Your YouTube Shorts feed may be changing

YouTube is reportedly testing out a possible future change to your Shorts feed, and it may be a difference you won't mind much.

Shorts, which are marketed as an easy way to upload vertical videos with your smartphone, have become extremely popular since their initial launch. Knowing this, YouTube is considering testing inserting longer videos into the Shorts feed to get more eyes on them (and, ideally, more advertising dollars).

YouTube Shorts are viewed in a very similar way as Instagram/Facebook Reels or TikTok videos, just on a separate tab on the YouTube app. Once you're in the Shorts stream (similar to your TikTok feed), all you have to do is swipe up to scroll on to the next video (or down to go back to the previous one).

This possible change would incorporate longer videos into that same feed, though it's unclear exactly how that would work at the moment. Would creators choose which videos to appear in Shorts? How would views be counted (since Shorts and Video views are counted separately in analytics)? Whose channels' videos get to appear in the Shorts feed?

Shorts were a response to the success of apps like TikTok, which shows viewers videos at random just by scrolling. Since short videos are extremely popular on social media right now, and YouTube was already the go-to platform for longer videos, it did make sense for them to add a feature for incorporating shorter videos into users' content.

Whether or not incorporating both video formats into one continuous feed will have the desired effect is the whole reason behind testing. If it's not effective, we may never see the change actually implemented into everyone's app.

Will Shorts continue to dominate the scene? Will they ever replace longer videos as the preferred viewing format? I'ts impossible to say. The future is always uncertain, especially when it comes to social media.