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okay. Hello, everyone. My name is Nicolette Scott. I'm a strategic partner manager at YouTube on the news team. And I'm so excited to be here with everyone today to talk about YouTube shorts. So we're going to focus on how you can optimize your news experience on YouTube shorts. So before we dive into the shorts discussion, we wanted to do a quick recap of the state of YouTube and our news efforts to date. To kick things off, I want to take a look at some of our key metrics. So YouTube has over 2 billion monthly logged in viewers and additionally, we have over a billion hours of YouTube content that is watched each day. We also have over $40 billion in revenues across all YouTube products in the last 12 months. The four R's are how we think about our approach to responsibility on YouTube. And they're really top of mind in all of the decision making that we do and our product design across the platform. particularly relevant for the news vertical. So our four R's are to remove content that violates our community guidelines to raise up authoritative voices on our platform to reduce the spread of borderline violative content and to reward content that meets the highest standards we have for monetization. And our news efforts on YouTube fall primarily within three main buckets. The first are to reach new audiences the second to build sustainable businesses, and the third are fostering informed viewers. And enhanced discovery has really been a key cornerstone of YouTube's efforts in news. Whenever a major breaking news moment happens we want to ensure that authoritative sources can quickly and easily reach new audiences with the latest information. One of the ways that we've done that is by creating a breaking news shelf that appears directly on the homepage, which features news events of national importance from authoritative sources. And so we have launched this feature in over 40 markets to date. And this is an example of our breaking news on the homepage. And then we also have our top news in search and top news on the homepage. So when audiences are proactively looking for news, we want to help make sure that news organizations can connect them with authoritative information. Okay, so for today we're going to focus as I said, on YouTube shorts, we're going to first take a look at shorts at a glance. Then we're going to focus some time on how you can develop your content strategy. We'll touch a little bit on discoverability and then close with analytics and then some q&a and I'll be around after as well if anyone has any additional questions. So as we shared earlier shorts have been growing quite rapidly. We have over 50 billion daily average shorts views and 1.5 billion month in logged in users. So shorts have been seeing tremendous growth since the initial release a few years ago. And just as a refresher shorts on YouTube are vertical videos that are 60 seconds or less. And we really feel like they can supplement your existing content strategy and provide a new unique way to grow and reach audiences on YouTube. So this is again just a little bit of a reminder 50 billion daily views globally, 2 billion monthly logged in users a multi format future. So part of a short strategy is thinking about how your overall content strategy can be multi format. And so the opportunity really goes beyond just short form. You know, YouTube is really a destination where creators can produce all forms of content, build community and earn revenue from different streams. unlocking new audiences really just the first step but we want to help keep all of the content organized. And so to help guide these fans through all of your channel, you know and everything that you have to offer. We've actually come out with channel customization tools, content, filters and targeted notifications. So channel customization tools as you see on the right screenshot enable you to organize the content on your channel homepage, including playlists, featured videos and how and where the short shelf may appear. content filters give viewers a set of easy to click filters to sort content by type. So if someone is just interested in looking at your short content or live content, etc. And then targeted notifications are available to really allow your subscribers to not be overwhelmed with notifications with updates to your short strategy. But really only subscribers that watch shorts will be notified when you post short so you don't have to worry about that. And this is really just the beginning we plan to continue building the connective tissue features that will enable a multi format future and so we are definitely working very hard on updating all of our features so that we can really enable this not just with shorts but beyond as well. And furthermore, as we think about reaching the Gen Z audiences, which I know is on all of our minds, how can we reach this younger audience and engage with them so we know that Gen Z audiences have expressed a habit of using short form content to help them discover things that they want to watch longer versions of. And so our product teams have been working on effectively bridging the experience within YouTube. The first step in that process was implemented in the fall of 2022. As described by the director of our product management team, Todd. So recommendations now consider recent long form videos from channels the viewer watches in shorts to really kind of help bridge this gap so a question that I often get is where do shorts fit into our content strategy? And how can we start to think about experimenting with shorts. So there really are three ways that you can easily plug short form content into your broader content strategy and the first is to create broad based content and share content that has the potential to appeal to a wide audience. So when you think about shorts, you want to plan for shorts to really be capable as a standalone viewing experience. So what this means is someone that has never been to your channel has never necessarily interacted with your brand, should be able to watch a short and understand contextually what's going on and hopefully through watching and engaging with that short. They'll have interest afterward to visit your either VOD content, live stream content etc on your main channel. So broad based content is super important. The second is experimental content. So experimentation and shorts really do go hand in hand shorts is obviously a newer product, but also it's a lower lift way that you can experiment and it creates a safe space to test out new formats and styles with audiences. And the third are snackable clips. So shorts can also be a great home for highlighting some of your most popular content pieces. If you kind of dig into the archive and pull content out that you can then cut from it allows audiences to really sample the best parts of your content and hopefully come back for more. And we know that long and short form video serve different purposes for viewers. So YouTube is a multi format platform as I mentioned, and while long form content does tend to lead on TV screens in living room viewing experiences, we see that shorts really lead on mobile. So viewers typically want to watch long form content if they're in a more leaned back experience. They watch videos to fulfill you know, entertainment or information if they want to go deep on a topic or connection goal. And the depth of this content makes audiences feel like it's time well spent. In the US, we see over 60% of YouTube, connected TV Watch time is content that's over 21 minutes that tends to mimic television. connected TV is also our fastest growing screen with over 700 million hours of daily watch time. But when we look at short form we see short firm as a place for people to kind of fill in gaps throughout their day. It's more bite sized entertainment if they're looking for quick information. And so while also providing creators and brands a new and unique opportunity to reach new audiences, we also feel that shorts are a good opportunity to kind of provide snackable videos in a fun engaging way. So definitely there's opportunity for both and what we actually see our channels that have both short form and long form tend to have generally higher performance overall. So generally, we see they have higher rates of subscriber growth we see they have higher rates of revenue growth, and viewership tends to be higher so there's definitely value in having both pieces of content on your plot on your channel.
