It was hardly a surprise when Alphabet and Meta responded to TikTok’s explosive growth with copycat products – called YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, respectively. Nevertheless, despite the lack of originality, these formats can deliver strong results for advertisers.

A Shorts explainer

Much like TikTok, Shorts allows content creators to publish short-form vertical video content up to 60 seconds in length. Videos are discoverable both on the YouTube homepage, and also via a dedicated Shorts Feeds only accessible via the primary YouTube platform.

This marks an important change from prior efforts by platforms to build standalone apps focused on particular...