YouTube Introduces 30-Second Stories Feature Called 'Reels'

We are moving dangerously close to a future where every single app on your phone does the same four or five things. Just this week, Snapchat unveiled a new app redesign that rearranges everything to be a little bit more like a regular app’s newsfeed, in case you did not already obsessively check enough of those. In another example of an app jumping onto a bandwagon, YouTube is getting Stories.

Reported by TechCrunch, YouTube’s new Reels feature is going to let creators document their routines more than they already do with 30 second videos that can be plastered with filters and stickers. However, there are a few very important differences between what YouTube will offer and what other apps with Stories do. Namely, they do not expire after a set period of time and creators can make more than one at a time.

That makes sense, as a YouTube creator’s primary output is video-based by nature (unlike other apps) and those videos are usually significantly longer than 30 seconds. YouTube told TechCrunch the feature “lets creators express themselves and engage fans without having to post a full video.”

The other major difference between YouTube’s Reels and the kinds of Stories you would see on Facebook or Instagram is they will not be prominently featured at the top of the app. Instead, they will have a special tab on a creator’s channel, making engagement with them significantly more optional than on other services. If you do not care about what your favorite creator did at the grocery store on a given day, no one will make you see it.

The introduction of Reels was a bullet point in a larger YouTube blog post about the expansion of the limited Community feature already available to select creators, which allows them to engage with fans in more personal ways than the default app layout does. The other major prong of Wednesday’s announcement is that Community is being expanded from its small test group to any creators with more than 10,000 subscribers.

If you do not particularly like Stories as they currently exist on other apps, you are seemingly out of luck. YouTube is clearly aping the feature because of its success elsewhere, as Instagram surpassed Snapchat as many people’s photo/video app of choice after introducing its own Stories feature. People clearly want to see small, easily digestible snippets of their friends’ or favorite celebrities’ daily lives. It is smart business on YouTube’s part, given how personality-focused its creator culture tends to be.

Again, this pushes us closer to a singularity where every single app has every single feature. Before long, you will be able to use any app to blog, vlog, send direct messages, send and receive money, order food and vote in elections. For some reason, we will all obsessively use six or seven of them every day anyway.