YouTube's ad revenue is still shrinking, but YouTube Shorts, the engine that the video site hopes will bring it back to growth, is cranking up.

More from Fortune: 5 side hustles where you may earn over $20,000 per year—all while working from home Looking to make extra cash? This CD has a 5.15% APY right now Buying a house? Here's how much to save This is how much money you need to earn annually to comfortably buy a $600,000 home

YouTube Shorts, the company's short-form video service, is catching on with users, advertisers, and creators, company executives said during YouTube and Google-parent company Alphabet's quarterly earnings conference call this week.

Shorts is the “number one” area of focus for “YouTube’s long-term growth," Google's chief business officer Philipp Schindler said during the call, pointing to the service's rising status in the “creator ecosystem” and YouTube's own “multi-format strategy.”

"People are engaging and converting on ads across Shorts at increasing rates," Schindler said, citing growth in "watchtime" as well as monetization of the short video clips.

And creators are increasingly cottoning to Shorts: According to YouTube, the number of channels uploading daily to Shorts grew by 80% in the first quarter of 2023 versus the final three months of 2022. And Google has expanded the number of ways for marketers to put their ads in Shorts, the company said.

The momentum for YouTube Shorts comes as new YouTube CEO Neal Mohan took the company reins in March after Susan Wojicki’s nine-year tenure in its top spot. In his short time at the top of the video giant, Mohan has made Shorts an enormous priority, positioning the product as the future for creator growth, communities and content diversification.

YouTube's primacy as the dominant hub for online videos has been challenged recently by TikTok, the popular video sharing app, and YouTube's ad revenue has declined for the last three consecutive quarters. With Shorts, YouTube is trying to blunt TikTok's momentum by giving consumers and creators its own short-video offering.

Shorter videos means less space for ads, though. But Schindler said Tuesday that YouTube to "closing the gap" between the ad revenue it has traditionally racked up from longer videos on and the revenue it earns from shorter clips. Indeed, YouTube's $6.7 billion in Q1 ad revenue was down 2.6% from the year-ago period, a less brutal decline than the 7.8% drop it suffered in Q4.

Company executives on Alphabet's earnings call repeatedly stressed Shorts’ growing audiences, payouts to creators and content (mobile-optimized and maximum 60 seconds long) as the roadmap to wide-ranging corporate success for the parent company. Daily Shorts views have increased from 30 billion last spring to 50 billion today.