- For the last 30 days,
I've been posting one short a day on my second channel,
and my goal was just to experiment
with some different formats
and figure out what works for short form content.
However, things have been going
a lot differently than anticipated,
and currently I'm getting over 5 million views a day
and I just broke 50,000 subscribers on that channel.
So in this video, I wanna take you through
my thought process between 30 days of shorts.
And I also wanna dig into some of the analytics
to show you how shorts behave over time.
And at the end of this video,
I just wanna go through some of the strategies
that I'm using when I'm making my shorts.
So I have two channels.
I have my main channel here,
which is creator education and filmmaking tutorials
and all of that.
But I have a second channel
that's dedicated to just stories from adventures.
And my whole goal with my second channel
is to do something completely different
than this main channel here.
It's two different styles of videos that I enjoy creating
and I wanted my second channel to just be storytelling.
So I've been making videos on my second channel
for a little while now.
You could see that I started this back in February, 2020
but I really didn't start posting
much content on this channel until last year.
And the videos that I've been posting on this channel
have been kind of sporadic.
It's whenever I have a chance to go shoot a story,
and be able to make one of these videos.
Oftentimes it goes around
some of the content I'm making here on this channel.
So if I have a new gimbal
or a new lens that I'm working with,
well I'll use that as an opportunity to go shoot a story.
And then I have some footage of actually making a video
that I could use here as behind the scenes
when I'm making my videos on this channel.
And then on February 1st, YouTube started monetizing shorts.
So I thought this would be a good opportunity
to really start trying out shorts on the second channel
and see what happens.
Here on my main channel,
I've been doing shorts for a little while.
I've done a whole bunch of shorts on this channel
and they've kind of worked, but nothing's really taken off.
And so I wanted to try something completely different
on the second channel, which is all story driven,
and see if I could find a format that works for shorts
and be able to grow this channel in a different way.
So on February 1st,
I decided I'm gonna post 30 shorts in 30 days,
but really just focus on the process of making 30 shorts.
And for years I've been filming my adventures
and doing a lot of travel vlogging,
so I just have a ton of content to work with
to be able to make shorts out of.
And my approach to doing these 30 shorts in 30 days
was to do just a different story with every short,
and just something simple, something digestible
something that could be told in 30, 40 seconds.
So would you stop and try this?
My wife and I were driving through Ecuador
alongside a massive canyon on our way to the Amazon.
On the side of the road,
we saw a concrete platform.
From this platform, there was a cable stretch
to the other side of the canyon.
And that's when we saw someone launch off
and go headfirst to the other side.
So I climbed up there and got harnessed up,
but instead of going headfirst,
they spun me upside down and let go.
I had no idea where I was
as I flew to the other side with my feet in the air
hundreds of feet above the river below.
Now, when I started posting these shorts
there was a certain pattern that happened with every short
within the first few days.
And what would happen is,
there would be a ton of views out of the gate
and then it would just stop.
So for this video,
I got almost 3000 views in the first hour,
and then it just flatlined.
And then nine hours later,
it took off again and then it flatlined.
And that's basically the pattern I've seen
over and over with all of my shorts.
No matter what I did with the shorts
at the beginning of this experiment,
they would have the same pattern where,
it would get a big boost of views,
whether it's a thousand views, a couple thousand views,
3000 views like this one,
and then it would just flatline and stop.
And then maybe the short would take off later and get
another thousand views and then just flatline.
And every single short had this exact same pattern.
It's a very weird thing.
It's like the YouTube algorithm is testing it,
seeing what kind of data these shorts produce,
and then pulls your video off the short shelf
and then it just sits there
until YouTube decides to test it again.
And what I found is this same pattern over and over.
And this is the same thing that's happened
on my main channel here when I'm doing shorts.
I'll see this big boost in views,
and then it just tapers off and nothing really happens.
Now this pattern continued all the way through
until about day 15 and 16 on this experiment.
And that's when I started seeing views coming in
on a couple of my videos,
and this was after that second bump.
I started seeing more of a flat line work its way up.
And I had a few shorts that were starting to go viral.
And you could see these videos
weren't getting much for a while.
And then come around the 15th,
8,000 views, 21,000 views 4200, 200, 300, 400, 400,
and then dropped back down.
And then I got another massive boost
where it went 500, a million, a million, a million,
And now these videos are getting like a million views a day,
which is absolutely crazy
because I've never seen numbers like this
on any videos here on my main channel.
But what happened when a couple of my shorts
started taking off is that,
it started boosting all of the shorts on my shorts shelf.
