YouTube Shorts
YouTube Shorts are vertical videos up to 3 minutes long that appear in a dedicated Shorts feed, on the home page and in search.
YouTube Shorts are vertical, full screen videos, shot or cropped to 9:16, that YouTube surfaces in a dedicated Shorts feed, on the home page and inside search results, separate from regular uploads. YouTube raised the length limit from 60 seconds to 3 minutes in October 2024, though a clip using licensed music from YouTube's own library is still capped at 60 seconds.
Shorts matter because YouTube actively pushes them to viewers who have never subscribed to the channel, which makes the format one of the cheapest ways to reach new people on the platform. A single strong Short can bring in far more subscribers than a long video with a similar view count.
Keep the first frame self-explanatory, since Shorts often autoplay without sound, and hook the viewer within the first 2 seconds or the algorithm moves on. Brandlix generates short vertical clips and schedules them straight to a connected YouTube channel as Shorts.
Examples
- A 45 second recipe clip cropped to 9:16, posted as a Short next to the same channel's 12 minute long-form video.
- A channel with 3,000 subscribers gaining 15,000 new ones in a month after one Short passes 2 million views.
Related terms
Aspect ratio is the proportion between an image or video's width and height, written as two numbers such as 9:16, 1:1, 4:5 or 16:9.
Captions and subtitles are on-screen text of a video's spoken words, added for viewers who watch on mute or in a different language.
Short-form vertical videos on Instagram (9:16, up to 90 seconds).
The ranking system each platform uses to decide whose content appears in whose feed.