Southeast Asia sees 130% growth in YouTube Shorts daily views

A significant increase in daily views for YouTube Shorts has been observed in Southeast Asia, with a growth of over 130% in the year ending July 2023, according to Niharika Kapoor, the Asia-Pacific head for Shorts scaled partnerships.

This format, which limits videos to a maximum of 60 seconds, has been instrumental in attracting new creators to the global YouTube Partner Program (YPP) as it seeks to rival the rapidly emerging platform TikTok.

Kapoor revealed that there has been a surge of over 35% in the average daily log-in viewers of YouTube Shorts year-on-year across Southeast Asia. She specifically highlighted the exponential content growth on YouTube Shorts in Thailand across various sectors, including lifestyle, travel, food, technology, beauty, and arts and crafts.

Launched in 2021, the YouTube Shorts video format now boasts an average of more than 70 billion daily views globally. This development has created fresh opportunities for content creators to earn a living.

Thomas Kim, YPP product director stated that 16 years ago, YouTube made a conscious choice to share revenue with creators.

“What started with a handful of creators has now expanded to include 3 million channels under YouTube.”

According to Kim, over the past three years, YouTube has disbursed more than US$70 billion (approximately 2 trillion baht) to creators, artists and media partners via the YPP programme.

Video creators boost

Todd Sherman, the product lead for YouTube Shorts, revealed that in the previous year, YouTube Shorts allowed creators with 1,000 subscribers and 10 million shorts views within the last 90 days to become part of the YouTube Partner programme. This move also marked the introduction of revenue sharing on shorts ads.

Sherman emphasised the importance of this development in supporting creator choice, citing that it facilitates earnings for creators regardless of whether they choose to exclusively produce Shorts or explore different formats. Since the introduction of revenue sharing on Shorts, over a quarter of channels in the YouTube Partner programme have started generating income through this revenue stream.

Sherman also noted that the community of creators and viewers engaging with Shorts is continuously growing.

“Shorts is continuing to grow. It’s really a thriving community of creators and viewers are continuing to engage deeply with Shorts.”

Recently, YouTube Shorts introduced live streaming, allowing creators to broadcast live from their mobile phones and gain visibility in the Shorts feed, reported Bangkok Post.

This feature simplifies the process of reaching new audiences and building a community through live chat interactions.