YouTube is testing “Reels” – its own take on Snapchat/Instagram style “Stories”
Nov 30, 2017
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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Instagram Stories has been wildly popular since it launched a little over a year ago. It’s developed since then into a fantastic tool for Instagrammers to get more involved with their community. YouTube seems to have taken note of this, and are currently testing out “Reels”, according to their Creator Blog. It’s their take on this popular feature.
There are a number of differences between Reels and the way existing Stories-style features work. For a start, the clips don’t get automatically deleted. You can also create multiple reels to separate content by topic, event, or whatever you like.
The new “Reels” feature will be part of the improved Community updates on your channel. Although, it will have its own tab. It will soon be introduced into beta for a handful of creators for feedback and testing. YouTube told Techcrunch that the idea is to introduce a new video format to the platform. A way for creators to express themselves and engage with their audience without having to post a full video.
The more people engage with reels, the more YouTube will assume that they and others will want to see even more, so it will keep pushing them out.
Given constantly evolving changes to YouTube’s search & suggestion algorithms, it’ll be interesting to see what kind of an impact this has. Will it just make the popular creators even more popular? Or will it allow the smaller creators a chance to build up their audience a little quicker?
And by smaller creators, I mean those with 10K subscribers, because that’s the minimum you need on your channel in order to access the Reels feature.
Hopefully, by the time it goes live, they’ll lower that bar a little bit and let more people utilise them.
You can find out more over on the YouTube Creators blog.
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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One response to “YouTube is testing “Reels” – its own take on Snapchat/Instagram style “Stories””
Too bad you don’t need 10K lists, I’m almost there :D