Hey there!

It's Lauren here today! If you create YouTube shorts or have been thinking about starting a YouTube channel and maybe getting into Shorts, I have some interesting insights to share with you that might make you think twice about your content strategy.

I recently started a new business and YouTube channel with my brother called Mindful Max. It's all about mindfulness and mental health in our social media, device, and dopamine-driven world.

We just started the YouTube channel about 2 months ago, so it's still really new.

We weren't sure if we wanted to post shorts because we already knew that long-form content was where the real money was at. For example, 11.2 million views on a short can earn you around $536 but an average of 4 million views per month on long-form content can earn you $30,0000. (1) 🤯

But we decided to try it anyway and boy were the results shocking. Night and day difference.

• We were getting an average of 200-300 views on our long-form content. No bueno.
• The underperforming shorts were getting an average of 450 views, but then one hit 1k and then 10k and then 15k views.

Our little channel of 40 subs was suddenly up to 295 and we thought hey, this is great! We'll use Shorts to grow the channel and get subscribers while we also publish long-form content alongside it.

The Problem

As our shorts started growing in views and subscribers, our long-form content started performing worse and worse.

The 200-600 views our long-form content was averaging were suddenly decimated.

Our 5th video published barely scratched 100 views.

Our 6th video published got 17 views...

Whomp whomp.

At this point, after diving into our channel and video analytics, I noticed that the audience watching the Shorts was noticeably younger than the audience watching our long-form videos. This was concerning because we didn't really want to attract a much younger audience that was more susceptible to quick swiping and shorter view time.

The real problem is that when you publish a new video, YouTube tests it out with a small audience first. As you start getting subscribers, this test audience is largely going to be your existing audience (or at least this is what the "experts" speculate and it makes sense because this seems to be how most social algorithms operate to some extent). There are two damning parts to this problem:

1. Your Shorts audience doesn't bother to click in the first place. A large portion of Shorts viewers do not watch long-form content. This tanks your new video's click-through rate (CTR). Not a good place to start...
2. The smaller percentage that DOES click through is likely only watching the first 10-20 seconds because they're more interested in Shorts anyway. This tanks your retention rate, or the rate at which people stick around to watch your full video. Another REALLY important signal to YouTube on whether or not your video is worth watching.

So based on your test audience, your video has a poor CTR and retention rate. Your horse has sprained its ankle before it has even made it out of the gate... 🏇 Even if your video is shown to a sample new audience, those other initial metrics are going to be pretty hard to overcome...

So, does this mean that Shorts aren't worth it at all?

Not necessarily.

Are Shorts Worth It?

From all of the data and research that I poured over this morning, it seems that Shorts do work for a very small subset of creators.

• They seem to work better on more established channels who already have a large and stable audience.
• They seem to work better for creators whose Shorts are very closely related to their long-form content.

But even we fall into the second category because our Shorts are just clips from our long-form content. They're working for people like Ali Abdaal. This guy has a 3-step formula to create Shorts that will work better for your channel, but it's certainly not foolproof. We check all 3 boxes and they certainly are seeming to do more harm than good for our channel.

I think everyone has to make this call for themselves, but there are quite a few recent videos (also from highly reputable YouTubers) that are starting to form the same opinions about this and they have a lot of data to back it up. I even poured through hundreds of comments on these videos because there are so many other YouTubers who validate these opinions with their own experiences with Shorts.

Ultimately, Shorts may be more of a vanity metric for most people that isn't just worthless in terms of value but could actually be harmful.

Virality vs. Sustainability and Long-Term YouTube Success

Finally, I came across another video from Think Media that I thought raised some really interesting topics.

These are topics that we preach ALL the time at Create and Go: the importance of building a community around your business.

The long-term sustainability of your business depends on your ability to create a loyal audience around your brand: people who support you and engage with you. These are the people that buy from you - again and again.

Virality feels good because it's instant gratification, but it turns into a vanity metric when those subscribers bring no real value to your business. But they aren't just empty subscribers, because that would be fine. No harm done.

Instead, these subscribers don't click, don't watch, and don't buy. They bring down your engagement scores, which is a death sentence in the algorithm.

So you have to ask yourself: What kind of subscribers do I want to attract?

As he states in the video linked above (paraphrasing): "I'd rather have a smaller, highly engaged audience than a larger, unengaged audience."

This is exactly what we've found in our various online businesses over the years. The engaged audience is the one that brings in all the money.

If you want sustainable, long-term success on YouTube, you need to build it the right way.

Shorts Only?

​Some people in the videos that I've linked have said that they have created a Shorts-only YouTube channel where they ONLY share Shorts.

I find this idea really interesting and also appealing because we will continue to create Shorts no matter what. After all, we're repurposing them for TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest. It would be a shame NOT to post them on YouTube when the content is created anything.

But we haven't made a final decision about whether to create a Shorts-only channel yet, so I'll keep you posted on that.

For now, we have decided to stop creating Shorts and see how things go. From what others are saying, it will take some time to start to see growth again in long-form content but many people have reported that this is exactly what happened when they stopped publishing shorts.

If you want to follow my (very early) journey on YouTube, you can check out Mindful Max.

Let me know if you found these insights helpful at all or if you've experienced any slowed growth on your YouTube channel since introducing Shorts.

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