YouTube is killing off a feature you probably weren’t using anyway and won’t miss. June 26th marks the death of YouTube Stories, a feature released in 2017 shortly before the company announced “Reels” – now YouTube Shorts. What made YouTube Stories different is that the videos were temporary, disappearing after a week. It also wasn’t available to users with fewer than 10,000 subscribers.
This 10K subscriber requirement almost certainly doomed YouTube Stories from the beginning. It remained in beta since its initial launch and never gained in popularity at all. In fact, I can’t recall a single time in the last six years that I’ve ever seen any of the creators I follow actually post a “Story”. Sure, there have been plenty of Shorts, but not Stories.
According to an announcement on the Google Support website, YouTube’s goal is to focus on Shorts, long-form content and live streaming. And as of June 26th, you’ll no longer be able to post any new Stories to the service – not that most of you were doing that already. Any stories that have already been published before that date will expire and self-delete seven days later, as has always been the way with YouTube Stories.
Hi creators,
Today, there are many ways to create on YouTube – from Community posts to Shorts, to long-form and Live. To prioritize these key features, Stories are going away.
Starting on 6/26/2023 the option to create a new YouTube Story will no longer be available. Stories that are already live on that date will expire 7 days after they were originally shared.
While Stories are going away, we’ve seen that both Community posts and YouTube Shorts are great alternatives that can deliver valuable audience connections and conversations.
YouTube suggests using Shorts and the channel Community tab to reach out to your audience with Stories going away, which is where most creators were connecting with their audience already. Now, though, it’s even easier for smaller channels to connect with their audiences through the community tab after it was rolled out to everybody. Previously, it required 1,000 subscribers to access the community tab.
With other platforms like TikTok facing criticism from governments around the world, entire US states banning its use (which has already been challenged) and Meta pissing off creators with alarming regularity, the time is ripe for YouTube to convince content creators to start building up their Shorts audiences.
To find out more about YouTube Stories, see here, and to find out why they’re dying, see the Google Support website.
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