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YouTube app: Shorts should attract creative people
Photo: Fabian Sommer / dpa
YouTube is accelerating the expansion of its TikTok competitor shorts and is also bringing it to Germany in the process.
Shorts will now be introduced in more than 100 countries, the Google video platform announced on Monday.
The beta version of shorts should be available to all users in this country by Wednesday.
So far, the service presented last year has been available in 26 countries.
As with the TikTok model, the videos on YouTube Shorts are played in vertical format, suggested by a recommendation algorithm, and you can swipe up to the next clip.
YouTube also hopes for an advantage through the far-reaching deals with the music industry: This means that users can add music to their short videos.
So far, shorts creatives are likely to use "millions of songs" and the music catalogs of over 250 labels and publishers, and more songs are to be added.
According to its own information, YouTube is also working on monetization options.
The company aims to attract creatives by offering them the opportunity to generate income from shorts.
Shorts already has 6.5 billion hits per day
YouTube has already achieved initial success with the new format.
When the Google figures for the first quarter were presented, it was said that the clips from YouTube Shorts now have 6.5 billion views per day.
As was originally the case with TikTok, they can be a maximum of one minute long.
TikTok, on the other hand, wants to increase the limit to three minutes.
TikTok, which belongs to the Chinese company ByteDance, has grown in popularity a lot.
Facebook's Instagram had already started a clone service under the name Reels last summer.
Later, then-US President Donald Trump tried to force ByteDance to sell its TikTok business outside of China to American investors by threatening to ban it in the US.
However, the plan was torpedoed by the introduction of new software export rules in China and American courts.
pbe / dpa
