Why YouTube Shorts Will KILL Your Channel 

Thanks for watching everyone. This video goes over my experience with shorts and how it has negatively impacted my channel. You can have success with shorts but you have to be careful and strategic with what you post (checkout the three c's framework at the end of the video). My overall advice to creators is to pick either short form or long form content and focus exclusively on that. For most people, long form content is better as it tends to align with most creators bigger goals (creating a loyal audience and building a part time or full time income). Please watch the video the whole way through so you can understand the entire picture and message me if you have any questions. Best wishes, Oscar

I got 190K subscriber from Shorts. Now when I'm experimenting with long form, the video not performing well :(

I think another problem is that a lot of advertising and short video recommendations have appeared in the content selection feed. And now long video icons compete for impressions with ads and short video....

I'm happy to see bigger creators outright saying this. Sometimes it just doesn't hit the same coming from smaller creators like myself no matter who I've worked with.

Finally somebody called it out ,))) These days it almost seems like RU-vid is Forcing people to make YT shorts (bcs of the war with TicToc) otherwise your channel wont perform so well plus you see soo many random channels that just stole videos and they could easily have up to 1mil subs....its a shame what happend to this platform.

when i read the title, i clicked because my channel has grown by about 300k subs because of shorts, so i wanted to hear your argument, and i agree and understand why you said what you did. i definitely agree that people need to keep their shorts content similar to their long form content, and have them both be the same quality. people are always shocked when i tell them that i spend about 4 hours for a 1 minute short, but it works, and my latest long form video is doing pretty well, as a result of promoting it through shorts. so youre definitely onto something when you say that your shorts have to be as good as your longs, but i would actually reverse that. your long form stuff has to be as highly edited and fast paced as your shorts. i think a lot of people understand that for shorts you need to edit it a lot to keep peoples attention, but they dont apply that nearly as much to long form

I was able to kinda solve this problem by making compilations of my short form videos into big long ones so that way the viewers doesn't have to keep scrolling, and in my other long form videos i make sure to include jokes that i make on my shorts so the viewers are more familiar with them.

I totally agree with you. I started to post shorts in 2022 because all YT gurus said that it'd help, but then I realised that people just watched my shorts and did not even check out my long-form videos, which confused the algorithm. My channel was dead for ages after I stopped posting shorts in Oct 2023 to test if my theory was right and it took two months for my channel to start to get views again. Thanks for your video. This is going to help heaps of new RU-vidrs to save their time.

I don't think they are that bad for channels. In fact, they work really great for me on my secondary channel. I mean, I just work really hard and I try to create short and expressive content as that is popular now among people (after that I use a lot of Famester to make that content viral immediately). This plays a crucial role so my content reach broader audience and gets spread on other platforms as well.

I wish everyone of you get success on your youtube journey❤

Agreed 💯 Sometimes I really feel like giving up, since my long videos don't get many views than shorts.

Thanks Oscar. One of my channels is shorts heavy and the long form content I create has suffered. Your video has really helped me to understand what to change for the better. Greatly appreviated. Nick

Great job breaking this down. Exactly my experience as well.

Excellent post, Owen. I’ve been grappling with the whole long vs short for a bit. This video immensely helped me put the whole thing in perspective and come up with a better strategy. Thank you!

Thanks for this video man. I’ve brought this question up to a lot of people, even at VidSummit, and a lot of the answers that I got were kind of skating around the actual problem. You confirmed a lot of the suspicions that I’ve had. My main focus is long form movie/television reviews and in 2022 I had a couple shorts go crazy viral and that gained me 10k subs, pretty much over night. But since then, trying to get views on my long form has been an absolute struggle. My content has only gotten better and so not seeing steady growth can get really frustrating. I’m finally starting to break through a bit but still have a long way to go to achieve my goals. I deleted those shorts about a year ago and have since stopped making them all together. I feel like my initial CTR is still feeling the effects from those subs not clicking. Not sure what to do about that besides continue to build the right audience. I appreciate your video dude! Definitely helped!