And so the example over here to the right is from Vox. So the first video was how America's hottest city is trying to cool down and then there was an adjacent but net new short that was called Why trees matter in a warming world. So basically the content was related, but the videos were separate and served kind of different purposes, but the shorts kind of complemented the longer form feature. And so another question that we get often is okay, well should we have a separate channel then for shorts? Or should we keep everything on the same channel? And this is actually not just a question for shorts, but also for podcasts or livestream content. And the short answer is if the shorts content you plan on creating is similar in style and tone, and you're trying to reach the same type of audience, then we actually don't recommend that you separate the content, we recommend keeping it all on one channel. That said if the short content is looking to accomplish either a different goal or reach of separate or entirely new audience, then we do see value in kind of separating them. And this is a really great example from the Washington Post that has a channel called Washington Post shorts that is really geared toward a younger Gen Z specific audience. And then they have their main channel where they also have shorts, but the shorts on the main channel tend to be more focused on interviews or, you know, a different style of reporting that's a little bit more traditional, maybe a little bit more broadcast focused. So this is a really good example of you know, a publisher that's really understood the two audiences that they're trying to reach and their approach to shorts are pretty different, but ultimately accomplishing, you know, the same goal of providing relevant authoritative information to the audience. Okay, so not only do shorts give you the opportunity to broaden your audience and to reach them at all occasions of news consumption, but we also started monetizing shorts in q1 of 2023. And so we're really happy to share that we're bringing both Advait ad based revenue, you know, to our partners and fan funding, and so this is going to help our partners hopefully earn additional revenue from shorts. And just a really quick kind of overview of how our bad sharing works. We will have like more of a pooled model where we'll look at all of the shareable ad revenue will calculate the split based on viewership, and then we'll distribute it to our partners. And what's really nice about this model for shorts is for news partners in particular, there won't be any, like excluding news content or advertisers that don't feel comfortable with news content. It's a pooled model. So it's purely based on the success of viewership of your content. So we actually see this as a big opportunity for our news partners. Okay, so that's a little bit of an overview. I'm most excited to get into the content strategy because I think this is where we can kind of dive in and understand how some of our partners have had success already on shorts and what you can do to better understand how it can fit into your content. strategy. So we actually took a look at all of the top performing shorts globally, and identified common themes or best practices for news organizations in particular. And so I looked at a lot of shorts when we were going through this exercise and I was trying to understand what are some things that just most of these successful shorts and when we think about success, we're thinking about viewership, the number of views that the short would get, what do they all seem to have in common? And so some of these best practices are quite basic, but they're incredibly important in ensuring that the context is there for the short and ensuring that you know, there's authoritative information that we're able to share with our viewers. So you'll notice the first two are really kind of focused around context. So including dates. This sounds very simple. But we actually found that with news in particular, it is so important to include a date for the coverage that you are reporting, because we want to better inform viewers and really avoid misinformation. So we've seen organizations that will you know, either be reporting something or even if it's just kind of B roll footage that they're sharing, and it's important to include the date kind of embedded into the video, so that people are aware of when this is happening. And we see this you know, honestly with breaking news events and stories, sometimes the stories don't get picked up via shorts as quickly. And so, you know, if someone comes across your short two weeks later, you want them to know that this is something that happened on a specific date. The second is text over video. So YouTube is a sound on platform and our viewers come to YouTube for Lean data engaged experience. But shorts work a little bit differently. It's more of a feed base discovery so comprehension is really critical. And we're not always sound on when we're watching or scrolling on our short speed. So knowing that it's really helpful when you add the text overlay to ensure that the audience can really follow along whether or not they have sound turned on. We often find that people start out sound off, they start to read the text and then they sometimes go sound on but this is something that I've seen most of our like successful partners that are working with shorts will do until we highly recommend that as well. The third is focused on titles and the importance of titles. So it's not about clickbait, but it's rather about intriguing curiosity and so effective use of titles really encourages viewers to watch the shorts to their conclusion. And you want to remember to keep your target audience in mind when you're creating these titles and to position them to show the value to the viewer. So you know Vox is a great example they are known for having really catchy titles. And like teasing things out, there was a video that they had that was called the three ways to to the 2022 election can go which did a great job of kind of teasing out the content but also hooking the viewer in to learn more. And then after titles, leaning into trends and graphics can also be helpful. And this obviously is so dependent on the organization and what you're trying to accomplish and if it's a good fit, you know and feels true to your brand. But you can see here to the right this is from The Washington Post's from their shorts channel, and it's a way to creatively engage the audience to use humor to lean into trends that you're seeing and helped maintain attention. It's also effective in speaking to younger audiences and a language that they understand and will help you reach new audiences but also ensure again that information is disseminated in an engaging authoritative way. And the last is to you know, be pithy be