The limited time YouTube Stories videos are going away for good on June 26

Google's YouTube is getting rid of one of the least used formats. Today, it was revealed that YouTube Stories will not be available for creators after June 26.

The announcement was made on a Google support page, It stated:

Today, there are many ways to create on YouTube – from Community posts to Shorts, to long-form and Live. To prioritize these key features, Stories are going away. Starting on 6/26/2023 the option to create a new YouTube Story will no longer be available. Stories that are already live on that date will expire 7 days after they were originally shared.

YouTube Stories was originally launched in 2017 as YouTube Reels. At the time, the video service was feeling some competition from rivals like Snapchat and Instagram, both of which offered ways for people to post brief videos that would later disappear after a certain period of time,

YouTube Reels, which switched over to using the name Stories in 2018, was made for channels that had 10,000 or more subscribers, which made it inaccessible to many more casual YouTube creators. The uploaded videos would disappear after seven days, and users could even have multiple Stories, with each having several videos, live at the same time.

However, the format never really caught on with most YouTube creators. However, in 2020, it did launch another short-form video format, called YouTube Shorts. Like Stories, Shorts was created as a response to the rising popularity of another social network, this time TikTok.

Shorts allow creators to upload brief clips, or a series of brief clips, into one longer, but still brief, video. Originally, the length of each Short was 15 seconds but since the launch, it has expanded to 60 seconds. Users can also quickly remix content from their longer videos for new Shorts. They are designed to be easy to make with the YouTube smartphone app.

In the end, the appeal of Shorts quickly superseded that of Stories, so it's a simple choice for YouTube to get rid of the less popular short-form format.