And so now as I produce more and more shorts,
each one is starting to get more and more of a boost,
and they're all trending upwards
without actually having this weird stepping motion.
So here's my data from this 30 day experiment.
I got 11 million views.
I gained over 12,000 subscribers
and I made just under $700.
So when it comes to shorts,
the ad revenue is much lower than long form videos.
If we go over to revenue and go to shorts
you'll see that my CPM is 6 cents.
So on 11 million views, I made $600.
So it's not very much money
for the amount of views that you're getting.
However the exposure is growing the channel.
And I think we need to pause and kind of talk about
what the purpose is of growing a channel.
So if you don't know what your purpose is
for building a channel,
you might jump into shorts
and you just try to do things that go viral
and get millions of views.
But ultimately, if you don't have a plan
of what your channel is, kind of at its core,
well, you might be making shorts in the wrong direction
and bringing in the wrong audience.
Whenever you're building a YouTube channel,
you really need to focus on who is that audience.
And whether you're making long form videos
or you're making short form videos,
you should still make content specifically for one audience
because if you could build a community around that audience
then they're gonna wanna watch everything that you produce
and not just these viral shorts of you
dancing in the street with cars rushing by you.
So there are things that will take off in shorts,
however, you don't wanna just follow trends
and go after what's trendy at that moment.
You really want to think audience first,
and what are your goals of your YouTube channel,
before you start diving in and making a ton of shorts.
For me personally, I wanna have the second channel
as a place to tell adventure stories.
And so I wanna build an audience
of people who are interested in watching adventure stories.
And so everything that I'm doing
with the shorts on this channel,
are really focused in on telling short form stories
about different adventures,
whether it's adventures that I've gone on
or just stories that I've researched and discovered.
So the whole idea is that
I'm building an audience and a community
that's gonna like the long form content
that I'm gonna be producing on this channel as well.
Because ultimately, you wanna make sure
that you're building a channel that can build a business.
And if you don't have that mindset,
you might just be putting out a ton of content
getting a ton of views, but then have no direction.
And so when it comes time to actually
build a business around what you're doing,
well, you might not have the right audience
for the channel that you're building.
And if you wanna dive deeper
into learning about how to grow a YouTube channel
and make it a sustainable business,
then make sure you head over to the Creator Film School.
That's where I have all of my education around
building a YouTube channel
and actually making it a full-time career
and something that you can build year after year after year.
'Cause ideally, you don't wanna do this for six months
and then just forget about it.
The whole idea of building a channel
is that you're building a business
that then you can sustain for years to come
and make this a business.
So for me personally, I'm building this channel
because I wanna tell adventure stories.
And I have this channel here,
because I enjoy teaching other creators
on how to make videos.
So the two sides of what I like to do in my business.
So now that these 30 days are finished,
this kind of first experiment,
I've actually extended it to 100 days.
I'm trying to do 100 shorts in 100 days
to really see what happens with the channel
by posting daily shorts for a longer period of time.
Because after the 30 days,
the channel really started to take off.
And you can see here in the last three days,
I went from 3.4 million views to 4.9 to 5 million views.
And in terms of subscribers,
I got 5,000 8,000 and 8,000
off of just these last three days.
Now that I have some shorts that have gone viral,
the audience is starting to watch
all of my other content that I have posted on the channel.
So I'm starting to see a lot of the other shorts
that didn't go viral,
starting to get a lot of views.
And what I'm finding more interesting than that
is that my long form videos
that have been just sitting on my channel
not getting any views,
are all now starting to get a little trickle of views.
It's not tons of views,
but if we look for the data for this video
where I went to an abandoned military base in Alaska,
you can see that I posted it back in July.
I've got a lot of views right outta the gate
because I put it on my community tab here on this channel.
And then it just kind of slowly grew over time,
nothing major.
A few views coming in here and there.
Then you could see right here,
you can see that I've got 1000 views on this one video,
during the same period where the shorts are taking off.
And so what I'm seeing is the trickle down effect.
I have a handful of shorts that have gone viral.
Those shorts are causing the rest of my short library
to start getting a lot of attention.
But then also my long form videos
are starting to get more views.
And I'm noticing when I go to all the analytics
for all of these videos,
the views are coming through the channel pages.
And what that means is
people are actually going to my profile
and watching my videos after seeing my short.
And so I've heard a lot of creators
over the last few months
say, don't sleep on shorts.
And it's true.
Like shorts actually do build your channel.
