part of that no doubt. However, to compete with TikTok, YouTube has created yet another feature for shorts. Which they seem to be catering more and more towards lately. They call it the shelf. More on the shelf below!
Courtesy: SocialMediaToday.com
What Exactly is the Shelf?
The shelf is an area just above the trending page on YouTube that highlights and showcases trending shorts in your region. This will showcase the most popular clips and shorts that your country or region has to offer. See the example below.
YouTube has been slowly pushing more and more attention to shorts. They already know that their long form content is popular and will sustain itself, so why not throw more money at shorts? It has been rumored that Google has invested roughly $15 Billion into improving shorts to compete with TikTok and pay creators. That almost triples what TikTok generates, let alone makes. Adding the shelf to the trending page will not only increase traffic to shorts in general, but it will also reward those who play to the algorithm. Depending on how you look at it, it could be a great thing, or terrible.
What Else is YouTube Doing?
To build on the previous point, YouTube is looking to expand shorts into all mediums of the app. This means not only mobile, but web, desktop, and other versions of the popular video streaming app. YouTube wants to take down its serious competition, which is TikTok. Sure, Facebook and Instagram are competition as well, but Meta isn’t going anywhere. TikTok is growing on an exponential scale. However, YouTube still believes that they can beat out the sprint that TikTok is producing.
The YouTube Monetization Lure
Overall, YouTube has a much more stable source of income for creators, as well as what I am going to refer to as a constant “income loop”. TikTok creators are heavily reliant on its creator fund, and sponsors/e-commerce features the platform provides. YouTube can completely negate this, as they have a stable partner program. With shorts that will only promote and increase your popularity, it will allow for you to not only make money on your shorts, but also create long form video content, where the potential is even larger. For instance, a long form video has pre-roll ads, and in-stream ones as well. In-between shorts also have ads. This creates a constant loop in which users are consuming your content. Not only this, but you can also take the sponsorship deals to add to your income.
If there are any points I want to be drawn from this post, its that YouTube and Google have tons of money. They can pay a creator whatever they want to be exclusive on their platform. Not only this, but their monetary structure for creators is also already established and has a foundation. TikTok is just building that foundation. Furthermore, we follow YouTube’s latest developments, and what it means for you. Lastly, we covered what the shelf is on YouTube, and what it means to you, and the average creator on the platform. The Internet is ever evolving, and we’re here for the ride.
If you liked what you read, feel free to check out some of our other blog posts over at Astrotechllc.com/blog. Have a nice day!
