stop posting YouTube shorts right now because they won't just decrease your views they'll destroy your entire Channel you see after reaching over 1.2 million subscribers on my main Channel and getting over 120 million views through shorts I've discovered that they've harmed my channel more than they've helped it so today what I'm going to do is show you how YouTube shorts can negatively impact your Channel's growth examples of big YouTubers that have destroyed their Channel with shorts as well as a clever way to use shorts without harming your channel in the process but first what's the actual reason for people hyping up shorts in the first place because I see loads of creators talking about the benefits of shorts without actually mentioning their downsides so let me tell you a story from a few weeks ago I was scrolling through YouTube and I saw some videos making a ridiculous claim when it comes to earning potentials with YouTube shorts like this one here for example says you can earn $275,000 with YouTube shorts and chat GPT and this one here copy and paste YouTube shorts and make $600,000 a month now these videos are blatant lies and it just like really annoys me because it's obvious that the creators of these videos don't use YouTube shorts themselves but the problem is that their viewers don't know any better because they don't have any experience with YouTube now I have uploaded YouTube shorts to my channel and here's what happened in total I've got over 120 million views through YouTube shorts which has gained me over 250,000 subscribers and just one of my shorts has received over 50 million views which in itself resulted in 100 ,000 subscribers gained and by the way that's a silver plaque award from just one video which is pretty nuts but I want you to guess how much money I got for 50 million views on one of my shorts $1,700 yep that's it for 50 million views and just to put things in perspective a long form video with the same amount of views would have received I would say anywhere between 50 to $100,000 so $1,700 is awful and if you think that's bad then I had another short that got over 30 million views and that one only made $41 so the revenue from YouTube shorts is rubbish but people often say in respon to that oh well you can like monetize it through things like affiliate links can't you well nope YouTube doesn't allow you to do that anymore so from a monetization standpoint shorts pointless but that's not the worst part because there's a very common misconception going around that's setting up so many creators for failure because most of us obviously now are aware that the money from shorts isn't great I mean that's never been a sec but what YouTube shorts are really good at is getting a lot of views in a very short period of time so there's this really big talking point at the moment that many YouTube gurus are saying which is if you want to monetize your channel really fast make shorts to begin with and then flip to long form content later and the reason they say this is that when it comes to YouTube monetization the threshold with shorts is a lot easier to achieve so it seems to make sense that if you were just to spend the majority of your time focusing on creating shorts this will be a quicker way to get views and subscribers fast and and build that initial viewer base and then as soon as you're monetized you can flip the channel back to long form content and just make more money with your long form videos now that sounds good in theory but in practice it just doesn't work and here's why you can actually take a look at your analytics and you can see the metric of your views across formats and from my channel that does both short and long form content that's only 11% so only 11% of my viewers watch both my short form and long form content and that's unfortunately the same with most channels out there so why is this bad well the worrying thing is what YouTube shorts do is they leave you with what is known as a split audience this is where some people only watch your YouTube shorts and other people only watch your long form content and that's why you see people like Dan rhods who's got over 20 million subscribers and is the king of YouTube shorts with billions of views he can't even hit over 50,000 views on his long form content because he's got a split audience and also by the way guys the same goes with my other channel I'm not trying to say I'm perfect or anything like that I've made this exact mistake of a split audience and so I'm just trying to point out other creators have also made this mistake so that you don't have to make it now some of you might be thinking this you might be thinking well that's not the end of the world right I mean my subscriber account might be a bit inflated and you've got a segmented audience but as long as they do their own thing you know some watch long form some watch short form it's all going to be okay isn't it well I wish that was the case but you're wrong because it doesn't stop there so to understand why having a split audience is really bad we first need to understand how the YouTube algorithm actually works so you've uploaded a long form video to YouTube but what happens next what determines whether or not that video gets like a million views or if it completely flops well when you publish a video to YouTube YouTube will first show that to a test group of viewers which tend to be your subscribers and we'll call this pool one if your subscribers click on the video comment like and do all that fun stuff this signals to the YouTube algorithm that your video is great and it will then show it to a broader audience of people which will call po PA 2 and if PA 2 likes the video and they do all the same liking and subscribing and stuff then YouTube will show it to Paul 3 and so on reaching a wider audience until the video stops performing but here's where YouTube shorts can really hurt your channel you see most YouTube short viewers tend to have a shorter attention spans and are looking for a quick dopamine hit as such the majority of them don't really care about your long form content and this means when you post your new long form video your YouTube shorts viewers who have subscribed to your channel either won't click on it which means the video gets a really low click-through rate or they might check out the video but then just realize it's not for them because they want more short form content and then they just click off and what this does is it hurts your watch percentage as well and this signals to the YouTube algorithm that your new long form video sucks so it just stops promoting it to