Improve the Average Watch Time for YouTube Shorts

Summarise the problem statement — Youtube shorts, is a short video feature within the Youtube app that was released as a competitor to Tik Tok and Instagram reels. The goal is to improve the “average watch time” as the primary metric.

A few clarifying questions before you jump into the process of coming up with solutions.

1. Are there any other metrics that we are targeting or shooting for ?
2. To move the above metric is it okay if it cannibalises on youtube’s watch time ?
3. Is there a particular demography that we are targeting ?
4. Is there a reason to not compare the watch times of shorts to Reels ?
5. Shorts is now only on the mobile app so is it safe the assume we want to limit the scope to the mobile app only ?

Let’s hypothetically get answers to all these questions:

1. Yes let’s focus on “average watch time” for now.
2. Yes it is okay because users are still on the youtube app.
3. Worldwide.
4. We consider Tik Tok as our major competitor and find a lot more similarities with that app.
5. Yes the mobile app only.

Now that we have a better grip on the scope, it is important to understand the goal of “shorts” as a product. I believe it is to provide engaging byte-sized video content to serve the Gen Z and millennial population who are considered to have a declining attention span.

The personas for this product can be coarsely defined as “creators” and “content-watchers/audience”. We have already identified that this sort of content is mostly popular among gen Z and millennials. Creators can further be classified in terms of their popularity/subscriber counts. Audience can be broken down further into folks who have discovered this form of content and enjoy Tok Tok/ Reels and and people who are new to this concept. Since our metric is to improve the watch time, we should focus on creators with higher subscriber count preferably over 100k(will have to test) and users who are familiar with this type of content.

Understanding the pain points of creators first, because this a marketplace. We need high quality, engaging content to be on the platform which can be discovered by the audience.

1. Creators cannot create longer content for “shorts” — Youtube as opposed to Instagram is a place for a diverse set of creators. All these different categories of content for example: a song cover, doesn’t feel fullfilled in 60 seconds and several creators would love to create content that’s not too long but also not this short. They need the right balance where they can push out high quality content faster.
2. Creators post the same content on instagram and they don’t get the same reach and engagement for the same post on youtube. Their audience maybe discover their content on instagram/Tik Tok first and that leaves very little incentive for them to engage with the same content on youtube.
3. Creators have the tools to edit videos but creating short engaging content with filters is not present as a tool within shorts. They also don’t know what is trending so that they can capitalise on it.

Now moving on to the pain points of the audience:

1. The users clicked on the “Shorts” tab and saw a bunch of random content which was not from any of the creators they had subscribed to which left them confused.
2. The next video doesn’t play automatically and they have to keep swiping, which is pretty tedious when having to do it every 30–60 seconds.
3. They don’t know their favorite youtuber posted a “short” video as there is no section in particular within the creators profile to look for that type of content. It is mixed with all their videos.

Here are a few features to solve for the pain points listed above.

Increase the video length: This seems like a fairly simple feature to implement with very little downside as creators still have the option to create shorter videos. The time can be increased to 3 minutes (copying Tik tok as a baseline, Instagram has IGTV to support longer video formats) and then can be tested to see if this works with Youtube as a platform.

Autoplay: Youtube already has this functionality of autoplay and many times you would have heard users say how they didn’t realise where did all the time go. This similar funcitonality can be implemenetd to shorts where by default auto play is on. Users should also have the option to turn it off so that they feel in control.

Strengthening the content recommendation algorithm: Youtube has a great recommendation engine and there is no doubt that their current algorithm for shorts is also very smart. But let’s agree that Tik Tok is so popular only because of the recommendation algorithm which feeds people content they want to see. Therefore there is always some scope to improve the algorithm, one way is by passing some extra parameters as inputs. To do this, we should allow creators to be able to add tags to the video and also tag a famous artist/celebrity etc if the video relates to it. For example, if someone is creating a cover for Taylor Swift’s song, it will be great to have the ability to add relevant hashtags and also tag Taylor Swift. This improves the reachability of the content. It is crucial to test how the algorithm performs after the addition of these input parameters.

Shorts category: A category called “shorts” on creators page can be an easy differentiator for the audience to filter that content.

Feed section: The feed can be organised as such to indicate “short” content. Instagaram has a reel icon on such videos to indicate that it is a “reel” video. Having that on the feed can help users identify “shorts” content from their feed and eventually watch other shorts. Separating content as “following” and “for you” as two sections inside the “Shorts” tab can help users see a good mix of random and familiar content.

Video creation tools for creators: Currently, Instagram or Tik Tok have a lot of these filters/video editing options within the app that enables creators to create engaging/viral content. Shorts does provide some filters(P1, P2, F1 etc) though they feel rudimentary. Giving creators more filters/editing options will make it easier to create more content.

Partnering with popular artists to launch exclusive content: Yoututbe can also partner with really popular creators to launch exclusive content on Shorts similar to what Spotify did. Another idea is to launch Music content through “shorts”. It can be a reminder, a countdown or a teaser video that famous artists can launch to get more people to discover and watch“shorts” type of content.

Now that we have these solutions, let’s prioritise with the two criteria’s :LOE (Level of effort) and impact keeping our goal of increasing the average watch time in mind.

Increasing the video length seems to be a low hanging fruit and also doesn’t restrain users from making smaller videos. Therefore, this can be rolled out along with Autoplay given Youtube already has it as a feature. Adding the section “following” and “for you” to differentiate “short” content is also a way to engage users with a healthy mix of familiar vs exploratory content. All three of these features directly map to the north star of increasing the average watch time. In parallel, allowing creators to add hashtags and refining our algorithm should also be worked on and AB tested. The other solutions proposed above can we considered post releasing these.