It wasn't JUST a tape measure test: The insane effect of YouTube Shorts. скачать в хорошем качестве

It wasn't JUST a tape measure test: The insane effect of YouTube Shorts.

Shorts version:    • I snapped a tape measure 10,000 times. Her...   Full video:    • I need to get a life   Script: I recently posted a video on my main channel that I thought was really fun: testing a tape measure to see if letting it snap back into its case would ruin it. What you didn’t know is that I was also testing something else, comparing the performance of a #shorts version of the same video. It’s been a couple weeks now and I want to share my results of the shorts vs longs test and some interesting discoveries I made. I posted the full video on March 8th. As of today, April 2nd, it has 85,000 views. That's really low. After posting that video, 3 days later on March 11, I posted the Shorts version. Today it has about 5 million views. The day I posted the long video was the most viewed day. 35,000 views in those first 24 hours. 87% of those came from subscribers. That's less than 2% of my subscribers. If you were one of those, thank you! This was ranked as the worst performing of the previous 10 videos. But it was only downhill from there. In the video’s first three days it had dropped to 5700 views a day. And since then, it has flatlined. This is essentially a dead video. Keep in mind, this was a passion project…a video I made just for the fun of making it and I'm proud of it. I love the story, my filming, my editing…it's one of my favorite videos in the past decade. The low view count wasn't really unexpected. This falls in line with my Halloween videos. They are passion projects that I love making, but they don’t appeal to very many viewers, especially new viewers, and they confuse the YouTube algorithm since they aren’t really about woodworking. To be fair, I don’t think YouTube knows who to recommend them to. “Top 5 woodworking mistakes you need to STOP doing” will always perform the best. And of course, these are way easier to make. It’s why we’re seeing fewer and fewer people making actual projects on YouTube these days, but I talked about that in another video. Now let’s look at the Shorts version. In this version, I edited out all the commentary and only kept the high speed snapping of the tape measure and the final breaking. There is absolutely zero context to this video: who I am, why I was doing this, or what all I was testing. It’s just released into the wild with no explanation. In its first 24 hours, it got 15,000 views, making it by far the worst performing Short out of the past 10. On day three, it received about 3,000 views, which made the video statistically irrelevant. I could probably post a static video of a sheet of plywood and get that many views. And this video stayed like that until day 12, when suddenly YouTube started recommending it. Overnight, it went from number 10 out of 10 to number 1. But here’s the most interesting thing. The majority of these views are from returning visitors. You get that? Not subscribers, returning viewers. These are people who have seen my videos previously and were shown this one. Basically, these ARE Shorts subscribers. They haven’t officially subscribed to anything, but YouTube is feeding them more of what they enjoy watching. And this illustrates the irrelevance of the subscriber button or subscriber counts in general across YouTube. Clicking the subscribe button on any channel is just one tiny data point YouTube uses to determine what to show you. It is essentially a like button. Ironically, this short has driven about 7000 subscribers to my channel. Subscribers that will most likely watch nothing else. Except my shorts which they'll get fed anyway. The full version, the one I put so much effort into, inspired about 45 people to subscribe. At the moment, the only thing holding Shorts back from completely dominating YouTube is monetization. There is still no method in place for creators to earn any real income from Shorts. This is something that YouTube is working on and they're suggesting to creators that a solution is in the works for later this year. The question is, Is it better to produce videos for a few people or for many people? Or more importantly, Is producing free content for a small audience sustainable, especially with the amount of video creators increasing exponentially? "Just make quality content and people will find you" is no longer the best advice. I present my tape measure short as exhibit A. Let's face it…that's far from quality content. It simply triggered thousands of data points that appeal to a large mass of people. A robot could have made that video…and who knows, someday it may. If making shorts ever becomes a viable income source, I would imagine the woodworking and maker space will look a lot different. The most viewed, followed, and recommended channels will be producing predominantly Shorts content. I still think there’s value in producing quality how-to content for very small audiences. As creators, we need to define what success means beyond followers and views.