YouTube Waves Goodbye to Its Snapchat Clone “YouTube Stories” Feature on June 26

YouTube’s “copy the hot new video site” procedure is concluding how it frequently does — with a closure. This time, “YouTube Stories,” a clone of Snapchat that the company launched in 2017 under the name “Reels” and later changed its name to “YouTube Stories” in 2018, is being discontinued. A YouTube support article details the shutdown and says that June 26 will be the last day to upload a story.

As YouTube keeps on emptying its energy into its TikTok clone YouTube Shorts, it’s leaving its Snapchat copycat in the dust. In just a few weeks, YouTube will officially end its stories feature.

YouTubers could use the Stories feature to post messages that disappear, similar to what users can do on Snapchat or Instagram. However, unlike Snapchat and Instagram, YouTube Stories allow comments and are only available for seven days. YouTube shifted gears after TikTok demonstrated that short content is king, but it was a bizarre move for the platform obsessed with long-form content. The organization is killing Stories to focus more on its TikTok clone YouTube Shorts, and the feature will close to users on June 26.

YouTube Stories always left a strange footprint that was easy to miss. It was mobile-only, and visiting a channel page would show a “stories” tab, or sometimes they would appear in your mobile subscription feed. Very much like Snapchat, the videos auto-deleted after seven days. Because it stopped the long tail of historical video views, they were an odd choice for creators who typically want to broadcast to a large audience. Anything the genuine use of YouTube Stories was, the auto-delete feature implies it’s normal for channels to have no apparent stories at any given time.

YouTube, the largest video site in the world, does not have much room for organic growth and instead focuses on cloning any new video sites that could reduce its view time. YouTube Gaming, a clone of Twitch that introduced gaming live streams and a brand-new homepage focused on games in 2015, was launched on YouTube. Although the gaming homepage and the YouTube Gaming app were taken offline in 2019, many YouTube features, such as low-latency live streams and chat features, are still available.

YouTube aimed Netflix with YouTube Originals, which saw the company produce big-budget content starring well-known YouTubers or scripted shows in the style of Hollywood. These more expensive videos were only available to subscribers of the ad-free YouTube Premium subscription, which cost $12 per month and was later renamed YouTube Red. From 2016 to 2022, YouTube Originals were available.

YouTube Shorts, a clone of TikTok, is Google’s latest obsession. This is a mobile-centric bite-sized video format that’s addictive to swipe through. This one is still in effect, and Google appears prepared to act immediately if government TikTok bans become more widespread. Shorts are similar to Stories in that they can include a variety of text and filters but do not automatically expire.

“Starting on 6/26/2023 the option to create a new YouTube Story will no longer be available. Stories that are already live on that date will expire 7 days after they were originally shared,” wrote Meaghan Sullivan of YouTube Product Communications in a blog post. “While Stories are going away, we’ve seen that both Community posts and YouTube Shorts are great alternatives that can deliver valuable audience connections and conversations.”

YouTube unabashedly borrowed the concept of stories from Snapchat, which introduced it in 2013, when it launched Stories for the first time in 2018. The feature was first revealed by YouTube in November 2017 and made available to 10,000 channels in November 2018. The YouTube community had mixed reactions to the release. Veteran creator Phillip DeFranco called Stories “weird” and said that their lack of swipe-up and video-linking features was a “missed opportunity.”

YouTube Shorts, a TikTok clone, appears to have struck gold, despite its failure to capture the magic of disappearing posts. As per the organization, YouTube Shorts earned 1.5 billion monthly viewers in June 2022, under a year after its global release in July 2021.