Are YouTube Shorts Worth It?

youtube short video size Are YouTube Shorts good for growing a channel? Quite surprisingly, a good proportion of my YouTube Shorts (beyond the ones shown in this screengrab) gained several hundred views. That video made up over 1,300 of all my views. All followed the same format - text captions over stock video. I posted one short video per day for 30 days, around the same time each afternoon. Over 30 days, I gained 53 subscribers and lost 7, giving a final total of 46 - over one per day, not too shabby. Over 30 days, my videos were viewed 8,185 times. And just to cap that off, above you can see that just 0.1% of my views came from YouTube suggesting my videos. Perhaps unsurprisingly (since it’s a new feature that YouTube wants to promote), a huge majority (94.5%) of my views came through the Shorts section on the YouTube app - there’s a Short Videos section a little way down the mobile app home screen.

Th᠎is c᠎ontent has be en generat᠎ed by GSA Cont᠎en᠎t ᠎Generator DE MO!

If you’re shooting videos on-the-fly, too, rather than piecing Shorts together like I did, you can push them out with even more ease. If you’re totally new to YouTube Shorts, you might want to check out my full guide to them here - complete with a full explanation and tips for optimising Shorts videos for success. Barely any traffic came from external sources (to be expected, I didn’t share the videos elsewhere and only a fraction of people shared them on my behalf). And as far as search traffic goes, hardly any views either - just 0.6% of the total came through search. Based on my experiment and the idea of YouTube Shorts as a whole, are they worth making to grow your channel’s views and subscriber base? For existing channels, Shorts seem like a neat idea to engage your audience with off-the-cuff clips, but do be aware that YouTube hasn’t yet separated long-from watch time analytics from Shorts, so your channel’s average view duration will likely take a hit. Let’s deep-dive into my YouTube Analytics to see what happened over the 30 days of posting shorts. In this blog post, I’m going to show you exactly what happened when I used only YouTube Shorts to grow a brand new YouTube channel - showing you my views, watch time, and subscriber count after 30 days and 30 videos.

I tracked the results in YouTube Analytics, taking account of views, watch time, and subscribers. Subscribers gained from Shorts do count towards this total. All but one of the subscribers was gained on the watch page of a video, with one subscribing from my channel page. After that, I’ll discuss the results and tell you whether I think YouTube Shorts are worth it as a way to grow a new YouTube channel or promote the growth of your existing one. Here is an example of one of the videos I posted. Since my videos were all 45-60 seconds long, not that many people will have reached the end - where my call to action to subscribe was. People were engaging with a brand new channel made up only of Shorts, and I was able to gain a subscriber or two per day, despite the data suggesting that not many of them would have made it to my “hit subscribe” call to action at the end of each video. The algorithm seems to favour new Shorts, but disregard them afterwards. It appears that, for a whole host of reasons (recency, length, SEO, popularity, etc.), the YouTube algorithm wasn’t giving them much visibility to desktop users of the site - 99% of my views were on mobile devices.

This content has been generat ed wi th GSA Content᠎ Gen er᠎ator Dem᠎oversi on!

YouTube is seemingly promoting Shorts (for now) and I was able to generate hundreds of views for many videos with relatively little effort. Are you looking to use YouTube Shorts as a way to get more views and subscribers, and to grow your channel? I bought an e-bike last year and know that it is an area of growth, so I wanted to use YouTube shorts as a way to answer frequently asked questions about e-bikes; stuff that prospective buyers or new owners might have. And if you’re looking to monetise your channel, then you can’t rely on Shorts alone, because at the time of writing they don’t count towards the 4,000-hour per year watch time requirement that YouTube requires before you can apply for monetization. As you can see above, the average watch time for my videos remained pretty consistent for the whole duration of the experiment. The average watch time per video was 21 seconds.

This da ta was w᠎ri tten with GSA Conte nt ᠎Ge ne rato᠎r DEMO.