YouTube and Snap Results Suggest Consumers Cooling to Short-Form Video

Have consumers started to cool towards short-form video? That’s certainly one read from Google and Snap results. 

At Snap, the company didn’t break out the monthly active users of its short-form video feature Spotlight, unlike in the second quarter, when Snap said the feature had more than 400 million monthly active users. Snap did say time spent watching Spotlight clips in the September quarter rose 200% year-over-year. But the absence of MAUs suggests there wasn’t much user growth to crow about. 

Meanwhile, YouTube Shorts hasn’t picked up new users: parent Alphabet said Shorts was watched by more than 2 billion logged-in users every month, the same as the second quarter. Daily views of Shorts reached 70 billion, up from 50 billion announced in February 2023.