YouTube’s New “Clips” Feature Lets Users Share 60-Second Clips of Videos



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YouTube is testing a feature popular on live streaming platforms like Twitch: the ability for viewers and creators to create clips of longer videos, allowing for sharing of short and small clips of a video. The feature is currently “in testing” with a small group of channels while YouTube collects comments.

Clips have a maximum of 60 seconds and can be created by pressing a new “Share Clip” button. From there, users will get a drag-and-drop timeline editor to create a clip, name it, and share it through a new URL. This video has clips enabled if you want to try it out for yourself. For now, the feature only works on a desktop browser, but support for Android and iOS is coming “soon”.

Unlike Twitch, which creates a new video from a clip, a YouTube clip link will load the original video with a start and end point on the search bar, and the approximately 60 second clip will loop. between these two points. It sounds somewhat similar to being able to link to a timestamp in a video, which is only 60 seconds long and is looping. A big blue “Watch Full Video” button to the right of the video will launch the full video, and since you are already on the page with the video already loaded, your browser is not going anywhere.

Another big change from Twitch is that a channel’s YouTube clips are not listed publicly anywhere. One of the best features of Twitch clips is a ‘popular clips’ section attached to each channel, which lists recent most viewed clips. The “Popular Clips” section on Twitch serves as a constantly updated reel and highlight from participatory sources and is a great way to get a feel for a new channel or keep up to date with major events. The YouTube clips you have created are only listed privately in your account settings, making it more of a personal shareable bookmark.

It’s unclear how the clips will affect the YouTube ecosystem. Clips on a live streaming platform like Twitch work because Twitch streams are hours long and not very shareable. This will certainly apply to live streams from YouTube, but you will also be able to create clips of non-live stream videos, and here YouTube differs from Twitch.

YouTubers tend to create carefully crafted ten-minute videos to appeal to YouTube’s recommendation engine, “The Algorithm,” which is considered the best way to increase audiences. If someone makes a 60 second clip of a ten minute video and it goes viral instead of the video, is that good for the creator? A clip is a timestamp link to the original video, so creators will still have a view of the original video, but The Algorithm also rates creators on watch time and other metrics.

It will also spoil ad reads. Larger channels often include ad plays embedded as part of the video, and cutting those from a video and sharing a clip instead could hurt creators’ earnings. Google says ads will appear on clips “as long as the original video is at least 30 seconds long,” so there is still a way to make money, but it makes YouTubers even more dependent on the Auto Ads program. Google offers rather than third-party ads that they can conclude with ad reads.

Listing image by Rego Korosi / Flickr

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