YouTube Stories To Be Terminated As Company Focuses On Shorts

YouTube Stories will cease to exist on June 26, 2023, in order to concentrate on other important areas such as Shorts, Community postings, and live videos in addition to its usual long-form content.

According to YouTube, creators will be made aware of the closure through a variety of channels, including forum postings, in-app messaging, reminders in YouTube Studio, and more.

Stories, which were formerly imitated by almost all social media apps, have fallen out of favour since TikTok's emergence.

In place of the more fleeting and informal Stories format, services are now embracing the short-form vertical video style made popular by TikTok.

Stories aren't the only thing that YouTube has given up on. In previous years, Netflix had experimented with a feature in its mobile app called "Extras" that was similar to Stories and offered videos and images from popular series.

Later, the streamer embraced vertical video with the introduction of features like "Fast Laughs," a feed of short-form comedic videos, and a related vertical video service geared at children.

In 2021, LinkedIn also stopped supporting its Stories function.

Despite the fact that Spotify recently included a feature for artist profiles that is similar to Stories, the app's overall makeover places a higher priority on discovery feeds that are similar to those seen on TikTok.

When it first debuted in 2018, YouTube formally offered Stories to producers with over 10,000 followers.

However, it never extended access to all YouTube users, preventing casual, personal sharing from taking off.

The firm had said at the time that producers could use Stories to interact with their audience in between posting more professionally made and polished videos for things like vlogs, behind-the-scenes updates, fast updates, and more.

Similar to Snapchat and Instagram Stories, YouTube Stories also vanish after a set amount of time, in this instance seven days.

But unlike Instagram's Story Highlights, it wasn't feasible to save Stories to a creator's profile.

Given the popularity of other engagement tools like Community postings, which also allowed artists to offer brief updates, promote their material, and participate in dialogue with fans, it's safe to conclude that the function only saw a modest amount of usage.

In fact, YouTube effectively concedes that Stories weren't effective when it notes in today's release that, among artists who utilised both Stories and Community postings, the latter generated "many times more comments and likes" than Stories.

Since YouTube removed the >500 subscriber threshold, more creators have lately gained access to Community postings.

Additionally, producers are now focusing their short-form video efforts on YouTube Shorts.

According to the firm, creators who utilised both saw "many times more subscribers" on Shorts than on Stories, indicating that this format has also been more successful than Stories.

“As Shorts adoption grew on YouTube, we saw that creators benefited from this new format,” a YouTube spokesperson told TechCrunch about the changes.

“Stories are going away so we can prioritize key areas that creators need to be successful.

"We’ll continue to invest in helping creators grow and connect with their audiences across formats,” they added.

The termination of Stories will be announced in a community forum post, a notification in YouTube Studio, in Help Centre articles, and YouTube will remind creators about the changes in an upcoming Creator Insider video, where it routinely posts updates.

Creators who often use Stories will also get these notifications.

Additionally, if authors use the functionality before June 26 there will be a notification right in Stories.

A new YouTube Story won't be able to be made after that date, but existing ones will continue to be available for seven days after they were first shared, according to YouTube.