YouTube Stories

» see youtube.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Nobody opens YouTube to find out what happened today. That sentence is the entire cause of death and it took the company five and a half years to accept it. YouTube has been open on some screen of mine for most of two decades and the reason is always the same: something specific that somebody uploaded, which is still there, which will still be there next year. A bar of disappearing clips across the top of that is a request to use the site with a verb it does not have.

It launched on 29 November 2017 and it was not called Stories. It was called Reels, a beta shown to an unnamed set of large creators, built around mobile clips of up to thirty seconds with filters and music laid over them. In that first version the clips did not expire at all, which made it a strange sort of stories product. YouTube renamed it Stories in 2018, added the expiry, and handed the word Reels back to the industry, where Instagram picked it up in 2020 and made it famous.

The mechanic that made it distinct was the clock. Instagram gave you twenty four hours. YouTube gave you seven days and no way to pin a story permanently afterward, which sounds generous and works out worse. A day is short enough that missing it is nobody's fault. A week is long enough that a story stops feeling urgent and starts feeling like something old sitting at the top of a channel.

~ the record ~

~ who could even see it ~

Stories were never open to everybody. When the feature rolled out properly in 2018 you needed more than ten thousand subscribers to post one, and that gate never came down in five years of operation. So the population who could make a story was small, and the population who could see one was whoever had subscribed to those channels and happened to open the mobile app while the week was running.

That produces a product most of its own userbase never encountered. Millions of people used YouTube every day throughout the entire life of Stories without seeing a single one, not because they avoided it but because they never subscribed to a large enough channel that bothered. The feature was in the app the whole time, invisible unless somebody else activated it on your behalf.

~ what got said on the way out ~

YouTube announced the closure on 25 May 2023 and shut it on 26 June, and the announcement was unusually candid about why. Creators who used both Stories and Community posts got many times more comments and likes on the Community posts. Creators who moved to Shorts picked up many times more subscribers on average. Neither of those is a statement about strategy. Both are a statement that the thing did not work.

The real winner is named in the same sentence. Shorts is the TikTok answer and the important thing about it is that it does not expire, which puts it on the right side of what the site is for. YouTube spent half a decade trying to make its audience check in, then went back to selling them things that keep.

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