The thing is as a youtube consumer i watch both shorts and long form. So I believe both can actually work together. And generally speaking long form videos has always been harder to get genuine audience even before the coming of shorts.

Finally people are realizing this. Shorts really hurt my channel! Since they introduced shorts all my stats went down by 40% or so. 😡. So I nixed them and finally starting to gain traction again. Before shorts my channel was doing incredibly well! And I’ve been at it for over 6 years. Then shorts came out, 👎🏼👎🏼👎🏼 thanks for sharing this.

Thank you for this!! Just built up the courage to post my first video and you may have saved me from making the same mistake! Keep making great content!

Good video Oscar, this happened to my channel. I had some shorts that had over 1.5 million views and my long form videos suffered cause of it. I took them down and now my long form videos are actually starting to perform better.

Wow these are really helpful insights and I'm grateful to have found out about this now rather than later in my RU-vid journey! Thank you so much and best of luck with building this channel up ♥

great video man, thanks for the heads up i was gonna do 5 shorts a day alongside long form but i always wanted to focus on my long form content

Thanks for this video! I've only recently started my channel, so it's pretty tiny at the moment (only 10 subs so far). I was thinking about adding shorts, but now I know I should wait on that, and plan it out if I ever do start those.

This was really helpful, and really well-timed! Thanks for sharing this.

As a viewer, most of the short form accounts I watch I have zero interest in their long form. Goes the other way too. I don’t care to see shorts from most of the long form channels I regularly watch. It’s like I mentally bucket channels. Very few channels where I watch both. I think you nailed it that it’s a different skill set.

Very true my channels have been destroyed this way and I suspected this very same thing for both my TikTok and RU-vid

Thx for making this video, i feel like i was on the verge of digging a ditch for myself but now I can change my strategy

Very helpful. Thanks!

Glad I stumbled upon this! I just posted my first short on my channel and got some subscribers and thought, "oh cool I'll keep making them!" But this makes so much sense. I will limit my shorts to advertising my longer videos! Thanks for this.

So before I write my own old findings, I first want to say that I highly appreciate the analytical approach in the video, it's not seen often that someone is rather precise and also reflects reality. I had tested this a few times a long time ago and here are the findings I had there. The TLDR would be to not post shorts, but it's more complicated than that. But I should also note that this information/data is potentially outdated since it was done a while ago. And as a final note before the rest, one very important thing to consider is that channels rise and die very fast, or rather, they can rise and die very fast. It happens all the time and people don't know the exact reasons, but it's easy to point at Shorts and say "They were the reasons!", while in reality it may have all taken the exact same path without them. I would just like to keep this in mind in general, since there is no easy way to test for the truth - but if Shorts would automatically kill channels, then no channel with shorts would be succesful in their longform content, which is not the case. So I don't mean they do no harm, but I rather mean it's more nuanced than a simple black/white picture. Still, I don't see a reason to take a risk. -the biggest direct harm Shorts did was taking viewers from longfrom to shortform content, as in they got it recommended at the end of videos. This meant that views that could have went to useful longform content were instead given to shorts, as long as they were the "latest upload" -Shorts can blast the subscription box and depending on frequency can kill the amount of people that use the notification bell. Even if you disable notifications though, there are a lot of people that will unsubscribe just to not see that content anymore in their sub box -Shorts are an amazing tool to create an audience if you had none and to bring them somewhere else. I mean to another channel or a stream, but not the same channel -Shorts can actually destroy your demographic/audience, simply because the people that watch Shorts are completely different compared to people that watch longform content. This is complicated because Shorts also work even if someone does not understand what you are saying (depends on the video though), but for longform this doesn't work -Everyone who uploads regularly knows the "95% of people watching are returning viewers", which are most of the times subs. That's what you referred to as Pools and would be Pool 1. But it's more than that, it also uses up impressions for the viewers that wouldn't watch the longform content, and that's why this death spiral is so rapid. So not only can you expect a shorter average watch time - which is the main video metric for active viewers - but it also wastes impressions, where it's important to succeed equally to the watch time -This still highly depends on how different the shorts vs longform content style is. If someone usually uploads 5 minute videos, then the difference isn't really big and it could easily work to have both - though the flooding issue and wasting recommendations will still happen. But especially for people that have longform content exceeding 15 minutes or even 30 minutes, it will be a bad decision. Not saying no short viewer will watch the longform content, but it's like a view injection that is very likely to at the same time end any potential success of the video. Luckily, there is nothing that forces anyone to upload longform and shortform content to the same channel, so my advice would be to split it up, have a second channel for shorts and then link to the main video.

