YouTube shuts down Stories just six years after their debut. Timed posts can no longer be published starting from June 26, existing ones will expire after seven days. With this decision, Google intends to prioritize the tools currently most used, including community posts and Shorts, which for some time now has been one of the favorite ways for creators to share short videos online.
“We recently extended access to community posts to millions of creators and introduced some of the popular aspects of Stories in community posts, such as advanced editing tools and the ability for posts to expire after 24 hours. Creators can strengthen connections with their audience through new engagement features including polls, quizzes, filters and stickers.”
Launched in 2017 under the name Reels, YouTube Stories were initially exclusive to creators with more than 10,000 subscribers. They took their cue from Instagram Stories – which in turn had taken their cue from Snapchat – but never achieved great success. In a way, this story is reminiscent of how it went with Fleets, the Twitter Stories: the ephemeral posts were definitively shelved in the summer of 2021.
Google reveals that Shorts are able to attract more users than Stories: new tools are constantly being released, including the ability to respond to comments through Shorts, and the same will happen in the future for both short videos and community posts.
And what do you think of this rather curious choice of Youtube, let us know in the comments, have you ever used stories on YouTube?
