Google has a huge list of discontinued products throughout its history. Some are full-fledged products like Orkut and Google+ while few others are byproducts like iGoogle (custom search home page). Adding to their retired products list, Google recently announced on its support blog that YouTube Stories will retire on 26 June 2023. The retirement comes due to poor usage and the popularity of other options like Community posts and Shorts.
YouTube Stories are Dead
Many YouTube users do not even aware that the platform has a Stories feature similar to Instagram. The original Stories feature was evolved from Snapchat and got quick popularity with Instagram and other social platforms copying that. YouTube followed the suite and introduced the feature as Reels in 2017 with limited access. The feature was only available to those creators having more than 10K subscribers. It allowed creators to post a short story video which will be online only for 7 days and will be deleted automatically. However, the feature was never expanded from YouTube itself and lost its popularity over time.
Meaghan, a Community Manager at YouTube, explained the decision to retire Stories in a blog post on Google’s YouTube support page. She said that YouTube wanted to prioritize other popular features like Community posts and Shorts. So, here are the two points you should know if you are using Shorts:
- YouTube Stories feature will be removed on 26 June 2023 and you will not have access after that time.
- Any items you post till that date will expire in coming days and eventually will be deleted.
Community Posts and Shorts
With the retirement of Stories, there comes opportunities for all YouTubers. YouTube Shorts is already available to all users which drives more subscribers than Stories as per Google. Shorts also got a new feature that you can reply comments in Shorts section like any other regular videos.
Earlier, Community posts feature was only available for creators with >10K subscribers which was subsequently relaxed to 500+ subscribers limit. Now that Google announced they will be removing the limitation of Community and make the feature available to all YouTubers. This means all users will get the Community tab in their YouTube channel page. You can simply create a new post from YouTube app and check whether you got the access to Community. If not, you will be prompted to confirm one-time verification to get that access. Once Community tab is available, you can create quizzes and polls to attract more subscribers to your channel. It is also possible to make your posts expired after 24 hours in Community section.
So, forget Stories if you have the access and start creating Shorts and Community posts.
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