YouTube’s adding another way to utilize Shorts within its community engagement process, while it’s also looking to help Shorts creators convert more viewers into subscribers via their clips.

First off, YouTube’s looking to make Shorts a more responsive engagement option by enabling users to reply with a Short in the comments feed.

As you can see in this example, creators will now be able to add Shorts clips as comment replies in-stream, providing another way to utilize Shorts within the engagement process.

Which is similar to TikTok’s video reply option, and provides a more intuitive, interesting way to interact within the process.

YouTube says that the functionality is rolling out to creators on iOS this week, with Android coming ‘in the coming months’.

YouTube’s also adding new Data Stories for posts, which will provide more insight into how your YouTube content is performing.

YouTube has been rolling out variations of its full-screen Data Stories cards over the last few months, which provide quick snapshots of various aspects of channel performance.

The new post analytics will give you another way to learn more about your overall channel performance, with quick, headline notes that showcase key stats.

Finally, YouTube is also adding the capacity for subscribers of a channel to become a channel member direct from the shorts feed.

“The join button will show to subscribers on Android and iOS. The goal is to give more subscribers of a channel the opportunity to support a creator through channel memberships.”

Shorts has become a key focus for YouTube, with the TikTok-style vertical video feed facilitating over 50 billion views per day, and sparking a whole new use case for the app. And it could become even bigger – with YouTube now rolling out its new Shorts monetization program, that could prove to be another lure for top creators, which could see more of them switching focus from TikTok to YouTube instead.

And with TikTok on increasingly shaky ground in the US, maybe YouTube could be the better option, and could end up ultimately winning out in the short-form video race.

These new additions are another step in advancing YouTube’s short-form video position.