mindful of audience attention spans. These are shorts, they're scrolling. You really have I want to say like one or two seconds to capture attention, and if you want to hold their attention, 60 seconds you want to get right to the point. You don't want to sacrifice context, but you want to make sure that it's kind of short and sweet. Okay, so there are many different content formats that can work for you as a news brand within shorts. These are some that we've seen have success for news partners. And news adjacent partners. So the first are broadcast clips. Broadcast clips are just what they sound like they are content, you know, pulled directly from existing broadcast footage, or online digital content if you don't produce broadcast content, creating clips that contain enough context for viewers to understand the importance of a topic or a story can be a great and low effort way to start engaging with shorts. This clip right here has a story behind it because it was a broadcast clip that was clipped from a VOD piece of content on their YouTube channel and the VOD content, I think had two or 300,000 views, which is, you know, a healthy number, but the short that they clipped actually at 3 million views. And so you can see kind of the evolution of this clip it was from Jen Psaki, I think was talking about the Paul Pelosi attack you know, a couple months back, and she did an interview I want to say on MSNBC, it ran on TV, they clipped part of the interview for a YouTube video for a piece of VOD content and then they clipped again for the short so you can kind of see the evolution from TV all the way down to short and the short performed really, really well. Like I said, over 3 million views. The second example are condensed stories. So condensed stories are another great way that are another low left great way for you to kind of produce short specific content
in which you can distill the information down to fit within 60 seconds without sacrificing necessary context. So this gives the user a way to get an abstract drop an abstract of an important story and if further interested, they can then go to your channel and kind of watch the longer form piece of content or dig deeper. The third or explainers, so this is a very familiar format works really well on YouTube in particular, but we're also seeing shorts explainers work super well. It's an opportunity for you to really hone in on one question, or one theme within 60 seconds and kind of, you know, focus on that answer. That question, you know, keeping it very direct. The next or interview sound bites do super well on YouTube shorts. Similarly, podcast clips. There's something about just like clipping at that one moment. That's super compelling to audiences that these tend to perform super super well. And similarly to broadcast clips like very low left, it's a very easy way to like begin engaging in shorts. Experimental storytelling is another format where news partners can take a unique approach to sharing and conveying news information in a more unique and compelling way. And then let's see raw footage clips do super well. This again is very low lift creation. You know, some of the most popular content honestly, offered by news channels are just raw footage. That they're clipping for shorts. And then we have events and cultural stories and soft news also are other formats that you can consider. Okay, so here are a couple examples of broadcast clips and sound bites and I want to just give you kind of a sense of how you can use them so shorts can definitely be used as trailers for your VOD content. So if you have a longer piece of content on your channel shorts can be a really great kind of trailer for that content to tease it out. Especially if you do some sort of series or news round up like this is a really great way to kind of advertise in some ways for the longer form content on your channel. There's also the opportunity to just clip notable topical moments. So you'll see here on the left hand side, we have Sky News had a short Boris Johnson says ASA Lavista baby and his final pm cues, which was a clip from a longer form piece of coverage of his last pm cues from the despatch box. did super well. The short was like very brief, and it was literally just that clip from that moment where he made that comment. And then to the right, you have President Biden and his granddaughter casting votes together and you can see here, you know, neither clips are highly produced or edited, and they were clips of longer form coverage. We then have condensed stories. So I had shared that on the earlier slides. These are two other versions. So with condensed stories, you can either take you know a screenshot of a news article or story that you're trying to kind of condense down and explain or you can actually edit, you know, Chris way different clips together that are kind of like almost a news roundup for audiences. So it's a way for someone to quickly catch up on headlines or particular issue. So to the left, we have Liz truss 45 days as British prime minister and the clip was called, I think 45 days and 45 seconds or something like that. It was literally one second for each of the days, which was very clever. And then to the right we have 10 Downing Street posts, a weekly download that voices over you know photos and videos highlighting breaking news stories of the week. And then mini explainers. So I mentioned YouTube is known for explainer type videos. Vox is actually in particularly known for this Johnny Harris is a former Vox journalist who is now an independent creator, and he does a lot of longer form explainers. But what he kind of does on shorts is really interesting. He'll actually take you know, other questions that maybe don't warrant 20 minutes of explanation or research. And he will just kind of focus in on that one question. And you'll notice here too, like the titling is really interesting, who really controls the economy and then he'll answer that question in his 60 seconds. So for him the shorts are actually net new kind of adjacent to the longer form content that he's covering. And then you have the right here again, similarly with Bloomberg quick takes why the US is slow in counting ballots, so targeting trending topics thinking about using authoritative voices or even animation and then again appealing to a broad casual audience. And then raw footage clips or live footage is a really simple yet effective way to demonstrate credibility and to provide viewers with an inside look into news stories. And so if you have already filmed anything on the ground, if you have unique access into a story that's developing, or even aerial footage, as you'll see here from CNN, just kind of clipping that including the date and maybe a little bit of context can go a really long way in providing viewers with access to that on the ground footage.
