YouTube has announced that the YouTube Stories feature will be discontinued on June 26.
YouTube Stories will no longer be available to users. Any story created before that day will expire as usual, 7 days after it was created, implying that there will be no YouTube Stories visible beginning the following Monday, July 3.
YouTube announced that it was discontinuing YouTube Stories in order to focus on its other, more popular recent offerings. The company concentrated on YouTube Shorts, a short-form video feature, as well as Community postings. The platform recently brought out Community posts to all YouTube channels, since it was previously only available to channels with 1,000 subscribers.
“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 said.
YouTube Shorts was the platform’s response to TikTok’s dominance in the shortform video sector, while YouTube Stories was the platform’s response to Instagram’s popular Stories feature. YouTube Stories first became available to some producers in 2018 and was formally launched in 2019.
Creators with at least 10,000 subscribers used the feature to shoot short video collections that showed on subscribers’ home pages. YouTube Stories, like Instagram Stories, were only available for 7 days before they expired.