YOUTUBE SHORTS: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW IN 2023 | #THINKMEDIAPODCAST #193
Speaker 2 :
We need to talk about Youtube shorts. One of the biggest opportunities right now on Youtube for getting views extra money. Youtube shorts are making major waves. This is.
Speaker 1 :
Like one of those podcasts that I think is so important.
Speaker 2 :
Youtube shorts are getting 30 billion views per day. Youtube shorts could be its own platform people are getting.
Speaker 1 :
Brand deals on short videos.
Speaker 2 :
You gotta pay attention to them this is definitely a must listen to take notes during this one.
Speaker 2 :
I’m going to be hanging out with Nolan moult from the team, think media, and we’re going to be discussing the opportunity for you and how you can leverage it this year. Nolan, how’s it going?
Speaker 1 :
So good. I am so stoked about Youtube shorts. I’ve been experimenting with them just on many different Youtube channels. Small Youtube channels. Our two point you know 2000000 think media YouTube channel, our podcast channel, we’ve been posting daily shorts which is under a hundred k subscribers. And so I’m excited too and I know we just there’s stories we’ve been helping people and people are using it. I’m excited to talk all things and really help. This is like one of those podcasts that I think is so important. Youtube shirts have kind of been around a little bit, but like it is so fresh, so fresh and so fresh and so new and so this is definitely a must listen to. I think people need to take notes during this one.
Speaker 2 :
Yeah, what’s wild is actually YouTube shorts are two years old now.
Speaker 1 :
Pretty crazy, because it doesn’t feel like it’s.
Speaker 2 :
It doesn’t. It feels like they’re so brand new and they really are. In terms of the opportunity. In the second part of the podcast, we’ll talk about strategy, but in the first part, let’s just talk about some of the stats. And so here’s some things people need to know already. As of listening to this, shorts are open for a higher level of monetization. There was the Shorts fund, but now YouTube is splitting revenue with creators. You’re going to do a video on think media. That’s kind of revealing. How that works and how there’s a pool and the music companies get their cut 1st, and then eventually creators get 45 %, YouTube gets 55 %. But all of that aside, the point is you can earn revenue from YouTube shorts specifically at a higher level. So that’s an opportunity. And also when YouTube Premium subscribers watch your content and YouTube shorts, they’ll be paying you at a higher level. Also, YouTube shorts are getting 30 billion views per day. And that’s an older stat, and that was 4X increase from the year before. But that’s almost a year old stat, so I’m sure those numbers are higher. And YouTube shorts has 1 5 billion logged in users watching them every month, and they’re touted by YouTube as a feeder for long form content. So it’s important to know that even if you don’t love shorts, using them can be a gateway to your longer form content. But I’m sure those numbers have gone up. But if you were to isolate that, because if YouTube has 2 6 billion monthly logged in users and there’s 1 5 billion of those that are consuming shorts, then it’s almost like YouTube shorts could be its own platform. Bigger than Twitter, bigger than Instagram maybe. I don’t know what Instagram’s monthly active users are, but, you know, massive. But then YouTube overall is even bigger than that. And then this one was wild and I’m curious your take on this. So you can go to tubefilter.com at any time and look at the top 50 YouTube channels in any given week. And the last one I was able to pull, even though it’s way past this. The last one that came up for me was the beginning of 2023 It was like the first week in January of 2023 the 50 most viewed US YouTube channels and I counted 40 out of the 50 were shorts channels meaning well,
Speaker 1 :
I don’t know what it means, but there’s a little. I think what it means is they’re either heavy shorts or all shorts, because there’s a little logo on the tube filter page that shows that they are shorts and some of the titles of the channels were like such and such comedy shorts or whatever so man, So what are you out of the top 50?
Speaker 2 :
That’s a sign. I mean, there’s signals and signs we need to be paying attention to. And then thinking about how we could apply those into our own world, what are some of those stats make you feel?
Speaker 1 :
Well, just on that last one, it makes sense because Ryan Trahan, he just posted a YouTube video and he gets a lot of views right. He’s one of those viral YouTube guys and but he posts a short and it it’s just low key because it’s not even in the subscription feed, but like if you go to his channel you look at his shorts. Within like the first day, he’s getting like 25 million views on a short and I’m not surprised and it really is like as a viewer, it’s more of a commitment anyways to watch an eight ten minute long YouTube video versus watching a 15 to sixty second YouTube short. And so you can just watch so many more of them. Yeah, i think that number actually will just increase the 40 out of top 50. I think that number just gets higher and higher as even with monetization people are going to be posting more shorts because they want to make money. And I’m excited to see what that looks like as we start to you know, get those checks and collect the check. But all this stuff is, it’s exciting for me and a lot of people that I know well. I’m sure we’ll get into this, Sean. They get into the negatives of like, it’s ruining my average view duration. They don’t watch my long form videos. I got a hundred thousand subscribers and I’m only getting a thousand views on my videos. And you know, people tend to focus on the negatives, but I like that. Like you’re sharing facts and I want to look at that and help people. Make the most out of it and so yeah I’m excited to get into.