And then recasting popular series, this can mean really leveraging resources and time that you already set aside for creating your most popular series and capturing something unique that might resonate as a short. So I think one thing to think about here, this is an example from Vox. They had a series already that they were working on and then they created like an adjacent short so it wasn't cut from the longer form but it was kind of in the same vein using the same research that they were already using for their longer form piece of content. And so we're seeing that there is still a lot of engagement with long form, but to also show people highlights or variations of the longer form content can actually serve again as a promotional tool, but also to help bring in audiences to watch your longer form content. We do see that there's very minimal overlap between the audience that's watching shorts and the audience that's watching content on your channel, your VOD content. So it's really a huge opportunity for you to bring in new audiences to kind of tease out the type of content that you're producing already on your channel. And then thinking about really repurposing archival content can be a really effective strategy. So deploying what you already have, you know, shorts can be a great place to give new life to library content. So you can experiment and see like what videos maybe resonated the most you can look in analytics and see where you've had strong engagement. And then you can clip from there and kind of test that out on shorts. And then experiment, you know, there's plenty of content that I'm sure you thought about producing in the past or have had conversations about testing new formats, but we know it can be very expensive. There can be a lot of production involved with doing so. So shorts are really a great way for you to experiment and hopefully it's a low lift again on your teams and on the resources and we encourage you to kind of focus on content that maybe you've always wanted to create, but haven't yet tried because you really never know what will work until you try it and shorts is definitely an interesting space to do that because of the new audiences that we're finding on shorts every day and the younger audiences and ways you can speak to them. And then, again, clips in sound bites. From you know, already existing content. It's probably like the easiest starting point. So whether that's clips from your archival content on your channel, or clips from broadcast coverage or content again, these are really great places to kind of start to increase your awareness. And we have features and, you know, tools for creators to really make it as seamless as possible as you think about importing your videos into shorts. So we do have a feature that allows you to clip from current videos in studio in YouTube studio so that you can cut shorts out of existing library footage. There's a video uploader if you're opted in for content sampling remix is another tool that we have that allows other creators to actually clip from your content and remix your content which will help with driving awareness and also, you know, broadening hopefully like your base of subscribers to redirect them back to your channel. But there are a lot of opportunities and hopefully like the editing features make it much easier for you to kind of clip from what you have existing already. We also find that shorts tend to be scrappier and the expectation for having something be super highly produced or super polished is just not the same on shorts. So even if you just have a mobile device and you want to get started and create net new content, you can totally do that as well. And coming soon, we have a very exciting announcement that we're going to be adding the ability for channels to link from either their shorts content to a long form video or to a piece of long form content hosted on the same channel. So this is a big step in the journey to enabling channels to share related long form content with their shorts audience and we're really excited about this. We've been asked from partners over the past year for this feature. So this is a mock up what it will look like and you can see here on the right hand side, there's a video called a breath of fresh air on this channel and then the short on the left hand side shows with a little play button that you can kind of seamlessly within the short click out to the longer form content. And we think this will help drive new audiences and drive viewers to your channel. And then I would be remiss if I didn't call out one of our partners from Mexico who has been really a great case study for us because they have seen so much growth on their channel overall from shorts and have really leaned into shorts in a way that has been effective for their business. So sin embargo is a new site that is focused on issues ranging from politics to society to the environment. It's a newer channel that was started really out of a desire to reach more audiences through video they felt like they weren't reaching enough on audiences through print alone, so they started this channel and their strategy has really mainly opted into shorts format to showcase some of their breaking news and to also draw in younger audiences with their 62nd videos and you know in condensing the content into the shorts, they have made sure to include interesting parts from all of their episodes so that the audience would get hooked and come back and watch their longer form content. And so the point of their short videos were so that anyone could watch them and understand what was going on. Even if they weren't familiar with their channels content, which is super important when you think about your short strategy. But they've really been using shorts as a way to test content for longer form episodes before kind of investing there but also to really help drive younger audiences to their channel and connect with those audiences. Their results have been incredible. They've had 14 million plus views