YouTubeYouTube is making yet another big change, implementing more TikTok-style features to Shorts as the rival platform’s future hangs in doubt.
Over the past few months, YouTube has made a series of updates to Shorts to make them similar to how TikTok clips and Instagram Reels function.
In October 2024, they increased their duration from a max of 60 seconds long to three minutes.
They followed this up on March 31 by changing how views are tallied. Now, rewatching a Short multiple times or just scrolling past one counts as a view.
And on April 3, the Google-owned platform unveiled more updates to Shorts with a new video editor, music, stickers and more.
YouTube announces more TikTok-style additions
According to YouTube, this Spring, creators will be able to spice up their Shorts in a series of new ways.
The first is a new editor, which lets users add music, make edits to the timing of clips and make more precise adjustments.
Users can also add music, which will automatically align clips to the rhythm, thus saving creators a lot of time manually syncing them.
Templates will also be added by using photos from one’s gallery.
Finally, Shorts will be adding image stickers and AI stickers. “Simply describe the sticker you envision, and we’ll generate it for you, giving you a sticker that is truly one of a kind and perfect for expressing yourself,” YouTube explained.
These updates, set to arrive later in 2025, come as TikTok’s future remains unknown. The company has been ordered to sell and there are some last-minute offers coming in from the likes of Amazon three days before the deadline.
Related
Former President Joe Biden signed the TikTok divest-or-ban bill back in 2024, causing the short-form video platform to go dark for just over 12 hours.
President Trump took office just a day later and signed an executive order extending enforcement of the ban for 270 days, making the new divest-or-ban deadline April 5, 2025.