Will YouTube be the new TikTok? It’s pushing longer Shorts and more creation tools

As the legal hammer potentially comes down on TikTok, YouTube is expanding three-minute Shorts to all users.

This is a stark illustration of the fact that even if TikTok vanishes from U.S. soil, it has left a permanent mark on U.S.-based digital platforms. When TikTok’s user base began to grow exponentially in 2020, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and more all recognized it for the burgeoning competitor it was and rolled out their own copycats, attempting to capture some of the short-form fervor.

But as competitors went shorter, TikTok got longer: Over the last four years, it’s consistently pushed its max video time limit from just 60 seconds to 30 minutes.

That posed a problem for creators who wanted to crosspost their content from TikTok to YouTube, since YouTube Shorts has always had a one-minute max video time. We’ve seen thousands of videos that abruptly cut off because they were crossposted from TikTok…which likely means some YouTube viewers ended up over on TikTok, looking for the full uploads (and maybe continuing to watch more content there instead—a loss for YouTube).

Now, YouTube Shorts is softening that problem by allowing three-minute uploads.

YouTube’s Creator Liaison, Rene Ritchie, tweeted about how this is the fourth stage of a rollout first announced in October. The previous three stages were about shifting some longer (but still short) vertical videos into the Shorts feed.

So, to be clear, YouTube is backdating this change: any vertical or square VODs that are three minutes or less in length now automatically count as Shorts, whether creators want them to or not. They’ll appear on the Shorts tabs of creators’ channels, and will pop up when users are swiping through the Shorts feed.

The fourth stage also comes with updates to YouTube’s in-app Shorts creation tools to “support up to 3-minute Shorts, so in addition to uploading them, you’ll be able to make them right in the YouTube app as well,” Ritchie said.

It seems clear that YouTube is aware it will become the top short-form platform if TikTok is banned. But will these changes be enough to charm TikTok users after they’re stranded? Some replies to Ritchie’s tweet include complaints about midroll ads on longer Shorts, and at least one creator (The Bentist, who has 7.44 million subscribers) said he feels longer Shorts are “not ready algo wise.”

“So we tested this for 1 month and our analytics dropped over 60% including revenue,” he tweeted. “Went back to sub 60 chain and trying to recoup the losses.”

YouTube hasn’t said yet if it plans to further raise the time limit threshold on Shorts. Whatever happens, though, the platform is now in a place it wouldn’t have been without TikTok—and we’ll see whether that proves a net positive in the coming years.