YouTube have announced that the monthly active user count of Shorts, their TikTok rival, has reached 1.5 million.

Google made the announcement on Wednesday, titling themselves as ‘the multiplatform creator’.

YouTube introduced Shorts as a way to keep up with the social media trend of short-form video content, following in the footsteps of the previously popular Vine platform, and to take on the extremely popular ByteDance Ltd platform, TikTok.

The pandemic saw TikTok’s popularity grow rapidly worldwide, and it now boasts an official monthly active user count of one billion.

Meta have also sought to capitalize on the social media trend with Instagram Reels. While the company have not made a statement disclosing monthly users, they have stated that 20% of time spent on the platform is comprised of ‘Reels’ consumption.

Google has announced that ads would be coming to shorts soon, after announcing that the traffic on shorts had affected into YouTube’s main site ad revenue. According to YouTube in 2019, the main site has over 2 billion monthly visitors.