YouTube to remove Stories

Luke Meredith

Towards the end of next month, YouTube will be removing its short-form Stories feature, with users having until June 26th to post temporary content to their audiences before access to the feature is revoked permanently.

YouTube first released Stories back in 2017. The short-form, temporary style of content, often only viewable for a 24-hour time period, was first popularised by Snapchat back in 2013. Then, in 2016, Instagram released its own, remarkably similar version of Stories, bringing this form of content to an even larger social media audience. Stories is still one of Instagram’s biggest features to this day.

However, YouTube’s attempt at the Stories feature never quite took off. Originally called Reels, which is now more widely known as Instagram’s TikTok rival in short-form video content, the feature was designed for YouTube creators to give their audiences a behind-the-scenes look at some of their favourite channels, promote new videos or simply post updates.

Only available to users with over 10,000 subscribers, any popularity that YouTube Stories had appears to have dwindled, with very few notable creators using the feature and a noticeable lack of promotion from the company. YouTube isn’t the only social media platform that’s failed to implement a feature like this successfully. In 2020, Twitter introduced Fleets, a temporary tweeting feature. However, the failed project lasted less than a year.

Instead, YouTube is likely to focus more of its attention on both Shorts – its own competitor to TikTok and Instagram Reels – and Community Posts, which is a text-based update feature creators can use to interact with audiences in a variety of ways.

Across the different social media platforms you can use to promote your business, it’s important to make use of features that your target audience will use, or else your promotional efforts may be in vain. For expert social media advice from specialists in the industry, have a word with our friendly team at Engage Web today.