And so now I have a completely different viewpoint
of how shorts can work,
and how they can actually grow your channel overall.
Because personally, I enjoy making long form content.
I'm not a big fan of short form content,
but diving deeper into making shorts
is making me appreciate this format much more.
And I've come up with a lot of ideas
that I would never make a long form video around.
And so now I'm definitely seeing two types of content,
stories that fit well for shorts,
and stories that fit well for long form content,
because there's a lot of things that happen
that only need 30 seconds to tell the story.
And on the other side of things,
there's stories that will take 10, 20, 30 minutes
to tell the story.
And so I think no matter what type of content
that you're producing,
there is a world where shorts were fit.
If you can figure out which content
works best for 15, 30, 45 seconds,
because for a while, I just disregarded shorts
and I didn't really think too much of it.
But now that I've started experimenting
more and more with it,
I'm seeing the world where shorts
can really have a big impact on a channel
and the channel's performance.
And it goes back to what I was saying earlier
where you need to know what your audience is,
and you need to have your goals in mind,
so that you're not just making
a bunch of shorts to go viral,
but they're actually bringing in the wrong audience.
All right, so let me just go over some of the things
that I've personally been doing with my shorts
that I think are working pretty well.
And so the key thing for me is telling short stories,
rather than just giving like a tip
or just showing something cool that happens,
I'm trying to tell a story from beginning to end
in a short format.
And so the story format basically goes a hook,
backstory that kind of sets up what you're doing,
where you're at, the journey,
what happens when you get to the end,
and maybe a takeaway for the audience
or maybe pose a question for the audience
that makes them think.
And one of the things that I'm noticing is that
the shorts that get a lot more comments
and a lot more interaction,
are the ones that are going viral,
which makes sense because YouTube uses those metrics
to be able to judge viewer satisfaction.
So if you're getting a lot of comments,
you're getting a lot of likes,
you're just getting a lot of interaction,
well that video will probably be surfaced to more people.
And then alongside that,
you're getting a long average view duration
that might make that video take off.
So when it comes to average view duration
and audience retention,
the majority of my shorts are getting somewhere in
80 90 or 100% average view percentage.
You can see here some of my top ones,
92, 92, 104, 122, 87, 83, 94.
So all of the shorts that are doing well on my channel
are getting above 80% average view percentage.
And so I think it's important to make sure that
the shorts that you're creating
are getting watched through the end.
And it might seem daunting at first
to get those high average view percentages,
however, because of the short form content
if you're telling a story,
there's a good chance that your viewers
aren't gonna swipe out
because they wanna see what happens.
Now, in terms of the actual shooting of my shorts
I've heard some people say that
you wanna shoot everything on your smartphone
because it's more engaging with this format,
but I haven't really noticed that as a key factor
in making a short go viral or not,
with the testing that I've done.
Just the big thing that I've noticed with shorts
is just keeping things moving pretty fast,
and also putting text on screen
if you do have vocals in your short.
Now in general, most of my shorts are just voiceover.
So I'll sit down, I'll do a 30 second voiceover,
and I use an app called Captionator,
to put the text on screen,
so it's flashing on screen the entire time
what I'm saying.
That visual cue and also the voiceover of telling the story
helps keep someone watching longer
because they just wanna see what happens next.
Rather than putting just some text on screen
and lighting a bunch of visuals play,
the text popping up constantly and the voiceover
seems to keep a viewer more engaged.
At least that's what I found with my experimenting.
And so all of my videos, I have text on screen,
I do a voiceover from beginning to end,
and I've also been playing around with looping.
So a lot of times the end of my videos
will be right at the start of the video.
So if I ask a question, what would be the end of the video?
I end up putting that question right at the beginning,
so that it starts with the question, you see the video
and then the last sentence cuts off
and goes right back to the intro.
So it creates this looping effect
where people watch more than 100% of your video,
they end up watching again and again.
So overall, those are the strategies
that I'm personally using to create shorts
and I'm gonna keep this experiment going
for probably 100 days.
I wanna see what happens making 100 shorts in 100 days,
and basically telling 100 stories.
So let me know down in the comments
if you want me to do a follow-up video
where I dig into all my analytics once I hit 100 days.
And let me know if you're gonna be creating shorts
on your channel,
because I think shorts are a huge opportunity,
especially for newer creators to get discovered.
This second channel of mine, was very flatlined,
but after doing shorts,
now this channel's starting to take off.
But next, you should check out this video right here
which is an hour and a half masterclass
that goes through a ton of information
on how to grow a YouTube channel.
I'll see you over there.