With YouTube’s Shorts gathering significant momentum over the past year, Google is now experimenting with ads on the platform, Bloomberg reported. At first, you’re likely to see app-install ads and other promotions, according to Google. “While it’s still early days, we’re encouraged by initial advertiser feedback and results,” said Google’s chief business officer Philipp Schindler on an investors call.
Shorts launched in September 2020 to counter TikTok offering 15-second videos shot on mobile phones, and expanded to the US in March 2021. The platform now averages over 30 billion daily views, up more than four times over last year. “As we’ve always done with products, we focus on building a great user experience first, and we’ll work to build monetization over time,” said Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
YouTube as a whole missed expectations by a good margin, posting $6.87 billion in sales compared to the $7.48 billion investors were expecting, according to Variety. Parent Alphabet also fell a bit short of targets with $68.01 billion in revenue, but that’s still up 8 percent over the same quarter last year.
Along with YouTube shorts, a bright spot was the YouTube TV cord-cutting subscription service that “continues to deliver substantial revenue growth,” the company said. Pichai also revealed that viewers watch more than 700 million hours of YouTube content per day on connected TVs. He added that YouTube will introduce new smartphone features for connected TVs this year that will make it easier for users to comment and share content.
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