Videos on YouTube Shorts are taking on TikTok, Instagram Reels and bringing internet influencers back to where it all started

Thanks to YouTube Shorts, the video-streaming platform is once more home to up-and-coming creators who previously posted to TikTok and Instagram

The YouTube feature is designed for endless thumbing on phones – ‘once you’re in that feed, you can keep swiping forever’, says a product manager for Shorts

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Shorts is YouTube’s answer to TikTok and Instagram Reels – and it’s creating the kind of influencer that it hasn’t been doing for the past half decade or so. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 11:15am, 28 Jun 2021Updated: 11:15am, 28 Jun 2021

As a child in Manchester, England, Dan Rhodes taught himself magic by watching tutorials on YouTube. But when it came time to post card tricks of his own, Rhodes largely bypassed the video-sharing giant and instead took to Instagram and TikTok – apps, he believed, that would more quickly get him the notoriety and audience he desired.

For years, the British teen continued to post only sparingly on YouTube. Then in early 2021, the service introduced YouTube Shorts, a new feature showcasing videos that are less than a minute long. Rhodes embraced it and, within two weeks, his YouTube subscribers jumped from 17,000 to over a million.

The 17-year-old magician now has 3.8 million subscribers, and his videos have been viewed 3.2 billion times.

Along the way, Rhodes has become an embodiment of the overnight success that YouTube executives had in mind when they created Shorts. It’s the kind of sudden fame the site hasn’t routinely bestowed on up-and-coming creators for the past half decade or so.

Now, thanks to Shorts, nobodies are once again rapidly becoming somebodies on YouTube.