Starting in June, YouTube will no longer offer its Stories feature, a transitory post format. Users won’t be able to create Stories after June 26 and any current postings will automatically expire after a week.
Reels, a predecessor of YouTube’s Stories, was first presented in 2017 and was only accessible to those with over 10,000 subscribers. It was evocative of features on Instagram and Snapchat. In order to promote their channels, they provided producers with a platform where they could post updates and unique behind-the-scenes footage. However, it is clear from a look at the current state of YouTube that Stories did not succeed in gaining much popularity. Even YouTube itself has not done much to promote the feature due to its limited accessibility and lack of regular use by producers.
YouTube is not the first social media platform to stop using its own version of the story format, which was invented by Snapchat. One could be reminded of Twitter’s Fleets, which were fleeting posts that disappeared after a year.
YouTube is concentrating on improving other content-sharing alternatives for artists, such Community Posts and Shorts, while it says goodbye to Stories.