YouTube Live and Shorts Updates: Addressing Complaints and Introducing Image Carousels | Creator News

Transcript

TikTok LIVE is bleeding viewers while Twitch survives Amazon’s corporate cuts. Also, we’re taking your biggest questions and complaints directly to the head of YouTube LIVE, and YouTube Shorts is officially turning into Instagram. Here are the creator news of the week. Let’s dive in.

Let’s start with some macro data on the creator economy. Stream Charts just released their Q1 2026 report for the most-watched streaming platforms, and the numbers are a reality check for vertical LIVE.

TikTok LIVE nearly lost 12% of its viewership in just one quarter, down by 11.92%. Meanwhile, YouTube remained relatively stable with a tiny 0.24% drop. Kickstarter grew by a mere 1.7%, and Twitch actually grew by almost 4.5%.

Before we discuss Twitch and TikTok, let’s look at the absolute numbers, too, since percentages can be deceiving. Kickstarter’s PR team loves to boast about their growth. Last year in Q3, they grew by 55%—which sounds impressive. But in reality, it’s very little. They currently sit at around 1.4 billion hours watched in total.

YouTube, on the other hand, dominates the market with 13.5 billion hours watched. A 1% drop in watch hours on YouTube means more hours were lost than Kickstarter’s entire quarterly growth. YouTube is a behemoth that can absorb such fluctuations, which would devastate other platforms.

But the real story here is Twitch growing by 4.5% while TikTok crashes. It’s a testament to Twitch’s core audience. Over the last year, Amazon eliminated Prime Gaming benefits and is now drastically scaling back their cloud gaming service Luna, ending third-party integrations and game purchases. Analysts predicted Twitch would lose viewers without these corporate incentives, but the data proves them wrong. The core gaming culture on Twitch remains strong; viewers are there for the 16x9 parasocial connections with their creators.

Regarding TikTok, the novelty of infinite vertical LIVE scrolling and NPC streams is wearing off. When people want background entertainment for hours, they still prefer a horizontal desktop experience. Vertical live is struggling right now.

Speaking of this vertical live market correction, it’s ironic because YouTube seems to be heavily pushing into this exact vertical space. Barbara McDonald, the lead for YouTube LIVE, recently published a blog post outlining new updates and vertical monetization tools. However, as someone who actively streams on the platform and consults channels, I know there are underlying infrastructure issues for core 16x9 streamers that the PR post didn’t address.

So, I reached out to Barbara directly on the YTG Discord. She kindly offered to answer questions about YouTube LIVE, and we’ve already compiled a list of pain points from our community and sent it to her. We haven’t received a reply yet, which is understandable—it’s only been a day since we submitted our questions at the time of recording, and she runs a global product division.

There’s plenty of time for you to add your topics to our list in the comments below. This includes issues like discoverability, an overhaul of the gaming directory, moderation, and long-promised mod permissions such as pinning messages, creating polls, or setting goals. We also reported a memory leak in the YouTube live chat that fills up RAM and crashes browsers when opening the participant list.

We suggested including channel memberships in live goals and requested auto-complete for @mentions on mobile. We also asked when auto clips will be available for traditional horizontal streams, not just vertical ones. We’ll wait for Barbara and her team’s response but, in the meantime, if you stream on YouTube, what’s your biggest pain point? What bugs are driving you crazy? If you don’t stream on YouTube, what features would convince you to start?

I’m collecting your feedback, and we’ll send it directly to the engineering team as a follow-up batch.

Moving on to a significant workflow update from YouTube. If you’ve followed KW Media for a while, you might remember our video from November 2025, where we discussed a small experiment rolling out to just 5% of creators: image posts in the Shorts feed. Well, as predicted, it’s going global. As of April 14th, YouTube is officially introducing image carousels directly into the Shorts feed.

Since the November test, there have been updates. You can now use up to 10 images in a carousel. However, you can now also add text overlays and royalty-free music from the audio library or Dream Track (if available in your country). This could be an incredible low-effort, high-reward engagement strategy. Think about it: you no longer need to film and color grade a video to hit the Shorts algorithm.

Creator News: Leveraging YouTube Shorts for Engaging Content

A quick three-image meme carousel, a before-and-after short, or a photo dump can now directly contribute to the Shorts view pool. This feature allows you to maintain visibility within the algorithm on days when producing a full video isn’t feasible. However, a word of caution: refrain from excessive use of stolen memes. If your channel becomes a haven for low-effort meme dumps, you risk violating YouTube’s policies against reused or inauthentic content, potentially leading to monetization loss across all your channels. Ensure that your content remains true to your brand identity.

For those with access to this feature on their mobile app, carefully integrate it into your content strategy. And that concludes this week’s update. I’d love to hear your thoughts: why do you think TikTok Live is experiencing a decline in viewers? Remember to leave your YouTube Live questions for Barbara in the comments.

Until next week, I’m Martin, keeping you informed about the latest creator news.