YouTube Shorts confronts TikTok in the battle for young users

The video-sharing platform is rolling out plans to attract new content creators amid a slowdown in digital marketing…

YouTube is offering new financial incentives to content creators to draw them away from a rapidly growing competitor - TikTok. It's a move by the company as it competes with social media rivals to win over younger users amid a faltering digital advertising landscape.

A division at Alphabet, Google's parent company, said it would soon announce a new revenue-sharing plan on Shorts. Accordingly, this short-form clip platform allows creators to receive a portion of the advertising revenue from their videos.

Launched in 2020, Shorts has been heavily promoted by YouTube to compete with TikTok's popularity and attract Gen Z users.

Nicky Rettke, YouTube's vice president of product management, says the short-form clip feature has grown rapidly over the past two years. Shorts has been logged in by more than 1.5 billion viewers monthly, accounting for three-quarters of the total viewership of the YouTube platform. This has surpassed the 1 billion user mark overall that TikTok revealed in September 2021. Currently, TikTok still refuses to give figures on the total number of users.