I just completed a 30-day test of running Shorts on my channel. One new short every single day for
30 days now a lot of people ask questions about whether to run shorts on their main Channel
whether shorts can actually help them grow their Channel how it might interact with your other
content so I decided not to change anything about the way I was publishing regular videos or my live
streams I just added in a short every single day for 30 days now the first question probably is
why 30 days no particular reason I just thought about a month might give me some data one thing
I knew going into this is I didn't want to just make shorts and put them up sometimes I think
creators make the mistake thinking all shorts are created equal and either they will work or they
won't work I've said since day one that you really need to develop a shorts content strategy and then
try to implement it the strategy for my channel was actually pretty simple whatever I published
today I'm always thinking well what's going to get that viewer to watch again tomorrow I started with
a very simple Community tab post on my channel and a tweet that coincided with it that talked about
the idea of trying to learn something new and how if you just took a moment every morning to learn
one simple thing imagine how far you could be if you did that every single day over the course
of a year that's actually how I taught myself to play piano so knowing that I had had some longer
form content that did actually pretty well on the channel called DaVinci Resolve for noobs I thought
it would be cool to do an entire short Series where every day I dropped a single tip for someone
who's new to using DaVinci Resolve show them one feature or show them one quick tip that can help
them learn to use the software better my thought was if one of these is valuable then many of them
should be valuable too I also wanted to see if any of the things that we already know about
edited content and how that works together over time applied to how shorts might work together
as a group so let's dive into some of the data now I've taken all these videos and put them together
in a group in in my analytics so that all the data we're looking at is every one of those
videos combined now here in advanced mode we're looking at sort of the standard things we would
see in any video we're looking at views watch time subscribers Revenue average view duration
Impressions and click-through rate now you might be thinking to yourself why are we looking at
Impressions and click-through rate one of the things you want to think about is that shorts
can be served in places other than the short shelf like recommendation or search or even in Channel
pages but one of the things I really want to look at is how these shorts performed on the short
shelf itself so let's add in two other metrics to this data shown in feed so we know how often these
shorts were being shown to people in that short shelf and let's also add in viewed versus swiped
away so that'll give us an idea of how many times when those shorts were presented to somebody in
the short shelf they took the time to watch or if they swiped past it another thing I wanted to look
at was some of the subscriber metrics one of the things I hear from creators on a lot of the time
is they think that shorts push away their regular subscribers from the channel and might even get
them to unsubscribe if they start seeing shorts now YouTube has told us that they're changing
the way these shorts are being surfaced and not everybody gets a notification when a short goes
live and it should be targeted more towards people who actually do enjoy watching the shorts from
different channels so for this test I did leave all of the notifications on as I would with any
other video now as we're looking here we're just seeing how many subscribers overall these shorts
gained but let's add a few more metrics in to get a better idea of what was really going on let's
add in two different metrics here subscribers gained and subscribers lost now when we look
at the actual subscriber data I gained about 1147 new subscribers from this short series and I lost
about 41. now some people get really triggered when they find out they're losing subscribers at
all but if you look at my channel averages I tend to lose between fifteen hundred and two thousand
subscribers every single month overall that's actually really common for a channel my size it's
the subscribers gained number that offsets all of that that we're always trying to keep higher
my subscribers gain can vary anywhere between four thousand to thirty thousand depending on
the month so when I look at that 41 subscribers loss that's actually proportionately very low
for my channel shorts didn't seem to push a lot of subscribers away they actually brought more people
to the channel than anything else now when I was making these shorts I started off really gung-ho
I made three to five and I would get them all set up and get them scheduled to go live and that was
actually a really good feeling to have all these videos in place knowing that they were right there
in the chamber and I didn't have to do anything every day they would just publish automatically
but I will say as time rolled on as simple as you think it would be to make shorts that actually
became quite a workload every day making sure I had a new short that was going to drop now I
was actually learning as I was creating these shorts a lot of people will see one short do
well and another short not do well and they think that there's some crazy thing going on
with YouTube that they don't understand or that YouTube is playing some crazy games with these
shorts but as we've learned not all videos are created equal it really comes down to how each
one impacts the target audience now you'd think some of the shorts that were up for the longest
amount of time would have the most views and the most subscribers but that really wasn't the case
some of the ones I made much later into the series started doing very well for views and subscribers
now that could have been because of some momentum of the earlier ones starting to move the whole set
forward or it could have been the targeting for that specific short maybe the topic was just a
little more informative for the people who were trying to learn DaVinci Resolve one thing I did
learn pretty quickly is I had been starting all of these shorts out with the exact same
format and titling structure it had an intro it had the information and at the end I would push
them back towards a longer form video teaching people how to get started with DaVinci Resolve
what I noticed about halfway through this cycle is everything started flatlining these shorts weren't
really popping when I was dropping them no matter what day they went out people didn't seem to be
really responding overall and they were just kind of stuttering there so halfway through I decided
to do something different and I just changed the titling structure and the structure of the shirt
itself I removed the ending pushing back towards longer form content with the idea of thinking well
people who are enjoying this were getting hit with that same message day after day maybe that was a
little too needy of Me Maybe I was coming across as an askhole, always asking for that thing every
single day so I took that out and I also looked at the titling now I know the title sits right over
the short superimposed and people can see it as they're watching the short and in the beginning
I started all of them with DaVinci Resolve for noobs but what I did was I reversed that so that
the title started with exactly what someone would learn every single day with each short I will say
I noticed an immediate Improvement shorts went from coming out being number nine or number 10
and they jump right up to always being in the top three is that just because of those changes
kind of hard to say exactly but it was such a noticeable change exactly when I changed
the strategy that I think that started connecting with viewers better that's a really positive sign
because it does give us the idea that titles might actually matter for shorts now when I got to that
30 day Mark I just stopped and I did that for two reasons one I wanted to see what happens with the
momentum when you just stop publishing these videos and to be quite honest I was getting a
little burnt out doing that many I know that's not a lot to some people but it was a lot of work on
top of my regular workload let's look a little more closely at the data from that 30 days now
some interesting stats here is that that entire short series drove over a hundred and eighteen
thousand views added almost 1300 subscribers to the channel added about 930 watch time hours but
if you notice the minute I stopped publishing those shorts everything dropped off the views
dropped off the amount of subscribers that they were driving dropped off and the amount of times
that they were shown in feed dropped off another interesting thing is that if you look at the
traffic sources and switch over to something other than the shorts feed you'll see that all of those
recommendations started dropping off as well one thing I did notice is these shorts had absolutely
no negative effect on my regular video performance during that time frame now an obvious question is
how will these 30 videos perform moving forward will the fact that I stopped publishing these
shorts every day lose momentum for the series will they continue to keep going on and driving
more and more views did these shorts actually start working together so that publishing more
of them was more effective than just publishing fewer if I started publishing daily shorts again
on the same topic would those new shorts help rejuvenate the performance of the previous ones
and another important question is are the things that I'm saying right now actually setting up for
future shorts and giving people an expectation and a reason to watch some future videos for me
I'll keep you posted on how this series performs as we move forward but if you want to learn more
about how to make better content and grow your YouTube channel click on the video
that I have on screen now or the one that I'll link down below keep creating peace