- YouTubers are complaining, nothing new there.
Apparently, as always, something really fishy is going on
with the YouTube algorithm.
All of this lot are saying
that their YouTube Shorts views are being limited
and affecting the views coming into their longform content.
Could it be true?
Well, let's find out.
Let's uncover why you're feeling that way.
Let's have a look at everything we know
about the YouTube Shorts algorithm, and most importantly,
what should you do about it?
So I think we'll all admit that the YouTube Shorts journey
so far can be best described as turbulent.
The algorithm has been at best, unpredictable,
because it's changed so much in the last couple of years.
However, none of us can deny nor escape
that YouTube Shorts are booming.
YouTube won't ever admit it, but they were late
to this particular video party, shortform, vertical clips.
Instagram and in particular, TikTok,
have caused massive disruption with the industry,
but YouTube, to their credits, have recovered fast
and very successfully.
Just 80 months after its official launch,
YouTube claims that there are now 1.5 billion Short users
and I still can't quite believe this figure,
50 billion Shorts views every single day.
Now, if that number is to be believed,
that would be the equivalent of every single person
on the planet doing this eight times a day.
Now, YouTube, I don't believe you.
Regardless of these facts,
YouTube Shorts are definitely here to step.
They still present a fantastic opportunity for quick growth
and questionable opportunities to make money, at least now.
Who knows what's going to happen in the future,
but I think it is fair to say that generally speaking,
most creators, YouTube tends to be more generous
with their payouts to creators.
I'm sure there'll be some raging in the comments right now,
but underneath this layer of growth
and successful YouTube Shorts creator stories,
there's a usual struggle in strife.
The official line, according to YouTube, is that,
"Creators who produce both Shorts and longform videos
see better overall watch time and subscriber growth,
compared to those producing only longform format videos."
And this would ring true with these creators
whose views have increased dramatically
since focusing on YouTube Shorts,
and at the top of YouTube Shorts mountain,
we have outliers such as the Pink Shirt Couple,
who literally gathered in nine and a half million fans
from Shorts in around about three months,
but what about the flip side of the experience,
when you don't handpick the very best examples
of YouTube Shorts creators?
We're talking about the rank and file of YouTube here,
the communities, Reddit, yeah, the experiences on there
are somewhat polarizing.
One of the biggest issues we've seen so far
and I'm hoping this is just a temporary bug
is there are a considerable amount of complaints
about people uploading Shorts and literally getting
zero views and absolutely no engagement even though
they've already uploaded videos in the past reviews
and maybe have a few hundred subscribers.
Now remember, when it comes to YouTube Shorts,
viewers typically don't have a choice.
They don't have a bundle of titles and thumbnails
to pick from.
A viewer goes onto the Shorts feed and YouTube serves up
what it thinks a viewer may want to watch next,
but if your Short is literally getting zero views,
that means that YouTube is literally not giving
your Short a chance.
However, there is a solution to that,
although it's a little bit bonkers.
- If your YouTube Short is stuck at one view,
here's a little trick you can try.
All right, so what I'm gonna do
is re-upload the clip onto YouTube.
So the video with one view, I'm actually just going
to make it unlisted for now.
All right, I'm making the new video public
so let's see what happens.
So it's a day later and we're at 176 views
as opposed to being stuck at one.
- YouTube's working properly,
that shouldn't really happen should it?
Still, if you've had success doing that,
let us know in the comments below.
Next, we have a far more common phenomenon,
which are viewer waves,
which makes a YouTube Shorts algorithm
look somewhat basic and exploitable.
It sometimes looks like Shorts go through two cycles.
The first round is where the algorithm tries to figure out
the value of the content to determine
if it's worth pushing and check if it could go viral.
If your audience engages in a second cycle,
your video will pushed out to a much wider audience
and they might enjoy the content.
I even coined a phrase for this weird algorithm called
the Shorts surge, and then I challenge myself
to say that fast 10 times and I nearly broke
my teeth and my tongue,
and then we have a humankind creator problem, viewer revolt.
There are YouTube educators, like myself, telling you
to explore YouTube Shorts, but they are killing your channel
because your viewers hate Shorts being shoved
down their throats, but remember, YouTube's official line,
"Creators who produce longs and Shorts,
see better performance on their longform content as well."
And to hammer home the success of Shorts,
out of the top 10 most viewed US YouTube channels,
eight are Short channels, some of which are getting
350 million views a week.
As we dig deeper into this,
the messaging gets really unclear, doesn't it?
Should I make YouTube Shorts or not?
How are they going to affect my channel?
And I guess the reason we still have to ask this
is because last year, YouTube did actually acknowledge
they had a problem with the YouTube Shorts algorithm.
- [Speaker] 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 viewer's longform content.
Algorithm doesn't know how to handle Shorts
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.
- As a part of the growing pains of Shorts,
YouTube had to employ that quick fix last year.
So for a period of time, the success of your Shorts
was having no impact on your longform content,
but since then, YouTube has reversed
that algorithmic temporary fix,
but having said that, we still see consistently
of examples where people are getting tons of views
on Shorts and they just do not translate
into their longform content on the same channel.
Now, as an anecdote, we can give you vidIQ's experiences
of Shorts combined with longs.
To date, we haven't had that much success with Shorts
about 15 to 20,000 views per Short
and then they tend to die away.
Our longform videos consistently get more views
than Shorts, which I appreciate, sounds a little weird,
but since we started posting four YouTube Shorts a week,
combined with two or three longform videos,
the performance of our longform videos has increased.
Is our longform content doing better because we post Shorts?
I doubt it, I just think the quality
of our longform videos has improved.
Now, let's talk about YouTube's biggest rival
to shortform content, a platform that might not even exist
in 12 months time.
Why is it that some creators see tons more views on TikTok
with exactly the same content that when they're put
onto YouTube Shorts, don't perform at all?
We've even had this happen.
We've won our colleagues here at vidIQ.
Hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok and Instagram
and barely anything on Shorts.
Well, the simple answer is the algorithms are different.
Viewers watching habits on different platforms
is obviously different,
which means that the discovery engines
behind those platforms are different
and YouTube Shorts is just another one of those platforms,
but here's where YouTube differs
to potentially your advantage even with shortform content.
YouTube remains the second largest search engine
on the internet and I believe they are trying
to incorporate search into YouTube Shorts.
We've experienced it ourselves.
Some of our YouTube Shorts do get traffic from search.
So if you are an education /how to /solution-based channel,
there is still help for you when it comes to Shorts.
Listen, we get it.
The cherry picked success stories at YouTube shows us
in the media would suggest that Shorts is incredibly easy
to be successful at, but they're not.
Yes, they're quicker to make,
but that doesn't make them easier to make.
It requires an entirely different creative discipline.
Even we are struggling with Shorts right now,
but we're determined to keep plugging away
to make them a success for your YouTube education,
and if you're completely lost and you need
the complete beginner's guide to making YouTube Shorts,
then you might wanna start right here.