YouTube has announced that it will be discontinuing its Stories feature, which allowed creators to post temporary updates, starting from June. The feature, which was first introduced in 2017 as Reels and was only available to users with over 10,000 subscribers, will be removed from the platform on June 26th. Existing posts will expire after seven days.
The Replacement for Stories
YouTube is pushing creators to post content on other surfaces on the platform, such as Community Posts and Shorts. Community Posts is a text-based feature that allows creators to post updates, polls, quizzes, images, and videos and appear on a tab on their channels. The company has recently expanded access to the feature and added the ability to have posts expire after a certain period.
Meanwhile, YouTube is trying to funnel the popularity of short-form video into its TikTok competitor, Shorts. The company has been sharing ad revenue from Shorts with creators since February under a revamped monetization plan. YouTube is also encouraging traditional long-form video creators to start making shorter content.
The Stories feature, which disappeared after a set amount of time, was intended for creators to post behind-the-scenes content to promote their channels. However, access was limited, few creators regularly posted Stories, and the feature did not receive much promotion from YouTube.
YouTube is not the first platform to adopt the Story format and later remove it. Twitter’s Fleets, which allowed users to post ephemeral updates, was discontinued within a year of its launch.
YouTube’s decision to discontinue the Stories feature shows that the company is focusing on other surfaces for creators to post content, such as Community Posts and Shorts. The feature did not receive much attention and was not widely used, which made it easy for YouTube to remove it. The platform’s efforts to promote short-form video and encourage creators to make shorter content are in line with current trends in online video consumption.
Leave a Reply