YouTube Shorts Celebrates A Year In The MENA, Releases Insights

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A year ago, YouTube introduced Shorts in the Middle East & North Africa to further its mission to give everyone a voice and help creators grow their audiences and be inspired by new video formats.

Since its inception, YouTube Shorts has grown a community of more than 1.5 billion monthly logged-in users globally.

As YouTube introduces new products, it witnessed the birth of a new trend unique to the platform: “the rise of the multiformat creator and artist.” Moving seamlessly between different video formats on YouTube — from Shorts, Longform, Live and Audio — these multiformat creators and artists create an infinite flow of content combinations to maximise their creativity, reach, community connection and revenue. This interplay between video formats mirrors the reality of today’s viewer, who expect content to suit their active lives, varied interests and wide ranging attention spans.

This approach is yielding real results for both creators and artists. New insights include:

• In April 2022, Shorts containing content sampled from long-form videos generated over 100B views.
• With the launch of Shorts, artist and creator channels uploading both Shorts and long-form are seeing better overall watch time and subscriber growth relative to those only uploading long-form.

Neal Mohan, YouTube’s Chief Product Officer, said: “Shorts have become an essential part of the YouTube experience for our creators and viewers. Now being watched by over 1.5B logged in users every month, the product is growing thanks to the creativity of our community. While we’re still at the beginning of our journey with Shorts, we look forward to continuing to innovate the product so our creators can continue to express themselves, connect with their audiences, and increase their reach and revenue opportunities on the platform.”

Tarek Amin, Head of YouTube in MENA said: “It’s been exciting seeing the different ways YouTube  has helped MENA creators to share their stories with the world and Shorts is one of the many ways we hope to continue empowering them. Our team is constantly looking at ways to support the creator ecosystem in the region.”

At the heart of YouTube’s journey are the voices of creators and artists. Here are some recently launched highlights:

• Video remixing: Utilising content from the world’s largest video library, creators on YouTube can put their own spin on the content they love from YouTube using latest video remixing features, Cut and Green Screen to Shorts on iOS (coming to Android soon).
• Cut: The ability to use a 1-5 second video segment from any eligible VOD or Short in the creation of new Shorts content.
• Green Screen: The ability to use up to a 60 second video segment from any eligible VOD or Short as the background for their original Short video.
• Multiformat analytics: Evolving the in-depth analytics, we recently rolled out a new design for YouTube Analytics which allows creators and artists to see insights and performance data for specific content across different video formats: VOD (video on demand), Live and Shorts. This allows them to individualise and optimise their content strategies more effectively to make the most of the platform for both reach and revenue opportunities.