YouTube Stories; one feature that never really cut among several others, is going away. YouTube announced today that Stories will be retired on June 26.
In its stead, the company will now be focusing on other key areas, like Shorts, Community posts, and live videos. These of course, will be in addition to its long-form content. YouTube said it would notify creators of its decision to shutdown Stories through its various communication channels.
Stories never really got off to a great start, especially with TikTok being the toast of creators and millions of people out there. Services seem to be more attracted to TikTok’s short-form vertical video format instead of the more ephemeral and casual Stories format.
In a message to TechCrunch, a YouTube spokesperson said “Stories are going away so we can prioritize key areas that creators need to be successful. We’ll continue to invest in helping creators grow and connect with their audiences across formats.”
In 2021, App Annie published a report where it where it wrote that TikTok outperformed YouTube in average monthly watch time in the US.
About this time in 2020, TikTok overtook YouTube, and as of June 2021, the app’s user base watched over 24 hours of content every month, compared to 22 hours and 40 minutes on YouTube.
TikTok’s stats in the UK was even more scary for YouTube in that same year—with the short-form video sharing app outperforming YouTube in May 2020. For 2021, users on the Chinese-owned app in the UK watched almost 26 hours content per month compared to YouTube’s 16 hours.
As App Annie, the data only covered Android users. Regardless, TikTok’s rise over the years should be a big concern for YouTube and even Facebook. The company, despite threats of ban in the US, continued to emerge as the toast of millions of people.
That said, YouTube still retained the top spot in terms of overall time spent. This understandable as the Google-owned streaming site has more users than TikTok. With an estimated 2 billion monthly users at the time, YouTube still boasts immense capacity to recover from this current stat.
All that happened two years ago, this is 2023, and YouTube understandably wants to focus more on those features and areas where it feels it can really compete with TikTok.
