Many YouTube content creators undervalue the importance of Short videos. This leads them to focus on long form video content. Not only does this consume more resources, it is inefficient. There’s a space for long form videos, but they must not be made at the expense of Shorts. You see, Shorts count towards your total view count.
YouTube Shorts were first launched on September 14, 2020. At present, the feature is in the beta stage of development. YouTube Shorts were created to rival TikTok’s 60-second videos and Instagram Reels. YouTube Shorts are 15 seconds or less and can be created by segmenting clips, adding on some music, and incorporating whatever special effects you think necessary.
Because it is in beta mode, only select users are able to use YouTube Shorts. YouTube decided to make this feature available to its Indian market. In India, users can use the feature to create short videos. In the rest of the world, users can upload short videos of less than 60 seconds long, using the feature, so long as they add the hashtag #Shorts to the title or description.
On YouTube’s mobile homepage, YouTube Shorts can be viewed from a dedicated shelf. The only problem is that the only creators who can use YouTube Shorts are those with at least 10,000 subscribers. If you visit the channel of any of these creators, you will see their Shorts on their homepage.
Because YouTube Shorts are such a new feature, there was concern that if users shifted their attention to Shorts, viewership totals as counted by YouTube, would fall. Thankfully, YouTube has clarified that this is not the case.
If you are a content creator, you can see how many views your Shorts have by going through your YouTube Analytics.When you are on the YouTube Analytics page, click on the Reach tab, scroll down and then click on Traffic source types.
As you can see, YouTube shows your viewership numbers for Shorts in this section. If a user swipes through a Short, that counts as a view. It’s important to remember that you have to buy views on YouTube in order to rank highly on YouTube’s algorithm and drive even more views to your channel.
If, however, views are a result from a user clicking on the homepage carousel, this will be ascribed to views emanating from Browse or Suggested videos.
You can also see this data if you go through the advanced analytics page.
As you will see from YouTube analytics, Shorts views are reported the same way as views of normal videos.This means that Shorts can dramatically impact channel metrics such as click-through rate and average view duration.
This makes sense because if people are viewing more of your Short videos, then the average viewing times will go down. This may sound troubling, but, these channel metrics do not affect how YouTube assesses your channel’s performance.
At present, Shorts will not really affect your revenue. But, as YouTube Shorts become a mainstream feature of YouTube, YouTube will certainly give incentives to creators to create Shorts.
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