on shorts, and this is probably grown since we've made this slide. And they've had 900,000 Subs added from shorts alone. Okay, so we're going to just spend a few minutes now talking about discoverability and then we'll go into how you can assess your performance. So with the launch of shorts, a fundamental change in content consumption and creation required us to really adapt our recommendations to the evolving ways of consuming and creating short form video. So the algorithm that powers shorts is really adapted to the evolving behaviors of short form video users. Okay, so provide accurate context. Sometimes videos that might otherwise violate our policies may be allowed to stay on youtube if the content offers a compelling reason with visible context for viewers, so we often refer to this exception as dedza, which stands for educational, documentary, scientific or artistic and to help determine whether a video might qualify for an exception. We look at multiple factors including the title, the description, industry, standard ratings and the context provided in the videos, audio or imagery. And we can share more details on our community guidelines policies, you can find them on our website. So now that we understand this, and the importance of adhering to YouTube's community guidelines, let's talk about what shorts recommendation systems are designed to do. So the goal of the shorts algorithm is to cultivate a thriving shorts ecosystem. So with that in mind, the shorts are common date Dacian system is designed to connect each viewer with shorts that they want to watch and to broaden their interests and to maximize long term viewer satisfaction. So we care deeply about user's experience with our platform. We want to make sure that after a watch session, every viewer is left satisfied with the content that they have watched. And by focusing on generating the best experience possible. For our viewers. We aim at growing the audience for the platform as a whole. So this in turn helps us cultivate an audience that creators can tap into to grow and build communities of their own. So with shorts, unlike, you know, longer form content consumption is mainly done via the feed. So when we look at analytics to see you know, where our users coming to watch and consume short form video, it's mainly coming from the shorts feed. And so the ease and use and snackable nature of the content means that the shorts audience will watch more content in less time compared to that of long form video. And so this is great for discovering new content and new interests, given the barrier to watch a video is pretty low and requires, you know, not too much of their time. So for example, a user doesn't need to be a fan of gardening to enjoy a couple of cool shorts about growing bond size. This is also a great opportunity for creators because this is how you can kind of get exposure to new audiences. And in that same example, a niche creator that has a channel about growing band size can further grow the audience by reaching casual viewers on shorts. So trends fueled through creation. You know, the shorts algorithm is designed to empower the ecosystem by recognizing and recommending trends and to fuel creation and discovery through trends. We designed a recommendation engine that is capable of identifying, recommending and resurfacing clusters of videos that share common concepts. So the trend system is designed to identify trends through detecting shorts that share the same sound share the same concept. creators can participate in trends by using those sounds. And posting their take on the trend. They can use the sound from the sound library or from a short they already features the sound can help ensure that the short is considered part of that trend. When a trend is identified, the system recommends it on the feed and other surfaces and viewer behavior will provide feedback that can help the system recommend the short generating further familiarity with the trend. And so the algorithm really follows the audience. You know, this is something you might be familiar with creators often think that when a short is published YouTube pushes it out into people's feeds. But that's actually not how it works. videos do not get pushed out by the algorithm but rather pulled in to personalize the feed of each user. So recommendations are driven by audience signals that help us understand if we are matching the right viewer to shorts that we think that they will enjoy and these signals include personalization, performance that could be influenced by external factors. Before we go into that, you can kind of see here in this visual that we have, you know, personalization looks at engagement history, interest affinity performance looks at again engagement history and interest affinity and then external factors take into account topic interests, seasonality and competition. Okay, so we're going to now look at how you can assess performance. So the first is really to review the data. So YouTube Analytics has now a detailed short data breakdown that looks at metrics that are driving your shorts performance. So I highly encourage everyone who is creating shorts to go into YouTube studio and to look at your content performance, broken down by format type. So whether that's VOD, or shorts or live posts and stories, you should really kind of use this ability to look at the data by breakdown of the format and then all content here you can see you'll be able to see an overview of everything. Highlighting performance of views coming from each format, the number of uploads of each format, typical views by each format, etc. And then the short specific tab you can dive deeper into the shorts that are driving views. The shorts traffic sources, as I mentioned, we see a lot coming from the shorts feed and then remix data, including videos that were remixed and number of views from those remixes. Okay, so once you're familiar with analytics for short, it's important to keep some things in mind when you're analyzing your