YouTube is reportedly working on a rival named “Shorts” to compete with TikTok, the Chinese video-sharing social networking service owned by ByteDance.
According to The Information, YouTube is planning to release “Shorts” before the end of 2020. It will be a feature inside its existing mobile app and will include a feed of brief videos posted by users inside the Google-owned app.
It will take advantage of the video service’s catalog of licensed music, songs from which will be available to use as soundtracks for the videos created by users.
TikTok has become a phenomenal hit having grown like fire outside China. It was initially launched as Douyin in September 2016, in China. The following year, in 2017, the app was launched by ByteDance for markets outside of China. TikTok and Douyin both use the same software, but maintain separate networks in order to comply with Chinese censorship restrictions.
TikTok is by far one of the world’s most downloaded apps in recent years, having surpassed both the one billion and 1.5 billion downloads mark on the App Store and Google Play in a single year in 2019. It was declared the #1 most downloaded app on the App Store in 2018 and 2019
TikTok has 500 million active users worldwide (Datareportal, 2019).
