After the Format's First Year, YouTube Highlights Key Areas of Focus for Shorts

'Shorts,' YouTube's TikTok-inspired short-form video feed, debuted a year ago, signaling a significant shift in focus for the platform, which has since become a major growth aspect for the app.

Shorts was first released in September of last year, with Indian consumers being the first to have access to the format. With the release of Instagram Reels and Shorts, Facebook and YouTube saw an opportunity to fill the hole left by TikTok's banning in India last June, wherein TikTok had more than 200 million active users.

Each have garnered a lot of interest in India, while Shorts was made available to all US users earlier this year. So it hasn't been in the US market for a full year yet, but it's been around for a lot longer than you may think, and YouTube has used that time to figure out what Shorts users want and how it can expand the platform to keep up with the latest trends.

Shorts is still lagging behind TikTok and Reels in many ways. For example, YouTube recently added 'green screen' capabilities to Shorts, which has been present on both of the other apps for quite some time.

However, the growing popularity of short-form video is helping to raise Shorts usage, and YouTube's recent announcement of its Shorts Fund, which rewards top Shorts creators based on content performance, could be another method to encourage more people to utilize the feature.

So, after a year of development, what are YouTube's main priorities for Shorts? Check out the infographic overview below.