The 24-hour “story” social media post format was first popularized by Snapchat before Instagram copied the meta feature, and actually became more popular than Snapchat’s original rendition. Then everyone started doing it. And by everyone, we really mean everyone. Almost all social media platforms have or had the same temporary post feature, if not the same as Stories. YouTube was one of the first to jump on this band wagon, and now they’re jumping on. But I don’t think most people read this memorable YouTube story, anyway.
YouTube channels will no longer be able to post stories starting June 26 (via The Verge). From there, stories appear for their usual seven-day period, after which they disappear, essentially stopping the YouTube run. It’s not the first app to backtrack after implementing Stories — Twitter Fleets has that honor. But some may still argue that they took too long to die.
Stories on YouTube first became a thing in 2018 under the name Reels. Unlike in other apps, where everything posted there stays for 24 hours before deleting itself, YouTube Stories were available for viewing for a whole week. They were often used by content creators as a way to promote the content they were releasing or about to release, and they have been incredibly effective for this purpose for a long time.
YouTube wants content creators who use these stories to post other types of non-video content, including YouTube shorts and text-only community posts, the latter reintroducing that ephemeral nature by having the option to make posts expire after a certain amount of time. And of course, shorts are hot right now, with everyone imitating TikTok the way they did Snapchat back in the day.
If you’re going to post YouTube stories, make sure you’re excited for the rest of the month, because they’ll be gone.
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