Speaker 2 :
That, yeah. So we’ll talk about strategy in a second. But the last section of kind of the new data is some tools. And so there’s going to be a new card on the mobile version of YouTube Studio that will show creators which videos their viewers are watching. So that means that YouTube studio and analytics is going to split out. Shorts data for you, which is kind of cool.
Speaker 1 :
Yeah, we already have that even for our channel. Like if we look at, you can now go to, click the Shorts tab and if you go over and let’s say we want to look at 2022 we had 4000000 views in shorts. And I believe just this year with some of the new strategies that we’re going to be doing, you know, I think we’re going to exponentially increase that number, but eleven point 2000 subscribers as well. Just from shorts. So pretty cool and yeah.
Speaker 2 :
You can pull that now in terms of you’re pulling up desktop, but this is.
Speaker 1 :
Saying the YouTube studio.
Speaker 2 :
App is going to add a card, which will be like a particular. I’m actually updating my YouTube studio app right now to see if there’s any. If it’s updated, and there’s always. That’s actually one thing. If you’re listening to this number one, a lot of people don’t even have the YouTube studio app. It’s different than the YouTube app. Number two make sure it’s updated because they can give you different insights in terms of analytics and things inside of there. And so that was one thing. Another was thumbnails. This is kind of interesting, and so the new development on YouTube shorts concerns one of the most studied topics in online video community, which is thumbnails. On Android shorts, users can select a specific frame from the video to serve as the clips Preview image. It’s a pretty big deal because. You do see the preview images on the short shelf, and it also is a big deal because let’s say a lot of shorts in some niches are like interviews back and forth, like you and I. So the thumbnail should probably be one of us. You can’t really get two people into it. And if it’s a conversation back and forth and it edits back and forth, then it’s probably going to be one of us. The question would be who should it be if it’s like. If you have a guest on, you’d probably want it to be the guest. The bad thing is if you can’t select the thumbnail, you either have to think about the 1st frame. All that to say is that on Android you could do this, but YouTube is going to be making thumbnails more optimizable and clickable. I don’t know if they’ll allow us to upload custom thumbnails. I don’t know if that even be best practice if that’d be effective. But I do know and I believe on iPhone you could do that as well, but not on desktop. You can only do the selectable. Frame I think.
Speaker 1 :
It’s coming on Android 1st and then it will roll out onto iPhone is what it looks like. But that is huge though because when you go to the app and you open up YouTube, you typically only see like 3 shorts when most people are viewing shorts on their phone. So when you open up the YouTube app and you just go to like your subscription feed or your home page. On it. Like actually it’s only two. I’m seeing 2 videos and so am I going to choose this one or this one? And the first thing I look at is that thumbnail. The second thing I look at is the title. And so I really think this is going to, you know, I know there’s going to be some creators who are going to flash one frame that is going to be like a custom thumbnail. It’s going to flash one frame at the end. People on Instagram, you know, would do this a lot I. That might work. We’ll have to wait and see once that rolls out and that could be a way to kind of hack the YouTube algorithm and you can kind of customize it that way. But overall I think this is a good step and something you should definitely be doing because I do think the that click through it when it’s one out of two and people are clicking this one over that one, I think that will matter with the algorithm. So something people if you have Android definitely start using that as soon as possible.
