YouTube surprisingly tests long-form video recommendations in Shorts

YouTube is experimenting with long-form video recommendations in some users’ YouTube Shorts feeds. This effort is probably to promote the discovery of longer videos where users would normally find short videos. The test is currently available to a select group of users.

The test is explained in a community post called “Testing new content discovery features”. It details that longer videos may appear on the Watch Page and on the Shorts feed.

Basically, testers will see a mix of video formats alongside shorter videos. So far, YouTube has not detailed who the users who will be getting the new “discovery experience” are.

Google will also actively listen for feedback on this test.

Of course, as you can see such a test seems pretty ironic, given the fact that YouTube Shorts was introduced as an answer to TikTok’s growing popularity with short videos.

 It seems strange to me to recommend longer YouTube videos in Shorts… after all, people who are looking at Shorts are probably interested in short videos anyway… but we’ll see what YouTube makes of this experiment.