This week YouTube looks to take the social media throne by adding monetisation to its Shorts. No! Not the jorts kind but the funniest home videos you see on your YouTube dashboard. Plus we discuss, BeReals followers, the future of Twitter sharing and a new tool to help create engaging content coming soon. Let’s discuss it!

The Big YouTube Short

YouTube is making big waves this week by adding monetisation to its Shorts. How? They are adding ads to shorts and giving their creators 45 % of the income generated from the ad revenue. In comparison, YouTube creators typically receive 55% of ad revenue for regular videos. The YouTube Partner Program is also becoming more accessible as YouTube plans to lower its current requirements. At the moment you need to have 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time on your channel in the past 12 months which would be really hard to gain if you only make 10 second clips. There is yet to be an official announcement on what the new conditions for Short creators will be.

Watch Activity For Creator Insights (YouTube)

YouTube is testing three new options coming soon to Creator Studio. These tools will give you more of an understanding about what your followers are engaging with, searching for and interested in. These elements will be under ‘Search Insights’ where you will be able to see what viewers are searching for in-app in regards to your channel and more broadly. The first element will be ‘Watch Interest’. At the moment creators can only view what their audience is searching for. This new update will allow them to check what’s popular, new and trending upwards. This will help bridge the gap between what is searched for manually and what they engage with when they are scrolling through their feed.

The second element is based on content gaps which will show you what audiences searched in regards to your relevant topics where they couldn’t find anything. Helping you execute strategic content that appeals to a wider audience. Lastly, they are aiming to give us data relevant to our audience’s favourite videos. This will provide us with niche data on topics so we can see where the overlap is occurring and make content they want to see and wouldn’t expect us to know about.

TikTok Now

TikTok is following its close friends by adding a TikTok Now feature to its app. This BeReal rip-off will prompt users to post a front and back photo or video at a random time each day. Honestly, who’s next? MSN?

Twitter Adds WhatsApp Sharing Button

Twitter has launched a new sharing button in India for WhatsApp and LinkedIn. The trial is being conducted to facilitate the greatest reach in the market. WhatsApp is India’s most used messaging platform with upwards of 487 million users. It will be interesting to see if this button reaches any future markets, for example a WeChat sharing button for China or a Messenger sharing button for Australia.

That wraps up our digital updates for this week. Come back next week as we discuss MySpaces BeReal feature and the new Bebo sharing button on Twitter.

XOXO OMD SQUAD!!!