Speaker 2 :
And one other thing was. Location tags. So when uploading short form video you can now employ location tags. Youtube live from your mobile app allowed you to use location. I don’t know how helpful that is, but it very well could be for news or vlogging type of content because when if you were some place where somebody else wants to tour downtown Disney or something, you log in there or. Yellowstone National Park or something. The fact you could do a location tag becomes what it says here is the goal is to add another layer of customization. And so just these are all just different distinctions. So YouTube’s investing heavily in shorts. Of course it’s a major competitor because vertical video is taking over everywhere. A lot of people don’t know that Pinterest is doing vertical video. And of course tik tok and reels and Facebook reels and so shorts is only going to continue to grow. The data is supporting that. 40 of the top 50 channels even though I don’t think that would tell our community that you should drop everything and go all in and shorts it’s you got to pay attention to them. It would be irresponsible to ignore shorts. Which brings us to some strategy tips. Let’s land the plane on talking about what are people’s next steps and what are some advice for doing shorts. My first tip is even if like you mentioned, this inspired me, you said. I got, you know, a hundred thousand views or a hundred thousand subscribers, but I’m only getting like a thousand views on a short. The thing is you just don’t have that much to lose because rather than saying I only got well, what about gaining viewers that you may not have gained otherwise, right. And I think the thing about shorts, when you also said they’re easier for people to consume with, I would actually argue that there is so many people you’ll never reach if you don’t use shorts, because they will never. Try you out before fully committing. I think the world is so busy right now. There’s so much noise that people want the sample before they get the full thing. And we’ve been talking about the Cinnabon strategy here at think media, you know? And anybody who remembers shopping malls remembers that there’d be somebody in the food court standing out with a tray of samples of Cinnabon. That were absolutely irresistible. And I’m walking by myself and I would walk up to the lady and be like, hey, can I grab one for me and then three for my friends? And then she’s like, sure, you know, and it’s like I ate all four. Probably not the most ethical thing, but hey, this is me at 15 years old walking in the shopping mall. And so, you know, you try it first and then you’re like, man, that’s so good. And then the goals that you go by the full length, you know, the full size. Cinnabon, sit down. Have an incredible sugar high and then absolutely crash or in the rest of your day. And so shorts are like people to hit a long form video or a long form video podcast like getting someone to go from zero to 100 With you like that is kind of crazy getting somebody if you’re not sure you want to get the fullsize Cinnabon. Like that’s a lot to chew if you do the sample 1st. And that’s really the shorts are the their snackable content. It’s a gateway to long form.
Speaker 1 :
And I kind of have a successful kind of story about this. I started a brand new channel, it’s a basketball channel and I was just experimenting with different features and there’s this feature on mobile specifically called. Remix and if you click that button, if it’s your own video, you can click down to create a short and from there you can do 15 or you can extend it to 60 seconds. And I was like let me just play with this and see what happens. And so my first video long form video maybe got 6 views in the first day and half of them were me. And so I was like let me just try this remix short feature and see what happens within the first like 15 minutes. I got a couple thousand views and I was like. This is really weird and it just it’s and this was about a month ago and this still is happening right now and so it just proved to me you know and I picked the I picked a good clip for it to happen but. They’re pushing shorts and what I found was someone commented on that shorts and I and I can’t remember now the name of that person but I remember who it was at the time because I had no comments like no Subs. It was just me subscribe to the channel. And so a week later I posted another long form video. That commenter ended up commenting on one of my long form videos and I’m like. This dude found me on shorts and then now he watched one of my long form videos. And so here’s what’s really powerful about YouTube shorts right now. And they work with your long form videos. So what you’ll notice just as a viewer if you watch a brand new long form video just through the browse page, you actually next time you open up YouTube. I guarantee you you’re going to see their videos in the short shelf because they’re like you like their long form stuff. You probably like their short and I and that obviously is working the other way around as well. You find I don’t use short the shorts feed as much. I usually watch long form. So for the people who are watching shorts a lot they’re now like I really you know I started binging think media stuff they’re going to get recommended our long form video. So I one of my major takeaways at VID Summit was that people should be posting both. Long form and shorts and they actually help grow each other. And so it’s really powerful when you combine them. And that’s I think the key. And you know, I want to get into some strategies too on like what kind of content should you because i think some people, they miss the mark and their shorts are just so different. Than what their long form stuff is. And so a perfect example is like this podcast right now someone might be watching this as a short, they can click on our channel, they can go watch the full podcast. That’s pretty awesome. But some people might just take out their iPhone and shoot a random short has nothing to do with their long form content. And so I think do you have any advice there when it comes to what kind of content should people be posting? Like what should they be thinking about? When they’re going shorts and long form.
Speaker 2 :
Yeah, I think the question is why did people subscribe in the 1st place? What value did they subscribe for and what are they expecting? Like shorts are just a different content format for hopefully the same thing. You’re still delivering the same promise. Yes, it’s a limited, it’s 60 seconds or less and it’s vertical and so maybe it’s a quick tip instead of 52 tips in a long form video or it’s not a long form interview, but it’s 1 nugget. And so keeping it aligned to respect the viewer would be my first hit. But what are some of your strategies when it comes to shorts?