This is great, Oscar! Thank you for the insights and awareness🚀

Exactly my experience but I recognized it early so I deleted every shorts I uploaded on my channel. then after 2 month of long form uploads I was able to gain back my channel where it was. Thanks for uploading this video👍

Not me thinking about posting my first yt short last night then coming across this video 😬 thankyou for talking about this

Thank you for this. A lot of interesting and helpful informations there. Keep up the good work!

this was a great video and good watch but I think the best thing about this whole video aside from the information given was the editing and subtle sound effects. sensational. 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

This has definitely given me food for thought. I'm a small channel trying to grow, but find long video's dont get much attention so create alot more shorts. I'll have a try at increasing long form, going forward. Thanks for a really informative approach 👍

I started my channel on 31/12/2023 and I prioritised shorts. I’m currently around 2K and strategising my long form content. Hopefully I’ll be back here after a year to give a data 📈 backed testimonial

Thanks for the excellent explanation of what you see with shorts vs long form videos. I have some creative reasons I don’t like shorts , but they do pull in far more subscribers than long form video.

As a small content creator, I’d like to thank you. I currently have 7 subscribers from RU-vid shorts, and I was thinking of just posting more and more shorts but seeing this video changed my mind. I’ll try to focus on longform content from now on, thank you again :]

Great video! It's been tough for a lot of creators to try and balance long-form and short-form content. Like you said, they are really for separate audiences.

fantastic video! surprised it's not behind a paywall it's such good information. my own experience seems to differ so idk what i've done correctly but shorts helped my long form explode. before shorts my long form videos were barely getting 1k views and now every long form video is ranging between 30k-500k .... maybe i inadvertently got the "content, color...etc" right. idk 🤷🏻‍♂️ either way everything you just said makes total sense.

Great vid. Do you have any thoughts in channel that do long form alongside live streams?

For me, all of the shorts I post are single clips that didnt make the final cut for a longform vid. Usually due to an orientation error when recording. It also "buys" me time w/ the algos which allows me the time I need to make a better longform vid. I make vids about finding rocks, so "better" is pretty subjective...

Agree! shorts are killing the long video. Many content creators switching to shorts but then again, long video is much performing. I am new to youtube, hopefully I will get that boost!

To be honest Shorts has done zero positive things for our channel.

YT recommended this video to me. I was curious why such good video wouldn’t have much more subscribers for its high quality. Then I clicked on your first video to realise it is your other new channel. I agree with what you said from your first video that when your video is good, it will get promoted. Thanks for sharing your experiences! With shorts, I’m surprised to see the change from the beginning till now as everyone promoted how good it would be to help the channel grow. Your 3Cs strategy is helpful. Very inspiring video. Thank you.

While watching your video, my heart ached because it felt like you were talking about my channel. In the beginning, I uploaded a video every three days for about a month. Views were much higher then than they are now. After that, I started posting shorts every day to attract viewers through shorts. I think this is my biggest mistake. The number of viewers and time dropped significantly. After a few months, I thought it was because of the shorts. So I put up the shorts until February and then stopped. Your video further solidified my thoughts. thank you

Thanks for making this video. I was considering to make shorts videos and after watching your video, I have reconsidered doing that.

