YouTube today announced that it’s going to kill off its Story feature — like the similarly named Instagram Stories, basically its answer to Snapchat — starting June 26. That’s the last day you’ll be able to post a new YouTube Story. And seven days after that, any story that already was live will die an unceremonious death.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be an alternative to a full-blown YouTube video or a smaller YouTube Short. (Which is, in and of itself, YouTube’s answer to Tiktok.) YouTube is pointing creators to “YouTube Community posts” instead, which it says “are a great choice if you want to share lightweight updates, start conversations, or promote your YouTube content to your audience.” Community posts essentially are ephemeral updates that also allow for text, polls, quizzes, filters, and stickers. It added that “amongst creators who use both posts and Stories, posts on average drive many times more comments and likes compared to Stories.”
The help post announcing the sunsetting (not to be confused with the aforementioned YouTube Community posts, we suppose) also says that YouTube Shorts did better than Stories, too, and “on average drive many times more subscribers than Stories.”
In other worse, nobody loved Stories. Not even YouTube.
That’s sort of par for the course for products and services in the Google ecosystem. If they’re not performing, they’re sent to the Google Graveyard. But usually not until they’re renamed once or twice.
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