YouTube confirmed that it is shutting down YouTube Stories on June 26. The company admitted that the feature didn’t get much traction and shared that the decision would help it focus on other YouTube offerings, including Shorts.
The rise of TikTok led to the popularity of vertical video format. It affected platforms already offering horizontal short-form videos like YouTube and its Stories feature. Now, the company said it is removing the feature on the platform next month.
On the mentioned date above, creators with the said feature will no longer be able to upload Stories, but YouTube promised that content already live would remain available for seven days after they were shared. Meanwhile, YouTube said it would disseminate the announcement about the shutdown in various ways, including notifying creators via community forum posts, YouTube Studio, Help Center, Creator Insider, and Stories.
The company practically admitted that the feature isn’t bringing it significant help, adding that “posts on average drive many times more comments and likes compared to Stories.” It also praised Shorts, which “drive many times more subscribers than Stories,” and promoted it as a new tool for creators to share their short video content. This is not a surprise, as Google seemed to be rooting a lot for Shorts. Recently, it even injected Deepmind’s Flamingo visual language model into Shorts, allowing the automatic generation of descriptions for the content.
YouTube also promoted its other offerings as alternatives to the feature it is about to kill. “While Stories are going away, we’ve seen that both Community posts and YouTube Shorts are great alternatives that can deliver valuable audience connections and conversations,” YouTube wrote in the post. “YouTube Community posts are a great choice if you want to share lightweight updates, start conversations, or promote your YouTube content to your audience.”