Thank you so much, this was very informative as I'm starting out as a youtuber😊

So very helpful! I needed to hear this. I know exactly what I need to do now and where I have been going wrong. 🙏

I like your point of view about shorts being a low risk experiment of what content already works on our channel 👍🤔😊

Thanks man! This makes a lot of sense.

Good info! Hard to still not want to make them since they bring so much extra traffic. Especially early on to trying to build a page.

This was super helpful! Thank you! Just subscribed 💪🏻 😀

Thank you very much for sharing very helpful indeed about uploading Shorts and Videos. 🙏🏻😍

thats such a great advice.now its so much clearer to m.thanks man!

Thanks for the advice! Great video

Thanks for this information! I have been wondering about my shorts on one of my channels for a while. If I'm getting 44% watching both, should I just keep doing what I'm doing?

Really good content!! 1. So, do you think the algorithm will be adjusted accordingly so that shorts stop (potentially) hurting people's channels.... because after all YT wants to push Short obviously. 2. The idea of having a separate shorts channel mentioned at the end of your video, is it a good idea generally speaking?

Awesome I agree with you base on my experience for 4years on RU-vid ❤❤❤❤thanks for sharing this video ❤

I love how you asked us to go back to the stone age and once we got there you said we should back to the future. I admit great hook!❤

Thanks for this video! I have started out with posting shorts while I create my first long form videos... would you recommend starting a whole new channel before I post the long form?

Agreed. Very well said

This is really really helpful video. Although my videos are simply nothing as compared to yours, I always wondered why shorts get more views but long videos don’t. This video cleared my doubts. Thanks a lot. 😊

Im starting a YT channel very soon and tbh, this helped me a lot! Thank you so much.

This is great advice! Fun fact - I've never been a fan of RU-vid shorts. I prefer Instagram Reels which is pretty much the same thing. But as a audio podcaster, I like long form content anyhow. Thanks for the video!

This just appeared on my home page! Go on Oscar lad

Love this. Who edits your videos? I want that!

This is very helpful! Thank you!

just came across this video and when you mentioned that stat on your channel of viewers that watch both short and long, my statistics came back almost the exact same. I got like 13% of viewers who will watch both and im wondering if I should consider totally getting rid of all shorts (like unlist/private) on my channel since they seemingly dont help me at all. I am also at a point where all my videos have flatlined and Im seriously wondering if that also has to do with that minimal 13% who watches both and so all my videos go no where as a result regardless of what I try

Is it possible to use a short on a different channel to direct to a long video on your main channel? Basically keeping the shorts separated so they can't affect your main channel. If so, I'd probably do that.

You are the best, explanation was clear from the start of the video ❤❤❤

This is the latest Information that I Wanted, I'm making Shorts now, and I Uploaded Long form, It doesn't work, now what I'm doing I used Community Tab, making a poll and having connections with my subscriber asking then on what content I should do For long form , I'm not sure if this will work.. I'm really thinking on how should I switch into long form

I like that you mention shorts can destroy a channel. And I absolutely agree that it is hard to get short form viewers to watch your long form content and sometimes vice versa. I will say this, content creators who have been able to solve this problem have been able to grow their channel exponentially without any problems. But being honest, most content creators aren't like that and are unable to capitalize and end up hurting their own channels.

Thankyou really good advice, I was use this on my new art channel!

Going forward, I'm just gonna post my shorts on a separate channel. Great video 👍🏾

Thank you for making these kind of videos cause i'm triing to start my youtube carrier and it really helps!

Great video thank you. I tried making shorts but it just took time away from lying long form videos. So I dumped random videos.

You nailed it. I created this channel with shorts, and now I'm kinda starting over to create a long form audience.

Thanks Oscar, this was helpful insight!

