Head-to-head battle: Youtube shorts to emulate tiktok?

China-based short video sharing application TikTok has become a sensation of internet culture and social interaction for Generation Z these days. Its users participate in viral challenges, lip-sync and dance to music, show off comedic skits, and share their hot takes through the flurry of its short-form of videos.

Tiktok has been dominating the niche market; having a record number of download history and revenues in recent years.

Due to geopolitical issues, TikTok had to deal with ban challenges in the USA and India.

However, Youtube “shorts” seems to be in a battleground with “TikTok”. Henceforth, Youtube unveiled an early beta of “shorts” in India and brought Youtube shorts to the U.S by the last few months and introduced the YouTube Shorts Fund, a $100M fund distributed over the course of 2021-2022.
As per the official announcement of youtube shots, they focused on building its foundation across three main areas:

Create: Creation is at the core of short-form video, and we want to make it easy and fun to create Shorts.

  • A multi-segment camera to string multiple video clips together
  • The option to record with music from a large library of songs that will continue to grow
  • Speed controls that give you the flexibility to be creative in your performance
  • And a timer and countdown to easily record, hands-free

Get discovered: Every month, 2 billion viewers come to YouTube to laugh, learn and connect. Creators have built entire businesses on YouTube, and we want to enable the next generation of mobile creators to also grow a community on YouTube with Shorts.

Watch: Users might have recently seen a row on the YouTube homepage especially for short videos, and starting today we’re also introducing a new watch experience that lets you easily swipe vertically from one video to the next, plus discover other similar short videos.

And “shorts” is also working to bring even more features including:

  • Automatically add captions
  • Record up to 60 seconds with the Shorts camera
  •  Add clips from the phone’s gallery
  • Add basic filters to color correct your Shorts, with more effects

“Shorts” was designed to be a part of the YouTube app and looks a lot like TikTok, with an option to add music, change the speed of the video, short duration of around 15 seconds.

In a nutshell, “shorts” features and a budget of $100M over the course of 2021-2022 mostly indicate to emulate TikTok.

Ashik Ul Haque is a journalist, digital entrepreneur, IT analyst, e-Business strategist, author, and researcher. He pursued a master's degree in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) from the Islamic University, Kushtia, Bangladesh. He is the founder and CEO of VirtuStaffs, a leading IT/ITES service provider. Besides professional attachment, he loves traveling, volunteering, research, and social networking.
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