One of the fastest successful social media platforms remains TikTok. It took over the internet by storm and became a major platform in almost all parts of the world. And TikTok is simple: not more than 1-minute videos with music. That’s it.

The success of the app has seen very weird reactions. India banned the app. America is soon banning it if they don’t sell to an American company. Plus now major companies are launching competitors.

Facebook’s Instagram already launched Reels. It is very similar to TikTok. And to boost its growth as fast as possible, the feature is inbuilt to the Instagram official app with videos from people you don’t follow appearing in your feed.

YouTube has today announced Shorts. It is very TikTok like. And though it is currently only available in early Beta in India, we can bet it will be rolled out to more countries in no time. It would make no sense to just try out the feature in one place. Especially when it is an obvious rip off as it is.

From the official YouTube app, Shorts will appear in the homepage section with a dedicated tab allowing users to upload short videos with the option of being able to choose music, clip multiple videos together, change their speeds, and even have a count down for recording.

Given YouTube is the biggest video platform on earth, this is a big move because should it take off, there will be many people posting on YouTube Shorts, even if they’re posting content they’ve already shared on other platforms like TikTok.

The major issue Shorts will face is this: Many users don’t go to YouTube to create. They go to watch stuff. Unlike TikTok where there are challenges where everyone can join in. So, essentially, YouTube Shorts requires as many major content creators on the platform to be ready to engage with the Shorts feature so as to lure in other users to try it out. And that will be a challenge. For example, how many users have you seen try out YouTube Stories? No matter how hard they force it on our faces, people don’t relate YouTube with Stories. Will they accept TikToks?