zlacker

Not a chance. YouTube needs shorts so that they can compete with TikTok. They HAVE to put it in front of everybody so that they can leverage their existing, vast userbase to quickly bootstrap such a product. It's a fight for market relevance for them. You will most likely not see them let that go.

>>nptelj+(OP)
Someone may believe this, but it’s utter nonsense. The users who don’t want to see shorts aren’t using TikTok.

This would be like Starbucks randomly serving tea to 20% of customers who order coffee because they want to compete more effectively with Lipton. That’s not how competition works.

>>nptelj+(OP)
My experience is that if you have a population doing some activity online it is self-perpetuating

https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/the-flywheel.html

and you might think, "I have (say) N=250,000 people playing game A and I can get them playing game B" you are probably going to be disappointed and very lucky if you get somewhere between 250 and 2500 of them playing your new game.

The two-sided market that makes YouTube impossible to dethrone makes it just as hard to change direction. For one thing you have to change the behavior of the viewers, but you also have to change the behavior of the creators, who know how to make videos, who know how to monetize them, all of that.

Myself I find I don't have a big attention span for short videos. I mean, Chinese girls doing the robot turn on my mirror neurons as much as anything. I can watch a 30 second video and get 30 seconds of fun but I don't want to watch another and another and another. However I cannot get enough of Techmoan talking about tape decks and such

https://www.youtube.com/user/techmoan

>>amluto+q3
I don't think so. I think users who don't want to see shorts, and aren't using TikTok are a minority. Short form video is hugely popular. And even if they are not in a minority, it doesn't really matter (to YouTube), because they are not going anywhere - there is nowhere to go.

The analogy fails as well. It would be more like Starbucks asking every customer whether they want tea as well. And I imagine that whichever tea company is partnered with Starbucks at that point is going to be very happy. Product bundling works very well, especially in cases like this, when an established giant decides that they are going now offer the thing as well. YouTube Music worked the same.

>>PaulHo+68
I was thinking that Shorts is popular, and it seems like it is. What I estimates I find put it from half as many users as TikTok to on par with TikTok. With regards the flywheel, I think that it works better than your example, and I think that the existence of the myriad product bundles that we see are why. That strategy works so well against competitors that sometimes antitrust comes into the picture, to break something up that's too encompassing.

>>amluto+q3
What's really funny is that I reckon if Youtube's persistence finally managed to get me to like short content, the first thing I'd probably do is... ditch them for TikTok.