So long, Stories-on-Youtube. The Google-owned video site said Wednesday that YouTube Stories will shut down on June 26, 2023, as the company hones in on other key areas, like Shorts, Community posts and live videos, in addition to traditional long-form content. YouTube will alert creators to the shutdown via posts on the forum, in-app messages, reminders in YouTube Studio, and more, it says.

Stories, once copied by nearly every social app, have fizzled out with the rise of TikTok. Nowadays, services are more likely to go for the short-form vertical video format popularized by TikTok instead of the more ephemeral and casual format of Stories.
YouTube is not unique in turning its back on Stories, either. Netflix, for example, several years ago had a Stories-like feature called "Extras" in its mobile app where it served up videos and photos from popular shows. The streamer later integrated vertical video by adding, among other things, a feed of its short-form comedy videos called "Fast Laughs" and a companion feature for vertical video targeted at kids. LinkedIn also killed Stories in 2021. And while Spotify has only recently launched a similarly designed Stories ability for artists' profiles, the greater redesign of the app is one that focuses on TikTok-like discovery feeds as its core.

YouTube Stories were first rolled out in 2018, available to creators with more than 10,000 subscribers, but not opened up in any official capacity for everyone on YouTube to really welcome casual sharing. The company had mentioned at the time that the purpose of stories could be for creators to interact between more refined, produced content, such as behind-the-scenes updates, vlogs, sneak peeks at upcoming videos, quick updates, and more.

For example, for YouTube Stories, as in the case of Instagram and Snapchat Stories, they would disappear after a certain period of time. In this case, it would be seven days, however. Further, unlike Instagram Story Highlights, that enable people to save stories on their profiles, users were unable to save the stories in YouTube.

Given the popularity of other engagement tools, such as Community posts, that can be used to share quick updates, promote content, or have conversations with fans, it's fair to say the feature saw limited adoption. Actually, YouTube pretty much confesses that Stories weren't working, writing in today's announcement that, among creators who used both Stories and Community posts, the latter drove "many times more comments and likes" compared to Stories. Access to Community posts recently expanded to a broader set of creators, as YouTube dropped the >500 subscriber requirement.

Additionally, creators have largely shifted their short-form video effort over to YouTube Shorts. The company reports this format has also fared better than Stories in that creators who used both saw, on average, "many times more subscribers" on Shorts than on Stories.

As Shorts adoption grew on YouTube, we saw that creators benefited from this new format," a YouTube spokesperson told TechCrunch about the changes. "Stories are going away so we can prioritize key areas that creators need to be successful. We'll continue to invest in helping creators grow and connect with their audiences across formats," they added.

In addition to a community forum post, authors who regularly use Stories will be informed through a notification in YouTube Studio, as well as through other content in the Help Center, while YouTube will remind authors of the changes to be made in an upcoming Creator Insider video, with which it traditionally updates news. Not to mention, there will be also a notification directly in stories if authors access the feature before June 26.

On that date, it will no longer be possible to create a new YouTube Story, but the Stories that are already live will remain up for seven days after they were originally shared, according to YouTube.