data. So these are really like three tips that I would give to any partner that's trying to understand their sports performance. The first is to really take a zoomed out view and to look at a window of 28 to 90 days to really see how that changes the perspective of recent performance. I also really encourage partners not to try and compare or benchmark their performance against other channels. They should be focusing on their own channel and within your shorts portfolio. How are your shorts performing kind of against each other? And then you'll see one of the tips down here as well banana for scale, but what that really means is just don't compare VOD to shorts. They're two different products really again, focus and drill down to the video level and understand how you know your shorts are performing against the other shorts that you're publishing. And then lastly, consider outliers for what they are outliers. Sometimes we have a viral video that does super super well. Obviously you want to look and see if there's something that you can replicate in other shorts, but sometimes it might just be a viral video. It could be based on external trends or like themes that you were able to capture but you want to avoid judging your next upload based on something that was a viral hit. Okay, sorry. Oops. And then lastly, you want to just pay attention to a few factors when you're looking at the shorts analytics. So audience retention is one that's really helpful focus on keeping viewers engaged and watching till the end. Don't focus too much on the length of the short. There is no optimal length for shorts. Obviously, you have up to 60 seconds to kind of work to tell your story to do your reporting, but you want to really focus on keeping viewers as engaged as possible and watching till the end. So you can see within analytics, if there's any drop off and look at that audience retention. You do want to pay attention to the remix data, so shorts that are helping inspire creation. With other creators. There's probably something there that is worth noting and paying attention to why those particular videos are remixed. And then likes and comments. The amount of viewers who actually engage with your content can again show you what's really resonating and what's not, and that could also inform future strategies for shorts. Okay, so I'm gonna I think we have enough time to open up for q&a. We could probably take the next 15 minutes and I can take some questions. And do we have a microphone potentially? Okay.
Hello, thanks for the presentation. This was excellent. Um, what are your top recommendations for converting shorts views into subscribers? It's been something that our news organization has been struggling with.
Yeah, so that's a great question. So I think shorts are a great way to bring in younger audiences. And I think that with the update of linking content to longer form, that will probably be a really great starting point. So creating content that is compelling, and then directing to longer form content on your channel should hopefully help you build that strategy. So that you know, they watch the short, they watch the VOD, they see that you also have live stream content available on your channel as well. And then hopefully, they feel encouraged to subscribe. The other thing I would say is using your you know, community tab and really engaging with your audience and having that dialogue, posting shorts there sometimes letting you know people that are already engaged with your channel know, is also just like a good best practice I would say generally, but hopefully it's organic and they watch the short they like the short they subscribe either just from watching that standalone short or they watch it and then watch her longer form content. And that should help encourage subscribers as well. Thank you.
Hi, I'm Sarah Parnas from Washington Post video. I was really curious about when you talked about teaser trailers versus short clips. Is has there been any measurement to see which is better at directing people then to the VOD content, or is that something that we're looking at more when we have like the links?
Yeah, I would say teaser trailers are really great if you have a series where you're regularly posting content so like one really a great example of this is you know, if you have a show that you do every week, and you kind of start teasing it out as a trailer, but I think the other thing to keep in mind is when you're clipping from longer form content, and you do have the ability to kind of send folks back through that linking. Hopefully what you clipped was compelling enough for them to want to watch the whole thing but I wouldn't say there's necessarily one is better than the other. I think trailers can work really well for driving viewership when you have like an episode drop of a series, especially when the audience knows and you kind of like advertising that short like longer form episode coming soon or something like that. So making it very clear that it's a trailer.
Thank you. And I just also want to say that whenever you get customization for thumbnails on desktop, we will be like so. So happy.
That is definitely a feature request we've gotten before. Yeah.
Hi I'm Mark wreckers. I'm a public radio producer. I was really excited to see the podcasting support on the platform and it's been really cool to explore. I will say as a show that doesn't do like live to tape video recording. We really struggle with visuals on our episodes. We put a lot of time into the audio design and don't really have a great way to showcase that well. So I'm just kind of wondering how you're thinking about the broader podcast ecosystem and how it might relate to shorts. It seems like content linking is a good way to maybe use we have video that we could use in the shorts environment that we couldn't use for full episodes. Yes, one pathway, but I'm thinking I'm just wondering if there are other good examples that we can look to in terms of solving that visuals problem for full episodes.
