Youtube shorts, Good or Bad?

[compact basin]

So I've heard both stories, its good for your channel to grow, short and long form, and the opposite - it ruins your audience, your long form will suffer if the shorts succeed and vice verse...

[kind nacelle]

I can't see how successful shorts will make long form suffer. It would be the opposite. I just wouldn't only do shorts. I would mix shorts and long.

[rain rose]

I do a long video once a week and shorts every other day. The majority of my returning viewers watch both - I get more views and subs from shorts, but I don't feel my long form is underperforming comparatively. However, imo my niche is underrepresented in shortform content.

[compact basin]

You gain an audience of short viewers and when they go into your long forms they're most likely to leave early and screw up the view retention hence screwing your chances of getting showed on someone's feed

[kind nacelle]

I don't have stats, but that just sounds like someone's anxiety talking lol

I would not worry about these kind of things

[rain rose]

Do you have any sort of source where a creator documented this phenomenon?

[compact basin]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fass-rra3ds&ab_channel=ScalingwContent

Heres one. Hes not a major Youtuber tho

But if you take a look at a lot of pages, they have 50K short views on average and then below 1K views on long form

[kind nacelle]

that only really tells me that people create popular shorts and unpopular longs

[rain rose]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LFFHNkmYCY&t=113s

Vidiq and nate black touched on this in the vid, and thr general consensus I've gotten from those discussions is that if 1) the audience is the same and 2) the shorts are quality content, there are no downsides

[kind nacelle]

yeah, it'd be weird to have two different audiences for your shorts/longs

but i definitely do see people doing it

[compact basin]

Kids with 10 second attention spans vs people who can watch long vids. Its 2 different audiences. BTW im not trying to start a war, just a discussion

[rain rose]

I think it is way more common in like, gaming. I have a channel where I upload my twitch vods, but also publish my clips as shorts, and I highly doubt most people scrolling through shorts to get a quick giggle at a bawdy joke actually want to watch me play bg3 for 5 hours at a time

But for my vlog/travel channel, I think Barbara who is 67 and doesn't really understand why it's upright but liked seeing my dog being cute for 14 seconds would probably also watch me set up my rv in a nice park

[compact basin]

Can you elaborate on the (1) part? In my mind its (i) {LONG} Harry pooter book audience vs (ii) {Short} Harry potter Movie audience. The movie audience will most likely not read the books

[kind nacelle]

i mean, i watch both shorts and longs

[rain rose]

There is a very large population of people who watched the movies and read the book. It is not larger than the max of either population, but it is still a robust audience

[compact basin]

YES! I should have mentioned its related to Gaming or something similar to that category

[kind nacelle]

it just depends on my mood. At times, I want to sit on the toilet andd watch shorts. Other times, I want a long beefy video.

It's not two different people, necessarily

[rain rose]

Also, I still upload both to my twitch based youtube channel and have not seen any negative effects. A lot of my (small) twitch audience enjoys shorts and will watch vods if they miss a stream. I'm confident there are a lot more people out there like that

[compact basin]

Why do you think theres a lot of pages out there with shorts with 100k average views but their long form vids have below 1k?

Also generally pages with only long vids have higher view count than pages that post shorts

[kind nacelle]

selection bias

[rain rose]

It sounds like you've really made up your mind about what you think is best at this point

[compact basin]

No

Its a question, im trying to find out why that happens so that i dont fall into the same pit

[compact basin]

I actually appreciate all the input. Its impotant to see all the perspectives

[kind nacelle]

Here's an example

https://www.youtube.com/@PirateSoftware/videos

I found his channel through shorts

which is primarily about programming and software security/hacking

his shorts get millions of views

but his longs are not doing as well

but if you look at his longs. most of it is regular gaming content

the most popular videos in his longs is related to security and programming

so, two different audiences

[rain rose]

I'm not sure why you DMed me, but my DMs aren't open without invitation so I deleted it. I'm sure anything you sent there, you can send here

[rain rose]

That's actually an excellent example, someone sent me a short he made about unchecking the "push to subs" box for "experimental" content that you're not sure if your current audience will resonate with

I'm a software engineer that consumes a lot of long form gaming content, I'm a textbook example of "the overlap between populations does exist"

[kind nacelle]

ditto, i'm in the middle of the venn diagram

but i guess we're not the norm

[rain rose]

I think it's really up to what someone wants their channel to be

If you're excited about hyperfocusing down to a really specific niche, that overlap population will be small. Whereas if your niche is kinda general but the people who consume it are pretty fanatical about it (ie, 67 year old Barbara who just thinks i have the sweetest dogs and she doesn't care about the setting she's seeing them in), there's room for both long and short overlap

It's a really good example of the importance of defining your audience

[compact basin]

🤦‍♂️ "Im not trying to fight you. I want to see all the perspectives. Im seeing the issue with shorts but there might be other factors that im not seeing that is drawing me to another conclusion"

[civic mulch]

I haven't watched the video you sent. But imo I see shorts as something isolated from long form videos.

As if Youtube Shorts were on a different platform.

So you can thrive on Twitch but you have lower viewership on Youtube.

Because those are different platforms

Or... You can thrive on long form Youtube, but you suck making Shorts and viceversa.

Because both are "different platforms"

I don't see downsides on doing Shorts though.

[rain rose]

They're different skills, and I think the main reason people say do one or the other is the same reason Gordon Ramsey starts yelling when he sees spaghetti, pot roast, fried food, and like, sushi on the same menu. It's hard to learn both at the same time.

[kind nacelle]

But sushi pizza from kitchen nightmares 🤌

[steel monolith]

I've also been torn on long form and shorts. I've considered the fact that shorts don't translate as well to long form but I've seen mixed results.

My observations have boiled down to the following: sometimes people make better shorts than longform.

Sometimes their shortform doesn't relate back to their long form or sometimes the audience that sees their shorts don't translate over to longform.

I have seen some channels where the way they format their shorts directly can feed people into their longform, but I have no idea how well that actually works.

I've also noticed a ton of twitch streamers really dig into shorts as a way to just get eyes on their content.

So I haven't come to a conclusion on shorts yet, because it seems like they can fit into various categories and one solution might not check all the boxes for each creator, depending on what they want to make.

I have been concerned that shorts could potentially tank longform viewership, but I also think it really depends on the community that forms around a person's content.

One creator that I think has had some success that started with shorts and has made a few long form videos is JapanEat

He's made 3 longform videos now and has gotten 100k+ on each video, even though they don't exactly fit the same format as his shortform. The one factor is his editing and writing style is still there

I have seen a situation where a persons content started out one way, they had an audience of a couple thousand subscribers, but then they decided to pivot into a different style of content that their existing subs didn't like. In that situation they ended up making a fresh account and had seen success after that.

So yeah. I really don't know the answer, but it's definitely something to think about.

For myself I don't think I've ruled out shorts entirely just yet. But I think it's something to keep an eye on. I figure it's worth trying at least

[rain rose]

what's your ultimate goal for youtube? Is it a hobby or are you treating it as a full time job?

[steel monolith]

Sorry not sure if you're asking me or someone else. For me personally it's a hobby for now. But if I find some footing I would like to treat it like a job

[rain rose]

was asking you lol - and in that case, if shorts are fun and/or teaching you skills, post shorts. If nothing else, it's worth trying to develop filming/editing/storytelling skills