YouTube’s looking to help creators drive more traffic from Shorts, with a new option that will enable you to link a Shorts clip to a longer video, in order to merge Shorts viewers over to your extended offerings.

As you can see in this example, with the new process, you’ll be able to add a YouTube link to any Short that you’ve created, via a new option within YouTube Studio. That link will then be displayed in the description of the Short, along with a play button to encourage users to tap through. And once they do, they’ll be taken to the relevant video, aligned with the Short, effectively expanding their content experience.

It could be a good way to better link short and long-form content, which is fast becoming a key avenue to YouTube growth and success.

Shorts clips are now viewed by over 2 billion YouTube users every month, driving over 50 billion views every day. It’s the fastest-growing content format in the app, but a key limitation with Shorts is that it’s harder to monetize short-form content, because you can’t add pre- or mid-roll ads into such short clips.

That’s where this option could be particularly valuable. By providing direct linkage from a short to your longer uploads, that could help to drive channel subscriptions, direct from Shorts engagement. So while you wouldn’t be monetizing your short-form videos as such, it will make it easier to gain more monetizable traffic from your short clips.

And again, with Shorts consumption rising so fast, this has become a key consideration for all video creators.

I mean, if you’re creating the content anyway, why not make a shorter version to align with the trend?

YouTube’s currently testing the new link format, with the option set to be made available to all creators sometime next month.