Yeah, so that's a great question. And I will say the podcast clips do tend to really perform super well. So if you have any clip, like any video clip, again, you only need 60 seconds that you can publish on shorts to really encourage viewers to check out the rest of the episode. What's great about podcasting now on YouTube is it is part of YouTube music. So for those listening sessions where you don't have the whole episode filmed, you're able to really drive to that. And so basically for podcasting as long as you have a playlist for your podcast episodes that will get pulled in, you know, to YouTube music, but what I would say is for podcasting, again, just thinking about the moments that you can film that are just really kind of a hook for viewers. And you know, also thinking about branding those clips and making sure it's very clear that this is a podcast series, I think will also be really important. But hopefully, once you're able to link to longer form episodes, you can kind of make that a very seamless, like transition and process.
Yeah, it's, I guess the problem I run into as a producer is that it's tough to make the case that the YouTube version is worth our time when they don't perform as well. So I guess I'm just wondering if that's, if that's something you all see, like, it's what like, ultimately our goal is to get people to listen to full episodes, and it kind of feels like there's a pretty high privileging of shows that have a video component right now. So like I really, I really excited to get into the shorts piece of this, but I also need like to be able to kind of respond, like explain that return on investment.
Yeah. I mean, I think that you don't need to have video footage for podcasting. Now, kind of as we're integrating it into music it's meant to be for listening sessions. Right? So it's meant to be listened to not necessarily viewed. So I would say like for shorts, yeah, I think it's a great opportunity to drive to that and to really have that transition but also I would say it's like again, a great trailer or like promotional tool for you for free where you can kind of advertise almost your series or your podcast, and like be able to show like the face of the hosts and to kind of drive that way. But I would say like definitely stay tuned because we have a lot going on on the podcasting front. There's actually a podcasting conference I think happening this weekend as well. That our team is out. So there will definitely be more features. I think kind of as we think about multi format as we think about the way we're organizing content on the platform. There will be more features probably rolling out in the near future. That's
awesome. It's really cool to see it evolve. So thank you.
Thanks for the question.
Hi my name is Josh I have a couple just to kind of technical questions one do you notice any benefit to showing a person's face versus video because a lot of videos not like momentarily like wow, you know, it's sure some is but most isn't. So in absence of that is a face good? Or is it just a catchy headline good? My second question is doesn't matter what third party video you editing system you use whether it's like Premiere or I noticed that you said you can select from an existing YouTube click on do you privilege those clips that you make internally and then the third question is for old archival stuff. Like if you've got 20 videos that have been around for a while? Is it worth making sure it's for them? And if so, how many and how many till you like overdo it on diminishing returns?
Yeah, so these are all great questions. So I'll just go in order. So your first question. Actually remind me your first question
first. question was, how much of a benefit is it to show like a person's face really well lit and reel from well framed?
Yeah, so I would say it really depends a lot of the news content in the new shorts. You don't necessarily need to show a face just because it's the reporting that is kind of like at the forefront. So I would say like it really, it really depends on your style. I think even with longer form content for news, like sometimes we do see formats where there's like an interviewer or host and they're doing a news roundup. But I would say it's actually less important for news content to show a face and more important to really show like The crux of the information in the news that you're reporting on. There's also an opportunity to use a lot of like graphics with shorts, and with VOD, honestly, So animation is pretty popular on shorts. And as I mentioned, to like just having access to that footage often is I would say like those clips where you just have that exposure to a situation that's going on is probably the number one most popular type of content that we see. It also doesn't have to be highly produced. There are definitely a lot of shorts that were filmed on like ring cameras, honestly where someone caught something really interesting. Or kind of jarring on camera. So like that shock and awe value that comes from you know, footage that's not necessarily highly produced can also do super well. To answer your question about does it matter where you're doing the editing, it absolutely does not matter. If you have other assets that you use for other social platforms. You can upload those as well, like we do not reward or, you know, punish partners that are like uploading content that was uploaded to other platforms, like our platform just doesn't work that way. So it's really about again, like not pushing out content. We don't promote content. You know, it's really about having viewers, enabling viewers to like find the content that would be most interesting to them. So kind of pulling the content toward the viewer. And your last question, I'm sorry, was,
if you have a back library of good and longer form videos that are maybe like six months a year, two years old, is it worth making new shorts to promote them, given that they're old or does that kind of mess with your system?
Yeah, so doesn't mess with the system in any way. Again, the content is the content. So like, if something is compelling, it's going to find an audience. You don't necessarily need to create the shorts to promote the longer form content, even if it's older. It's more about using the existing content that you have to create compelling shorts. So yes, there may be some benefit of most likely if you're creating shorts from longer form content that's maybe six months old, people might like the short and they might want to watch the whole thing that's quite possible. And we see that a lot. But you also might be able to just create some really strong compelling shorts based on stuff that you already have in your library. And so like the lift of production, there is pretty low, and it's like a pretty nice entry way, you know, into shorts and also to like bringing in new audiences to your channel. So if you have like, some really great hits or pieces of content that performed really well and you can see in analytics, like where in that video had the highest engagement or you know, average view, what the average view duration was, like thinking about clipping from a moment where engagement was really high and like that could also bring in new audiences and help with discoverability of your existing channel. So that's where I think we've seen the most success is we have channels that have really grown their audience have reached a lot of new younger audiences through shorts, because they're just discovering these channels that they wouldn't have otherwise discovered on their own. And they're able to do that using content that they already had in their library.
