Google now monetising YouTube shorts, early results encouraging

NEW DELHI: In the era of TikTok, Google-owned YouTube Shorts is catching up fast and the company has seen encouraging results in its early monetisating efforts on the short-video making platform.

Philipp Schindler, Senior Vice President and Chief Business Officer at Alphabet (Google's parent company), said that consumers are increasing and consuming short-form videos obviously and they are seeing this across multiple platforms, including YouTube.

"We're continuing to see good user engagement on YouTube. Early results in Shorts' monetisation are also encouraging, and we're excited about the opportunities here," Schindler said during a call with analysts late on Tuesday.

"We're excited about the opportunity," he added.

YouTube Shorts is now being watched by over 1.5 billion signed-in users every month with more than 30 billion daily views.

In the April-June period, YouTube TV surpassed 5 million subscribers, including trailers.

"There's also a lot of potential for shopping on YouTube. Just last week, we announced a partnership with Shopify. It will help creators easily connect their stores to YouTube and enable shopping across their live streams and videos," said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google.

YouTube advertising revenue was $7.34 billion in the company's June quarter (Q2).

Ruth Porat, Chief Financial Officer at Alphabet, said that in YouTube and Network, the pullbacks in spend by some advertisers in the second quarter "reflects uncertainty about a number of factors that are challenging to disaggregate".