YouTube is experimenting with recommendations for long-form videos in some users’ YouTube Shorts feeds. This effort is likely intended to help users find longer videos where they would normally find short videos. The test is currently available to a select group of users.
The test is explained in a community post titled “Testing new content discovery features,” which explains that longer videos can appear on the watch page and in the Shorts feed.
Essentially, testers will see a mix of video formats in addition to shorter videos. YouTube has not yet released any details about which users will enjoy the new “discovery experience.”
Google will also actively listen for feedback on this test.
As you can see, such a test seems quite ironic, considering that YouTube Shorts was introduced in response to the growing popularity of short videos on TikTok.
It seems odd to recommend longer YouTube videos in Shorts… after all, the people who watch Shorts are probably interested in short videos anyway… but we’ll see what YouTube does with this experiment.
