- This is a problem many YouTube creators
are struggling with.
Why do all of the views I get on my YouTube Shorts
not transitioned over to my long form content?
Well, finally, we have an answer.
YouTube, in their own words, literally broke the algorithm.
(upbeat music)
You probably already know who this fellow is, right?
Mr. Beast, 100 million subscribers, yada, yada, yada
but that's not who we're interested in today.
This is Todd from YouTube,
and he probably knows more about search discovery
and the YouTube recommendation system
than anyone else in existence.
The pair recently sat down together at VidCon.
which is massively sponsored by TikTok these days,
to chat about YouTube.
The whole conversation that covered several topics
over 45 minutes is available to watch on YouTube,
and I'll leave a link to it just below if you'd like.
But what I wanna focus on today is an admission from Todd
that when it comes to discovery,
YouTube Shorts and YouTube long form content
don't necessarily communicate with each other.
And this, in a nutshell, is why.
One of the foundational elements
of YouTube recommendations are personalization.
YouTube will look at what's in your watch history
and recommend content based
off of that data. (bell rings)
YouTube have pretty much perfected
this personalized recommendation system
through a near infinite amount of data
over a long period of time for long form landscape content.
But what happens when you throw a massive curve ball
into that recommendation system?
Well, that's exactly what Shorts did.
For over a decade,
YouTube viewing habits were quite predictable.
People watch maybe several videos
over the course of an hour or two,
but then, and all of a sudden,
people could watch 50 videos in 10 minutes,
and that changed the way
the recommendation system understood the viewer.
- When the algorithm saw a viewer, oh look,
the last 200 videos this viewer watched
were all under a minute,
this viewer is like they only wanna watch short videos.
And so, it basically stopped recommending
those viewers long form content.
- It wasn't long before YouTube users started to notice this
and complain about it.
And that obviously leads to two major red flags for YouTube.
First and foremost, YouTube's algorithms
or the recommendation system,
all of a sudden, was failing in its primary objective
to serve the audience content they want to watch.
And as a result of this,
viewers are likely to spend less time on the platform.
And you can imagine that the data sets coming
from YouTube Shorts was sudden and massive.
Billions of new daily views interfering
with existing personalized viewing preferences.
So what was YouTube's solution to all of this?
Well, it was really quite simple.
- The algorithm doesn't know hand how to handle Shorts
and and treat that the right way.
So we're gonna split off the history for the viewers.
So when a viewer goes into the main YouTube,
we're gonna not pay attention to what shorts they watch,
because we don't want the algorithm to get the wrong idea.
- So a simple and convenient fix for the viewer,
but a baffling and frustrating penalty for creators.
Does that basically mean that a viewer
could watch 999 YouTube Shorts on your channel,
but not get recommended that one long form piece of content?
- If a viewer does discover a channel in Shorts
(bell rings) and then goes back
to long form, (buzzer blares)
right now, the system doesn't actually know
that they discovered that channel,
because we disconnected it.
- Okay, this goes all the way back to 2020
when YouTube first introduced short form content
on the platform.
Back then, I questioned whether these two
very different viewing experiences could coexist.
I thought that YouTube might develop
a completely independent app.
So you might end up with YouTube,
YouTube Kids, and YouTube Shorts,
but, alas, I was wrong, and YouTube integrated Shorts
into the main app.
And to their credit, it's been more or less seamless
with these one or two exceptions.
So if you are wondering why the success
of your Shorts content seems to struggle
with the transition to long form content,
it's because from a recommendation data perspective,
YouTube ignores anything positive your Shorts are doing.
Essentially, your long forms are starting from scratch,
but none of this means that your long form videos
will never get any views.
Put simply, and has always been the case,
your long form videos actually need to be good.
They need to satisfy the viewer.
And once those videos start doing that,
YouTube will serve them up to the right audience.
The responsibility still lies upon you to make good videos.
And it might be that you are a very capable,
skilled Shorts creator,
not as good at making long form content or vice versa.
They are very different creative disciplines.
I mean, I've been aware of YouTube Shorts
for probably longer than 99.9% of you
who are watching this video,
but it doesn't make me any better a Shorts creator.
We've not got enough Shorts views on this channel,
because we've not dedicated enough time and effort into it.
So yes, you may be getting a lot of views on your Shorts,
but if you're not getting any views
on your long form content,
it's because those videos aren't very good yet.
And then let's think about this disconnect
between long form content and short form content
in terms of discovery.
- There isn't much of a bridge from short to long forms.
- So doesn't that mean, theoretically,
that you can test, experiment,
and post as many Shorts as you want,
and it won't impact the rest of your channel?
I'm not sure if I'm confident enough to suggest
that as an actual strategy, it's just a Rob Wilson musing.
But what Todd did say is that they're looking
to rebuild that bridge back into the system.
So you have been warned.
But if all of this has wetted your appetite
to start making Shorts on your YouTube channel,
then check out the complete beginners guide over here,
because you're gonna start seeing a few more Shorts
on the vidIQ channel.