- How do I get discovered on YouTube,
especially as a smaller creator?
It's one of those big thinking questions
we get asked all the time.
Well, this might be the feature that allows you to do that.
And this might be the golden word that gets you in there.
But let me stress that word again,
might
- [Narrator] VidIQ - [Instructor] VidIQ
- [Announcer] VidIQ.com.
- All right then, let me give you a brief history
of what I'm talking about here.
On the YouTube mobile app now, when you're watching videos,
if you scroll down through the suggested videos,
you'll see this section called stories and short videos.
Now this is a collection of YouTube stories,
which not all of you have access to.
And vertical format videos of less than 60 seconds.
Which any creator can record and publish.
I'm sure you'll all agree having one of your videos
appear on that shelf is prime discovery real estate.
Let me give you an example.
MrBeast, the Uber popular youtuber,
when he pushes out videos,
they typically get tens of millions of views
in their first week.
Just imagine if you could get all of those eyeballs
in front of your video content
through this stories and short video shelf.
Well, that's exactly what happened for this creator
on this video,
and he got a quarter of a million views because of it.
This all seems fantastic, doesn't it?
But here is the real challenge.
How on earth do you get your videos onto this shelf?
Now channel size doesn't seem to be a factor,
since this channel only has 1700 subscribers,
and yet they're appearing on a video
from a channel with 40 million subscribers.
That doesn't usually happen.
And when it comes to optimizing your topic and keyword
to connect yourself to these videos.
Well, that seems even more disconnected.
I mean, maybe there's a key word connection between islands
and planets and moons,
but Tom Holland,
come on that's a bit of a stretch.
If you want to know more about the backstory
of this feature,
you can watch this video over here.
But at the end of it, I was left confused.
There's no rhyme or reason as to
why these videos were appearing where they were.
It all seemed very random until now.
If you don't have access to the shorts camera yet,
don't worry, we'll come back to that in a second,
you can still upload your existing vertical videos
that are less than 60 seconds using the hash tag,
hash tag shorts in the title or description.
We'll be testing out a section on the YouTube homepage
to highlight videos created from the shorts camera,
as well as any vertical video up to 60 seconds,
that has been uploaded to YouTube.
Let's just remind ourselves of those important steps.
If you want your content to potentially appear
as a short video for many, many views,
it has to be in a vertical video format,
less than 60 seconds long
and include hashtag shorts
in the video title or video description.
Now let's talk about YouTube Tik Tok.
I mean YouTube shorts.
I will leave a link to this article
in the video description.
But essentially YouTube shorts is
what YouTube stories is right now,
but with a few new camera tools,
and I think they're gonna change the name.
On the homepage of the mobile app,
YouTube already has a dedicated section for stories.
But the problem with this, is it's restricted to creators
who have over 10,000 subscribers.
Now currently, as of time of recording,
YouTube shorts is in beta.
And it's only available to the Indian audience on YouTube.
Having said that, for the rest of the world,
you're not completely cut off from YouTube shorts,
you just can't use these extra camera tools
that YouTube are talking about.
That's why they've enabled this,
I guess, backdoor entry into YouTube shorts
by including the hashtag shorts.
Yes, this is starting to sound a little convoluted
and YouTube, you're segmenting up your video content,
which is, yeah, a little confusing.
So what's gonna happen in the future?
All right then, having said all of this
is it having an noticeable positive impacts
on YouTube channels who are trying this out?
Let's investigate.
All right then, since you have to include hashtag shorts
in your video title or description
for it to potentially appear in one of the shelves,
that means it's searchable on YouTube.
So that's exactly what we're gonna do.
We're gonna search for hashtag shorts and see what comes up.
What we're also gonna do at the same time
is filter the video results by last 24 hours.
Because this story was announced today,
as of time of recording.
Look at the very top here, we see a channel, Ninja Monkey
with 2000 subscribers.
It's testing out hashtag shorts both in the title
and in the description.
But unfortunately, the video has only got 15 views,
which would be considered,
I would say disaster for that channel of that size.
Another one here as well with 5000 subscribers,
trying my first hashtag shorts with two views.
Yeah, this is looking a little grim, isn't it?
And as I scrolled down, I saw many more channels,
trying shorts and getting almost no views.
The only channel I could find that had any success here,
was Nurture Knowledge.
They uploaded a video 17 hours ago,
they have 70 subscribers, and the video got 400 views.
So you will consider that some sort of success.
But there's nothing massively amazing
going on here right now, is there?
Yeah, remember what I said at the start of this video?
Might. I think it's clear now
that YouTube wants to take
a huge slice out of Tik Tok's pie,
when it comes to the short form,
vertical video format market.
The problem is YouTube have established themselves
over the last 15 years
as a different video distribution platform.
And the way they're implementing these new tools
is very confusing for existing creators on the platform.
We as creators want to know how to maximize these new tools
to the best of our abilities as quickly as possible.
Because in six to 12 months time,
everybody in YouTube is probably gonna be
making YouTube shorts.
And the window of opportunity may have gone.
There are still a lot of unknowns,
especially how to get your content
to be seen on the shelves consistently.
And following on from that,
does it positively impacts your channel?
Because you may be getting views, but not much watch time.
And how do you monetize any of this content?
Because ads don't appear currently,
on the stories and short video shelf.
You just swipe from one video to the next.
Over the past couple of days,
all the creators here at vidIQ,
have been having internal discussions about
what you might do with these short videos.
Do you just upload them to your channel as usual?
Or do you start a brand new channel
that's dedicated solely to shorts?
And the answer right now, is I just don't know.
That's why we're testing shorts,
but not to a massive degree on the vidIQ channel.
We just wanna know what's gonna happen,
when we upload these type of videos.
So I'm afraid right now the saga continues.
We don't have a conclusive answer to short videos,
YouTube stories, YouTube shorts,
whatever you too wanna call it.
I think that's part of a problem right now.
But we will continue to investigate,
and if we do crack this nut,
your calls will be the first to know.
Enjoy the rest of your all video making day.
(upbeat music)