YouTube Ditching Stories in Favor of Shorts

05/31/2023 12:47 pm EDT

YouTube is winding down its Stories feature while pushing users towards two other existing features that they can use instead, the platform announced recently. The end of Stories will come on June 26th at which point nobody will be able to make Stories anymore, and existing ones will expire seven days after they were first shared. In the absence of Stories, YouTube is pushing people towards two existing features, community posts and Shorts, which it said should be able to fill the gaps left by Stories being removed.

The decision to wind down Stories was shared in a blog post shared by Team YouTube late last week. These were first made widely available back in 2018 and have been used since then like you'd see Instagram stories used. People would create brief recordings showing snippets of their lives that didn't necessitate a full YouTube video, and after a while, these Stories would expired and would be gone for good.

But with options like those full videos, the much more popular Shorts, and the aforementioned community posts, it seems Team YouTube felt that Stories didn't really have much of a purpose any more. The fact that people are being encouraged to use other options instead of YouTube outlining any plans to repurpose or revamp Stories should show that the feature probably wasn't doing as much as other features could.

"Starting on 6/26/2023 the option to create a new YouTube Story will no longer be available," Team YouTube said. "Stories that are already live on that date will expire 7 days after they were originally shared."

These community posts are more for "lightweight updates" or conversation starters, YouTube said, but the option people will more likely gravitate towards due to its popularity is the use of Shorts.

"YouTube Shorts is the way to go if you want to create short video content or reach a new audience! " the post from Team YouTube said. "Amongst creators who use both Shorts and Stories, Shorts on average drive many times more subscribers than Stories."

YouTube closed out its post by saying that we'd see new features for Shorts and community posts announced throughout the year.

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