This is great information. I started a music themed channel a few years ago. It took me almost 2 years to reach 1000 subs and that was all from long form content. I hit 1000 subs right around the time YT rolled out shorts and they became so popular. late last year I started posting shorts and noticed that my views and subs were going through the roof, so I started posting shorts every day, but noticed that when I posted long form content, it was all but ignored. So I've dug myself into this hole, whereby I need to keep producing shorts to keep the channel alive and now need to figure out how to make long form content that is related to the shorts, so my channel will now kind of be going in a completely different direction. I started this second channel, and that channel I think I will use shorts sparingly. Thanks for the video.

Thank you 💕 you so much for the tip

I recently moved to JUST RU-vid so I can concentrate most of my time with this platform over others, I've been at it for 3 months now. I changed my mindset & what I'm doing with my content, I'm sticking with Horror Gaming and my Fear in playing those games. So what I do is when I post my Long form videos I put those videos as my header video AND I don't publish the video to my subscribers because most of my subs recently are from Shorts. BUT as of now I am getting more more subs from my long form & more views. I take about 2 hours per short, either changing how the story is told or how the moment unfolds or adding an EDIT that wasn't in the original and I connect my long form to my shorts, with the new feature. So while I create my long form video I am posting about 2-3 times a week with shorts from my past video, I prioritize quality, story telling, key words that challenges similar shorts of my niche and prime times for my channel to post. SO NOW if someone who watches my shorts wants to watch my long form it's there as an option. I don't publish my videos directly to my subs because there is a chance that some will click off. But I make it an option for viewers who watch both to click on it. As of right now, I've gotten more results in the past years of just randomly posting and hoping for the best. I take my time with my long form and really concentrate on quality and the flow. Once I'm done with that I can slow down on editing and just do one short at a time while I do my next recording. It's a flow that I can follow and NOT get burnt out from. As of right now it feels good and IDK if it is THE BEST but it is working for me now and I feel like I can be consistent with this.

Hey Oscar! Great video. Im not sure that i agree that we should have 2 channels. Is there something that clearly says the algorithm suggests our long form videos to our short form subscribers? I know i have a split audience. Everyone does who has long and short on 1 channel. But a lot of newer creators who have had success with shorts i dont think understand the game completely - title, thumbnail, promoting a video, we just dont have to do those kinds of things with shorts

It’s because there’s no post nonfiction button next to the subscribe button. That most likely could be a reason why? I always link my longform content on the RU-vid short and that kinda helps.

Great bit of content here lad! Well done

If you manage one channel dedicated to longform and another to shortform, can you link from a shorts video on the shortform channel to one of your longform vids hosted on the longform channel?

my channel has always been so ignored that i keep posting my tik tok as shorts cause i have nothing to lose 😅

I have started my channel 9years ago and I'm having 2Million Subs...I totally agree with you.

RU-vid Shorts are the only reason my channel is above 10,000 subscribers. My regular videos just don't get much attention. So I'm just going to keep prioritizing Shorts and only upload occasional videos when I have time. Shorts take a much shorter time to make anyways and get me more views so it's a win win

This is what I am also currently battling with. My long form content doesn’t get much views as some of my shorts so I had to post more shorts to gain followers and then planning to switch to long form in the future. Probably not the best idea but I know it is beneficial for now

So true!! Great video 👍😃❤️

Bro your edit is fire!!! How do you edit and what's the software you use

Thank you for your sharing!!!💓

My take on your video was that one shouldn't make shorts and upload them to one's channel. However if one does make any shorts. The shorts should reflect what your long form video is of. In short the shorts should be like an ad or preview of the long form video.

Bro you speak the truth 🎉 you got my sub!

Well this is very informative.. I was wondering why my Long form videos have very short watch duration

Excellent video mate! I've just had a short get about 750k views and I'm thinking of leaning into it more to support my long-form. Wary of the negatives though!

Kind of happened to me aswell. Slowly recovering my channel since I stopped doing shorts.

Top video! Thanks for posting

Thank you totally agree either way this !