
YouTube reportedly working on TikTok competitor called Shorts - nedsma
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/1/21203451/youtube-tiktok-competitor-shorts-music-google-report
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drusepth
As someone who just jumped from Byte to TikTok, I'm excited to see what new
innovations Shorts brings to the table. Correct me if I'm wrong, but YouTube
is pretty much #1 in video management/processing/distribution/etc online and
Google has _amazing_ photo+video analysis/editing/search.

I have high hopes for new kinds of filters (filters might be the wrong word,
but TikTok has a lot of innovations in this area over the traditional
Snapchat-esque "filters") and better search/recommendations, which should both
go a _long_ way toward enabling the kind of creative videos that made TikTok
blow up and also get them to the eyeballs that actually want to see them.

Some kind of seamless integration with YouTube would also be pretty amazing,
since most of my friends only watch TikToks via YouTube compilations anyway
and there's a lot of back-and-forth interactions (liking, following,
commenting, viewing related videos, etc) that would make sense if both
platforms were under the same roof.

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onlyrealcuzzo
If anyone wants to make money from Social Video, they're on YouTube. You have
the MEGA Influencers who have been making insane amounts of money on Facebook
(mostly from Instagram). But even big Influencers with 1M+ followings are
having trouble monetizing their following to make $100k+ per year.

Vloggers on YouTube can do this pretty easily with 1/10th-1/20th the
following.

Marketing spend for Influencers is gonna dry up faster than anything else. If
Shorts can provide a real revenue stream (YouTube has everything in place for
this), it will be extremely well positioned during this time.

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bduerst
Bigger question is when is TikTok going to get revenue sharing for it's
content creators?

I've found that TikTok is increasingly becoming a promotion channel for
people's youtube channels or ig accounts.

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rtx
Not till they roll out longer upload options. Nobody is getting paid for 60
second clips.

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CydeWeys
Why not? What makes you think that? I frequently see 5 second ads on YouTube;
why couldn't you play one of those every so often between <=60 second videos?
Or have interstitial static ads in the scroll like Instagram does?

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seneca
Just about anything is better than a company beholden to the Chinese
government getting a strong hold in global social media, but Alphabet isn't
too far off the list of worst options. We badly need some new blood in the
upper echelons of technology.

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sneak
Please don't make this nationalistic. Companies beholden to the US government
are just as invasive. Your comment is a red herring.

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oefrha
YouTube is getting more annoying for me by the day. Recently I’ve been
bombarded by YouTube ads from a shady fake news publication — one is dressed
up as an infomercial, another is straight-up lies, etc. (Not gonna give them
free publicity by naming them here.) Really distressed to see such crap next
to COVID-19 info videos. You could argue that I should subscribe, but I
typically only watch maybe one YouTube video every few days (more frequently
these past few weeks though) so I don’t feel subscribing.

They really need to clean up their act before making another product focused
on teens and young adults.

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russdpale
It's that algorithm, you gotta keep it tightly controlled or it goes off the
rails. I watched about 6 tiny home videos with my wife and now my ENTIRE
recommended list is tiny homes. So now I do a tiny home video or two, then a
dog video or something, then perhaps reuters news, then back to tiny homes (or
whatever kick im on at the moment).

Before this, I had accidentally left my you tube playing on DnD ambient sound
videos, and it wrecked my recommendation lists lol.

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chongli
Have you tried removing tiny home videos from your YouTube history? That might
help.

~~~
russdpale
That's a good idea!

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Leary
Paul Graham taught me to not think of new products that remind me of old
products as mere copycats. By that token, I am sure that the fact that Youtube
could leverage its existing library of music will trump any network effects
that Tiktok might have.

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master_yoda_1
In line with google tradition this gonna be another yafp( Yet another failed
project)

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izzydata
I feel like they could have come up with a better name.

~~~
egfx
Pants?

~~~
egfx
Or even better. Briefs!

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xnx
I love the content on Tik-Tok (America's youths are hilarious!), but I'm also
excited for anything that will get YouTube off it's ruinous path of forcing
creators to stretch a video that should be ~2 minutes into something 10
minutes long.

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tyingq
Should be interesting to see if Google learned some lessons with G+.

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kindly_fo
I thought better of hn users. Apparently much of them uses tik tok, which is
overhyped shit for teens.

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_bxg1
Taking bets on how many months it'll be before Google kills the project?

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effingwewt
OK, so G/YT are ok with using licensed music for this specific platform, but
almost any video of any length with music or vid whether fair use or not will
get pulled at the 1st complaint, even if bogus on YT?

I legitimately do not understand their position.

edit: word.

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Traster
Their position is "In order to become a dominant force in short video we need
to infringe copyright, so we're going to do that until we're dominant, then
we're going to act shocked and outraged that people are infringing copyright
on our plaform and start attacking the content creators that gave us our
success in the first place".

Problem is that first stage is much harder if you're a multi-billion dollar
company.

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eganist
They could've literally just bought Byte...

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drusepth
Considering Byte was made by the original Vine founder after he said he
regretted selling Vine to Twitter, I'm not sure he'd be in the market to sell
a successor quite so quickly.

~~~
birdyrooster
The Wikipedia for Vine makes it look like they wrote Vine in the summer and
then sold it for $30 million in the fall.

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pmlnr
I feel the Google+ vibes.

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pram
I’m sure its lifespan will be as short as the videos themselves

