Min Yesl, head of the BIGHIT MUSIC Marketing 2 team, said that they “see a lot of people saying they became a fan by watching Shorts.” As head of one of the teams that work with TOMORROW X TOGETHER, Min has seen the specific influence that YouTube has had on K-pop consumers lately, where continuously watching Shorts leads to new fans. “Since the launch of YouTube Shorts, we’ve seen the way music fans both consume and create content on YouTube change,” Yoon Mijeong, YouTube Music Content Partnerships Manager, said, and Shorts is also bringing K-pop fans together in new and interesting ways.

According to YouTube, Shorts is averaging over 50 billion daily views as of December 2022. “Usage is increasing really fast” when compared to 30 billion daily views back in April 2022, Yoon said. With users watching more and more YouTube Shorts, they’re able to see more and more videos, too. “The recommendation system for Shorts and for longer videos is both influenced by many signals, like number of clicks, watch time, search history, feedback, likes, etc.,” Yoon said, “but as more people watch Shorts” and so, inevitably, “a wider variety of content is being recommended to a much wider variety of viewers.” That’s the reason may be shown Shorts with subject matter you never showed interest in before. Plus, unlike longer videos, you don’t have to search for or even click on Shorts—just swipe and the next video plays automatically. Whether you intended to watch more or have an established interest in the content or not, one video after the other appears before your eyes.

“It used to be that you had to search for a song or artist you’re interested in,” Yoon said, explaining what makes Shorts so different and useful in a time when competition in the short-form space is so high, “but now, if you’re watching a Short and want to know more, it’s directly linked to the song, music video or another full video.” YouTube is a multi-format platform, with formats ranging from long-form videos to live streams, songs and Shorts all in one place. In today’s world, people are first exposed to both longer media like variety shows and TV dramas and also shorter media like songs through short-form video, and after that can choose whether to view or listen to the whole thing. And if you’re watching on YouTube, it’s easy to make that next jump. And just like so many YouTube channels across a spectrum of different fields and interests cut key scenes or summaries of their content into Shorts to stir up more interest and viewers, K-pop too is attracting people through Short after Short. For example, if the music on a Short catches your ear, you can watch the official music video or hear the full song just by pressing the button in the bottom right. You also have the option to watch other Shorts that use the song, and if you use the remix feature, you can make your own Short using the same track. That’s why, in Jung’s words, “While the focus on TikTok is on watching and copying dance challenges, YouTube is about going to check out the song.” That’s why Shorts often end with a pitch directing viewers to watch the full video and have a pinned comment with a link to it. While titles and thumbnails were the keys to grabbing users’ attention before, now it’s the Shorts themselves that get people hooked and lure them in. A Short that captured just dancer Monika’s running part from PROWDMON and LAS’ “RUN RUN” video for Relay Dance got over 7.1 million views (as of March 24), making it the most-watched Short on the channel M2 just two months after it was posted. As the Short went viral, the full video saw an explosion of views, the “RUN RUN” challenge became a sensation and a new version of the Short showing comments on the original was uploaded as well. Many of the comments on the live performance of “RUN RUN” and the prerecorded version talk about how they arrived there after first watching the Short. “I think they did a good job picking out the highlights,” Lee Hanhyeong, chief producer of Mnet Digital Studio, said by way of explanation. “When it comes to K-pop content, understanding the genre is important, too, but it’s even more important to understand how fans feel.” In other words, Shorts that are crafted to draw in new fans are discovered by the wider public through the algorithm, which then leads to a virtuous cycle that makes it possible for an influx of fans to be born as they watch more videos and grow more interested in the artists. 

In this way, while K-pop Shorts on YouTube are designed to spread to people outside the fandom, it’s the fans themselves who kick off the chain reaction. Jung says they “use fan glasses to choose” scenes from LE SSERAFIM’s web series to convert into Shorts. Lee spoke similarly, saying that they make Shorts “100% from the viewpoint of the fans.” He explained that, when making Shorts using clips from Relay Dance or Meltin’ FanCam, they look for scenes that will specifically appeal to fans rather than clips that show off how good the artists are at performing because “it’s the parts that show that special something rather than those that show them dancing really well that acts as bait for non-fans.” For example, the Dance Relay video of “Poppy” by STAYC was reborn as a Short, but it doesn’t focus on the song or the dance; rather, it focuses on when the cat ear pinned in J’s hair falls off.