Yeah, I was wondering about titles so you use the word title so but I see that, you know, some of the examples they kind of look more like captions. I think one of the examples like my favorite trail, exclamation point, do you have any like data around whether it's better to do something more of like, you know, feeling like a title rather than like a caption? Because technically, like when we upload it looks like a title, but when it's on the actual shorts app, you know, it's at the bottom, kind of like a tick tock caption. So I'm wondering if you have any, like data on that or
any thoughts around that? Yeah, so I would say that, too. As you know, we don't have custom thumbnails available. So the title and the description are really like your places. To be engaging. We don't necessarily have data on like captions versus titles, but what I would say is just a think thinking about titles that really bring the viewer in or cause someone to stop and pause and want to engage with that content. So what we tend to see it depends on the channel I think the one I'm a favorite chat trail might have been an example from YouTube, is this. Yeah. I don't know if it was this one or something else. Yeah. So this is actually a mock of content linking. So not to be confused with our existing news partners. But I think what we see is just having really like creative, go back. Here we go. Just having really intriguing titles. So I think bringing in the audience is making sure that you're able to like capture their attention. You really only have one to two seconds to convince someone to watch your short, right, because they're swiping and they're scrolling. And so you want to just pay really special attention to ways that you can kind of bring them in and keep them from swiping. So it helps to really like create interest or like create like a what we would call like an interest gap of either a question or a topic that there's a lot of curiosity around and using that to kind of prompt what your title is. And then think about also keywords that are trending and you can look on Google Trends even and this goes for both shorts and BOD but like thinking about using some of those keywords in your description to kind of tie everything back to, you know, trending themes that we're seeing. Hi,
hi, I'm an event producer. We have tons of content video archive, as we're thinking about like our short strategy, I don't think talking heads are particularly compelling and I'm just curious if you seen some places do that particularly well with clips from events and what that might look like.
Yeah, I mean, I think shorts can really take many shapes and sizes and forms. I would say any footage that you have existing, like the beauty of shorts is that you can experiment and you don't need a lot of resources generally to clip from something. So if you have a lot of footage, like thinking about you can use shorts probably as like a promotion, promotional tool or like a marketing tool for some of your events. But I would say like just thinking about like the mission of your channel, and what you're trying to accomplish and who you're trying to reach would be like a really good starting point to figure out like what you want to feature on shorts. Because again, like you should assume that the person watching the short may have never visited your channel is unfamiliar with your organization or your brand and so if they were to then visit your channel following watching that, you know 62nd piece of content like what do you want to kind of share with them and how can you kind of bring them in to whatever whether it's reporting or your mission or what whatnot? Yeah. Hi, there. Hi,
quick question on the text over video part does it make a difference if you're using the text over video editing capabilities within the app itself versus adding it ahead of time, like with a video editing software?
Yeah, it does not make a difference. So I think as long as it's just embedded in the video so that because this is separate from captions, so this is just basically burned into the video so that if someone is scrolling, they are seeing kind of like the text over light but there's no difference in whether or not you do it in the with our tools or if you're doing it with a third party.
Okay, so the platform doesn't like scan that as additional data.
Definitely not. I would also say like none of these best practices are influencing the algorithm directly. These are just best practices that we've identified when we look at top performing shorts, and like they all tend to have some like at least some of these common themes. So yeah, this isn't necessarily like connected to the algorithm in any way. It's more about the user experience and what we see that tends to work to kind of encourage viewership. Okay,
cool. Thank you. Yeah.
Hi, hi. How you doing today? Good. How are you? Descriptions? Do they matter? When it comes to shorts, Emmys, Keywords search ability, or they just they're kind of blocked?
Yeah, I would say like the descriptions and the titles, they do matter for the user again. So this is it's really meant to help you bring in viewers and help kind of compel people to watch your content, I would say. But I do think descriptions generally, it's good to kind of have key buzzwords that kind of either map back to the theme that you're covering, or, again, I mentioned Google Trends. It's like a great starting place to understand what people are interested in are searching for. So I would say like everything kind of plays together. Again, like all of these best practices are really meant to kind of optimize and not necessarily
standard pricing just like your regular video, but title description. Keywords.
I would say they're a little bit like titles are definitely important, regardless whether it's long form or short, but I think especially for shorts, they're important because you only have a few seconds before someone decides whether or not they want to watch your short. Thank you.
Okay, well, I will stick around for the next 1520 minutes or so in this room. So if anyone else has any other questions, feel free to find me but thanks so much for your time.
