YouTube's 'Shorts series' brings episodic viewing to Shorts

As microdrama apps gain traction, YouTube is betting that episodic short-form storytelling will stick around — and that the format belongs on Shorts. At its Made On YouTube event on Wednesday, the company announced “Shorts series,” a new tool that lets creators organize their Shorts into TV-style seasons and episodes, complete with custom thumbnails and playback.

With Shorts series, viewers can watch a selection of Shorts as a continuous story rather than simply scrolling from one stand-alone clip to the next, and the series lives on a creator’s YouTube channel. The feature is rolling out to creators in the YouTube Partner Program across web, mobile, and connected TVs.

The move isn’t a surprise, given that YouTubers have already been experimenting with microdramas and increasingly treating them as a serious business. Internet personality Hannah Stocking has crossed into vertical drama, starring in the musical microdrama “Playback,” which premiered on Holywater’s My Drama platform. Longtime YouTube creator Joshua Ovenshire, known as The Jovenshire, has moved away from traditional YouTube videos to work as an executive producer on shows for vertical platform ReelShort, including a “Love Island”-inspired series called “Secrets and Soulmates.” The format has attracted recognizable names too, with celebrities including James Franco, Issa Rae, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson getting involved.

YouTube’s new feature puts the platform more directly into competition with a growing set of microdrama apps: TikTok recently launched its own microdrama app, PineDrama, while ReelShort and DramaBox have also grown in popularity. For YouTube, Shorts series could be a way to keep viewers engaged without sending them to other platforms for episodic vertical storytelling.

Shorts series builds on “Creator Shows,” which YouTube announced at its annual upfront event last year, giving select creators tools to organize content into seasons and episodes designed for TV viewing. Creators including Michelle Khare and Rhett & Link used those tools to structure their content for bingeing on the big screen. The announcement arrived alongside other Made On YouTube updates aimed at helping creators grow and engage audiences, including “Live Showdowns” for interactive team challenges, expanded video A/B testing to compare different cuts or opening hooks, a “Dynamic Thumbnails” feature that lets creators pick from up to three creator-provided thumbnails for different audiences, and new shopping features.

Why it matters

By building episodic structure directly into Shorts, YouTube is trying to keep the fast-growing microdrama audience — and the ad and subscription revenue that comes with it — from migrating to dedicated vertical-drama apps.