According to overseas media The Information, Google's video sharing website YouTube plans to launch a short video function called Shorts at the end of this year, competing with the tiktok overseas version of TikTok.

Shorts will allow people to upload short videos and then edit them using songs from the YouTube music copyright library, similar to tiktok's. However, short will become part of the existing Android and IOS versions of YouTube applications, rather than exist as a stand-alone application.

The Information article describes YouTube move as

It's common to compete for users by copying popular features of an application and eventually drive them out of the mass market. A few years ago, for example, instagram and Facebook copied snapchat's stories, filters and stickers to turn it from a hot app to an edge app. YouTube also copied snapchat's stories feature.

Now it's tiktok's turn. As early as October 2018, Facebook developed its own short video application Lasso, which has the same function as tiktok. But so far, the app is still being secretly tested in Brazil.

YouTube, by contrast, is much slower. Given YouTube's huge user base of more than 2 billion a month and the accumulation of a large number of music licensing agreements, it's time to copy tiktok. But now, it's a bit of a miss. After all, Facebook copied snapchat much faster.

According to app Annie, the number of tiktok users has increased by more than 125% in the past two years. In the past 12 months, tiktok's first downloads to apple and Google's app stores have reached 842 million times, up 15% year on year.

Last October, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google had been interested in acquiring tiktok's competitor, firework, to counter its rapid growth overseas.

Title Source: visual Hunt