YouTube is rolling out a way for creators to organise Shorts into seasons and episodes, giving serialised formats a clearer place on the platform.
The Shorts Series feature, announced at Made on YouTube, adds custom thumbnails and sequential playback to help viewers find and follow multi-part stories. It is beginning to roll out to creators now.
The move comes as YouTube reports that microdramas generated more than 6.5bn views in the first half of 2026. Watch time for the genre grew by more than 50% year on year, according to the company, while microdrama views on TV rose by more than 90%. YouTube also says TV is now the most-watched interface for more than half of its top 100 creators.
In a column setting out a series of broad announcements, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said the platform receives more than 20 million video uploads a day. He outlined plans for custom homepage feeds that viewers will be able to create with conversational prompts and save for automatically updated recommendations.
Production tools are also being expanded. A conversational editor for Shorts and the YouTube Create app will let creators generate a first cut and request changes such as trimming pauses or reordering material. In YouTube Studio, creators will be able to seek guidance on early drafts, generate thumbnails suited to their channel and test up to three different video cuts to see which holds attention best.
Mohan said Studio was becoming an “end-to-end creative partner” for production, packaging and channel strategy. YouTube is also bringing likeness detection to mobile and plans to combine speaking voice and facial detection to improve its matching of potentially unauthorised uses of a creator’s identity.
YouTube announced live stream competitions between creators, real-time automatic dubbing for live broadcasts and an extension of its “Watch With” reaction feature to long-form videos. It also plans to extend Ask Studio, its AI assistant for creators, to help them respond to brand briefs and prepare pitches. In addition, YouTube plans to expand its Shopping affiliate programme to 35 countries by the end of the year, while product tags will show offers localised to a viewer’s market.
