YouTube pitches Shorts at the NewFronts

YouTube Shorts, the kinda-sorta-but-definitely-not-TikTok clone, is getting updates for advertisers, YouTube announced at its NewFronts presentation.

At the platform’s annual dog and pony show Monday, YouTube said it would expand the tools advertisers can use to buy inventory across Shorts. For the most part, advertisers can still only buy Shorts through tools that allocate spend across various YouTube and Google properties.

The new stuff: Google is expanding the audiences that advertisers can now reach through Shorts. Later this year, advertisers will be able to buy Shorts inventory through what’s called Video reach campaigns, which are optimized for brand awareness. YouTube is also piloting a program built on its YouTube Select buying tools, which reserve ad inventory in the most popular channels on the platform. Advertisers will now be able to buy Shorts inventory via YouTube Select, allowing them to reach viewers when they first open Shorts.

Follow the money: Shorts are important to YouTube. During a Q1 2022 earnings call, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Shorts views had quadrupled year over year and now averaged more than 30 billion daily views. “We are testing monetization on Shorts, and early advertiser feedback and results are encouraging,” Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s chief financial officer, said at the time; still, Google is “experiencing a slight headwind to revenue growth,” she added.