The platform’s usage has increased fourfold in the last year.
According to Bloomberg, Google is experimenting with adverts on YouTube Shorts, which has gained a lot of traction in the last year. According to Google, you’re likely to see app-install advertising and other promotions at first. “While it’s still early days,” Google’s chief business officer Philipp Schindler said in an investors call, “we’re encouraged by first advertiser comments and outcomes.”
Shorts debuted in September 2020 to compete with TikTok, which offers 15-second films taken on smartphones, and expanded to the United States in March 2021. The site currently receives over 30 billion daily views, a fourfold increase over the previous year. “We focus on developing a fantastic user experience first, as we’ve always done with products, and we’ll work to build monetization over time,” said Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai
YouTube as a whole missed expectations by a good margin, posting $6.87 billion in sales compared to the $7.48 billion investors were expecting, according to Variety. Parent Alphabet also fell a bit short of targets with $68.01 billion in revenue, but that’s still up 8 percent over the same quarter last year.
Along with YouTube shorts, a bright spot was the YouTube TV cord-cutting subscription service that “continues to deliver substantial revenue growth,” the company said. Pichai also revealed that viewers watch more than 700 million hours of YouTube content per day on connected TVs. He added that YouTube will introduce new smartphone features for connected TVs this year that will make it easier for users to comment and share content.
