Competition in the tech world is absurdly fierce. In a matter of months, an application can go from being an absolute stranger to becoming the favorite of millions of users, endangering the apps in which all those people previously spent several hours a day. And the options for these apps are either buy from your rival or try to liquidate by adding their tools to your application, as is happening with TikTok, a very popular application in Spain.
An example was the Snapchat stories, a feature that Facebook implemented in all its products, a format that also reached YouTube. Now, the trend of the moment is TikTok, and again, the characteristics that make this app unique we will see even in the soup.
YouTube launches its own TikTok
If a few weeks ago Instagram created its own TikTok rival with Instagram Reels, now it is Google’s turn to do the same with YouTube Shorts. Or translated into Spanish, the “YouTube shorts”.
Shorts is a platform for creating videos of 15 seconds or less. For the creation of this application, the YouTube team wanted to focus onthree main areas:
- Content creation:To create your 15-second shorts, YouTube has created a camera that allows us to record and mix clips, make recordings with musical content, and have time and speed controllers for the recording.
- Discovery:YouTube boasts more than 2 billion unique viewers a month on its platform, and tries to sell it as a feature. Do you have any doubt that when the product is free it is because the product is you?
- Display:Within a new category of the application we can see these videos vertically and continue watching videos simply by sliding.
On YouTube they are surely aware that the value of a content service is not based solely on having the technology, but on having the support of the most relevant content creators so that people want to use it. YouTube is not going to convince all Tik Tok content creators to create on YouTube, just as neither its alternative to Twitch nor its stories have ended up having the relevance of their rivals. But not having all of this feature set is not something they can’t afford either.
The YouTube entry also has its own TikTok: that’s right, Shorts appears first on The Free Android.
