Photo Credit: Riverside.fm
With the looming TikTok ban in the United States, YouTube Shorts growth is beginning to outpace TikTok. That’s thanks to YouTube’s huge appeal in the United States—but also because the competitor is mimicking YouTube features.
Data from Luminate suggests that YouTube Shorts growth among music listeners is rising to catch up to TikTok—which remains the most popular platform. In Q2 2023, around 33% of music listeners reported using TikTok, with the same number for Q2 2024. But YouTube Shorts growth has shot up from 28% in Q3 2023 to around 31% in Q2 2024, showcasing how the platform is growing while TikTok is stalling.
Both YouTube Shorts and TikTok continue to be relevant among music listeners, while Facebook and Instagram’s Reels has stagnated among those who listen to music on the platform. TikTok is still the most used short-form video platform among music listeners, but YouTube Shorts is rapidly growing as it adopts more of TikTok’s features.
Photo Credit: Luminate
What’s doubly interesting here is that respondents to the Luminate poll report spending more time engaging with short-form video in some format than watching sports, reading books, or listening to podcasts. It’s only second behind listening to music, which around 13% of respondents say they do compared to 8% for short-form video, 6% for sports watching, and 5% for reading books. Around 3% of respondents said they listen to podcasts in their free time—placing it well below the appeal of short-form video.
The data suggests that TikTok may not be the leading platform among music listeners as we head into 2025—even if the potential ban doesn’t happen. That’s because YouTube is the second-largest website on the internet after Google, bringing in around 113 billion monthly visits. It’s also the second most popular social network after Facebook, with an average of 2.5 billion monthly active users. The number of daily YouTube Shorts views reached 70 billion in 2023, with around 750,000 YouTube Shorts creators making money on the platform.
In the United States, the estimated number of monthly YouTube Shorts users is around 153 million (TikTok is 170M) with a forecast of 164.5 million by the end of 2024. Will YouTube Shorts eventually surpass TikTok in the realm of short-form video relevancy? It could happen in the next eighteen months, depending on how TikTok’s current situation with the U.S. government plays out.
