Youtube Shorts Challenges TikTok’s Dominance
TikTok has been a source of entertainment since 2016 and grew in popularity during quarantine in 2020. However, with India’s ban on TikTok in September of 2020, Youtube Shorts grew into a popular source of quick and short entertainment. While TikTok has been a big provider of short entertainment for a longer period of time, Youtube Shorts have shown that it has the capability to be better than TikTok.
While TikTok is generally more popular, and has more daily viewers compared to Youtube Shorts, the platform rewards their creators with less money compared to Youtube Shorts. Although they are very short clips for the amount of time and effort some TikTok creators put into their videos, they don’t get as much money as people who do Youtube Shorts. Now because of how short these videos are, it makes sense that they don’t earn as much money as people who make long videos do, but, looking at statistics, TikTok pays their creators $0.02-0.04 per one thousand views, while Youtube pays their creators $0.01-0.06 per one thousand views. Youtube gives creators the opportunity to earn more from their shorts compared to TikTok, which could persuade people who are interested in content creation to choose Youtube Shorts over TikTok if they are looking for money.
When you consider videos for TikTok and Youtube Shorts, you would mostly expect people to keep the videos short and not run on for too long, but on TikTok, people can stretch their videos all the way to ten minutes. For an app that is meant to share short videos of entertainment, what is the point of allowing people to make 10 minute long TikTok videos? At that point, you might as well turn it into a Youtube Video. It makes no sense to have an app that was meant for short videos, to allow creators to make 10 minute videos, especially since most of the time, people tend to be constantly scrolling through TikTok, and not paying attention to half the content the see, and for the videos they do see, they will only be wanting to watch a short video, and then move onto the next video. Youtube, on the other hand, only allows creators to extend their shorts to 1 minute, allowing anything longer to be turned into an actual video. It seems unnecessary to have a short video be able to reach ten minutes; one to two minutes seems like the most reasonable number limit for a short-length video.
As someone who has used both TikTok and Youtube Shorts, it seems to me that the so-called For You page on TikTok is less of a For You page than Youtube Shorts. When scrolling through TikTok, There is typically some of the most random stuff--most of it would never interest me--which is confusing. Scrolling through a For You page, most of the videos don’t feel like it’s for me. Youtube Shorts on the other hand actually feels like it provides me with shorts that are related to other videos, with 90% of the shorts being something that is wanted. It feels like on TikTok, if someone always watches videos of cats, someone would expect to see videos of cats a lot, but instead half the time someone sees videos of unicorns. Versus Youtube Shorts, if someone watches a lot of shorts of dogs, they actually get lots of shorts of dogs, with the occasional cat in there every once in a while. The For You page should be mostly content related to what the person watching it has been watching, and not the most random videos you could find on the internet.