When looked at this way, K-pop Shorts are more or less always fan videos—that is, made from a fan’s perspective—regardless of who actually makes them. The SOURCE MUSIC marketing team “makes Shorts from things fans tend to talk about in real life” and M2 goes as far as to “assign the editing work to employees who actually love the artists.” K-pop fans already make so many edits from official videos and share them around to advertise their favorite artists that people call them unpaid creators. Now the official accounts are doing the same using Shorts. For example, the BIGHIT MUSIC Marketing 2 team made a trailer for TOMORROW X TOGETHER’s series TO DO and uploaded it as a Short that makes the viewer feel like they’re falling in love with the older kids at school. The comment on the video with the most likes says they thought it was a fan channel at first, only to discover it’s actually the official one. This shows the unique style of Shorts that show love for the artists and use fans’ slang in the titles, as do other comments like it: “I was sure this was a fan-made video but it’s actually official!” “You can tell the editor’s a true fan.” “How do they know about that nickname?”

According to YouTube, YouTube Shorts are being watched by over 1.5B logged-in users every month. Collab Asia found that 88.2% of all YouTube views are for Shorts. Compared to a two-minute video, a video that’s only one minute long receives 2.3 times the views on average. That means that there are more people watching 10 one-minute Shorts than people watching single 10-minute videos on YouTube. With the ever-increasing popularity of Shorts, there’s now a growing group of YouTube creators who only upload Shorts, leading both Lee and Jung to their plans to create more and more “original Shorts.” As more people watch Shorts and the influence of these short-form videos continues to grow, they’re increasingly being seen as completely separate content as opposed to a kind of lure for longer videos or songs. M2’s new web series Dope Club is a prime example. Lee described the show as having been “designed in response to the way Shorts of popular clips from talk shows blow up these days.” Rather than take the interesting bits from longer videos and condense them down into Shorts, Dope Club “knows right from the planning stage that it’ll be made into Shorts and we make the videos from there” and thus they “accommodated for that format and editing style in the scripts and edited around that.” The first episode, featuring THE BOYZ, has around 13 Shorts attached to it. Yoon noted that “YouTube Shorts provides a richer experience (from more diverse content) now compared to when it was first launched,” and that extends to all YouTube content in general.

The reach of Shorts, then, doesn’t stop at Shorts. They’re at once light and easy-to-consume content for all as well as invitations to bigger worlds lying in wait just behind them. It’s easy for users to swipe through and watch a number of these convenient videos and then dive into older content when they stumble upon something that really calls to them. Yoon chalked this up to YouTube “Shorts not being so ephemeral compared to other short-form media,” while Jung said the platform “locks in viewers so they keep watching.” Shorts link users to other content on YouTube, which in turn links elsewhere on the platform, and the chain continues. Channels that upload both long- and short-form videos have seen steep increases in both watch time and subscriber growth compared to channels only uploading long-form. Because they live on YouTube’s platform where so many different formats are organically connected, Shorts have become an easy way for creators to attract people to their channels and content as well as an environment in which viewers can discover new interests and enjoy media seamlessly.

We’re living in a world where time is a highly valued commodity—where people forego watching entire TV shows in favor of one-hour summaries and fast-forward through some scenes when watching movies, and it’s increasingly common for people to have already made a judgment call about a piece of media before ever seeing or hearing the full thing. And, as Lee puts it, K-pop is all about finding the most streamlined way of showing off “the best parts of the artist and their most attractive features.” In that sense, Shorts is like what K-pop already saw for its future long ago: The genre has continuously adapted to changes in the media landscape ever since the 1990s and has taken the challenge of appealing to fans who immediately look for what makes an artist special head on in a time when fans themselves can more easily watch, and also make, content. Now all it takes is for someone with time on their hands to come across a Short of a K-pop artist, and boom—something new is born.