YouTube Stories is going. In a recent announcement, YouTube revealed that it will be bidding farewell to its Stories feature, which will no longer be available for creation starting June 26, 2023. Stories currently live on the platform will expire exactly seven days after they were originally shared. This decision comes as YouTube seeks to prioritise key features- Community posts, long form videos, LIVE and YouTube Shorts- that have proven to deliver valuable audience connections and conversations for the platform.

YouTube’s decision to kill Stories comes from the company’s observation that alternatives such as Community posts and YouTube Shorts have proven to be greater alternatives to foster “valuable audience connections and conversations.”

Community posts offer creators a lightweight option to share updates, initiate discussions, and promote their YouTube content to their audience. YouTube in its findings has found that compared to Stories, Community posts garner significantly higher numbers of comments and likes.

YouTube seems to be overly reliant on Community posts as it recently expanded its access for millions of creators and incorporated. It also brought popular features of Stories into the Community post.

“We’ve recently expanded access to Community posts to millions of creators and have brought some of the popular aspects of Stories into Community posts such as rich editing tools, and the ability for posts to expire after 24 hours. Creators can strengthen connections with their audiences through new engagement features including polls, quizzes, and filters and stickers,” company wrote in a blog post.

Meanwhile, YouTube Shorts has emerged as a go-to option for those looking to create short-form video content. YouTube says that among creators who use both Shorts and Stories, Shorts have consistently yielded higher subscriber growth.

YouTube Stories arrived in 2017 as Reels. It was available to only users with over 10,000 subscribers. They were basically ephemeral posts that disappeared after a set time limit. While YouTube pinned its hopes on Stories, the move raised many eyebrows as the platform was known for long-form content. With the rise in popularity of TikTok videos, YouTube shifted its focus to short form content. The company is going all-in on its TikTok-inspired YouTube Shorts now by killing Stories.