people meaning your video completely flops and I've seen so many big creators destroy their Channel this way I mean this is exactly what happened to jevin doy as you can see here before I started posting shorts daily I was getting around a million to 1.2 million views per month now as I started posting daily you'll see in the last 28 days well it shifted to 3 to 400,000 views just on shorts now that's great that's an extra big boost of views however my views for long form content dropped by about that much in the same time period so pretty much around 400,000 of his views switched over from long form to short form and the exact same thing happened to my main Channel as well and this is bad because a short form view is a lot less valuable than a long form View and if the main goal of your channel is to make money or build a business then posting shorts will be working against that goal anyway YouTube shorts suck they're completely pointless and you should never make them and that's the end of the discussion well not exactly because I'm not ditching shorts completely from my channel because there's actually a way to implement shorts into your content strategy without destroying your channel but first let me go over some of the benefits of posting shorts the first thing is have you ever spent like a week making a YouTube video just to hit publish and then the video gets like four views and no engagement I mean I'm sure we've all been there it completely sucks well this is where shorts have the upper hand and Colin and Samir I think say this best one thing I really like about YouTube shorts is that it's a lower barrier to entry in terms of us getting ideas out into the world that's a great way for us to test audience interest and see which piece of content we want to invest in because the time commitment to making a short is a lot less and you could make a short in a few hours or so so let's say you post a YouTube short every day and one of them outperforms the rest that means you now have an idea idea that you can use in your long form content and there's a lower risk involved because the idea's already been proven to work on your channel now in even better news YouTube has also added a new update in the past there wasn't like an easy way to transition your short form viewers to long form viewers you to put like a pin link or something like that in the short which was super annoying but now YouTube's added a new feature that directs short form viewers straight to your long form videos so this is a really cool strategy that I'm starting to use on my channel to convert short form viewers to long form viewers and basically what you're doing is you're using shorts to funnel viewers to your long form videos but you do need to be careful though when doing this because it can backfire but there are a few rare examples of creators who are able to do this really well and I've noticed some subtle nuances involved in their strategy and I think Ali abdal is like a really good example of someone who does short form content very very well so as you can see here he uploads both short form and long form content but the reason he's successful with this is because he keeps the style very similar he's got the same editing style and His short form content is exactly the same as long form content meaning the type of viewer who's going to watch his short form is also going to enjoy his long form as well and I've begun to have the same approach in my channel and I've seen some really positive results from it so if you are going to do this here's the three-step framework to pairing shorts with long form videos successfully and it's the three C's content color and caliber so Step One is content so your content needs to be the same as your long form videos as I just mentioned as this will result in viewers who are interested in both your short form content and your long form content so they're more likely to watch them both step two is color you want the color scheme of your videos and the lighting and so on to be very similar in your short form and long form content as this means viewers get the same feeling when they watch your your videos and notice Ali abdal does exactly that in his videos and then step three is caliber so the caliber of your shorts needs to be just as good as your long form videos there's this common misconception that shorts you can just make something in 5 seconds and upload it I think that's a really bad strategy because it attracts the wrong type of viewer so you need to post high quality shorts and this will take time and effort but after implementing this framework to my own recent shorts I've been able to get a lot of viewers and transition them into long form viewers which has been keeping my channel really healthy so the final question then is should you make YouTube shorts well it really does depend on your goal but most creators in my opinion shouldn't mix short form and long form unless you're a experienced and B use the secret formula that I just listed above and I think the YouTube Creator liazon had a really good post which summarized this really well he said that in every case viewers have the agency they get to decide what they want to watch your short viewers won't watch long form videos just because you want them to you need to give them a reason to want to do that you have to figure out what feeling you gave them that made them want to watch to begin with and then figure out a way to deliver more of that same feeling in the longer video so that comes back to the three C's that I just mentioned but in my opinion there is a reason why most big creators only focus on one or the other Mr Beast tried posting a few shorts on his YouTube channel but he's decided to slow down and he's created a separate channel that is just dedicated for YouTube shorts and remember that shorts and long form videos are completely different art forms so it's like trying to learn tennis and football at the same time some skills do carry over but you're better off getting really good at one thing and spending your energy trying to learn just that instead instead of trying to master both short form and long form so take a look at both content formats and commit to mastering one now for most of you out there I think you should focus on making long form videos rather than shorts but there's one huge mistake I see small cretive is constantly making when they try and make these long form videos and that comes down to scripting so check out this deep dive video here to learn how to script your videos properly so you can blow up your channel in the process I'll see you there