Speaker 1 :
Well, I think, you know, there’s definitely, there’s a few strategies that you can do, but I totally agree. It’s like it needs to align with your overall theme for the channel because you don’t want your shorts to be different. That someone subscribes so that when they those people see your long form video, they don’t click. That hurts your click through rate and now you’re hurting your channel. Some people are doing that now. I do think though, there’s certain audiences and niches that just prefer the short form content and that’s okay. People get discouraged though, because they’re like, I get millions of views on my short form content and I’m not getting views on my long form content. I’m like, well, it’s sick. You’re getting millions of views. You can still monetize it. And so people get discouraged because they want the long form views for the Adsense. But we’ll see what Adsense kind of looks like on shorts. But what I’m excited about, and I’ve just seen with some of my tik tok, creator friends people are getting brand deals on short videos. Like that’s pretty awesome there. I just think over these next couple years as shorts continue to grow, there’s going to be so many more ways to actually. Make money. You can do brand deals. There’s going to be ways for you to do affiliate marketing and to grow your audience and to make money. And so I would, I would tell people, you know, if shorts are really popular, like just lean into that. Obviously people got to pay bills and stuff, but you know, there’s other ways that you can. Do that, but yeah.
Speaker 2 :
Yeah, I want to hear the rest of your strategies. One thing too that I just remembered was we just released a brand new deep dive shorts master class. And so I think at shorts class.com people can get access to that. It’s a super great price if you want tactical stepbystep education of leveraging shorts. And so we’ll put a link to the show notes, but one of the things and. We pulled some of the best practices from creators of all different backgrounds. There was one creator who grew 1000000 subscribers in one month just posting shorts and one of the things he discovered was stories do well and here’s an opening people can use. And you may have noticed this before. If you open with you won’t believe and more narrow down. If you open with you the first word is you. Because like you need to see. You’ve got to see this really cool coffee maker that’s perfect for people doing van life or RV trips. You won’t believe this. Now, one of the things that is also happening is stories. Some entrepreneurs are telling stories of businesses, not even their own business. But stories really do well on shorts and. Another one is this guy. This guy created clothes that grow with you. I think I just saw a creator making that and you’re telling a story and you’re just pulling them right into it. The mistake people make on shorts is the hook. It’s almost like there shouldn’t even be at the hooks like one second. The hook is like the first word. The hook is like the 1st frame as opposed to you definitely aren’t introducing yourself. Team things up. It’s all it’s a condensed, perfect video formula.
Speaker 1 :
My major tip and I had a brand new channel right go within the 1st 60 minutes of releasing my first kind of fully edited short. I just try to do it the best I could. I got 70.000 thousand and now has over two million views. And so there’s a few takeaways that I had from that i have a full video kind of breaking that down on think media that will put a link in the description but. Here’s what I’d tell people. Think about the shorts feed. You’re scrolling up and down. You don’t get to choose what video you get to watch. You either just watch it, or you go on to the next one. There’s not a title or a thumbnail that you’re selecting when it’s in the shorts feed. And So what I’m telling people is the first few seconds of your short is your thumbnail and your title. How can you hook that person in not to click on your video because it’s different how? How can you hook them in to keep watching? And those tips you shared are perfect ways to start off your video. And so you want to jump right into the content instantly and keep going and keep their attention. With my short that went viral, one of the methods that I used is the loop method, which at the very end of the video, it seamlessly goes to the beginning of the video. And that kind of helped just boost the retention a little bit more because it’s so seamless. You don’t want the video to sound like it’s ending at all. You want it to either end abruptly without anyone knowing, or you want it to just flow right into the beginning. And another thing that a friend told me who he claimed he cracked the code when it came to. Two shorts. So he was telling me he’s like, dude, all you got to do is that as it’s easy, right? He’s like all you got to do is post 42 to 46 second long or no, sorry you guys, you just need a 42 to 46 second long average reiteration. So I was like okay and then he goes and you want or he said, he said 42 to 46 seconds long video with a 90 % retention rate and that’s exactly what I did. I was able to hit that retention rate and I think my video is like or just under 50 seconds long. And so I think there is something about 50, you know 45 to sixty second long as long as you can keep the attention there. But then again I’ve seen articles of 15 second. Thirty second shorts blowing. Up so experiment. But really focus in on those first few seconds, hooking them in, and then make sure that the rest of the content, if you are going to make it longer, that it’s snappy, it’s quick, it’s on to the next thing.
Speaker 2 :
Yeah, well, there’s so much we could get into. And literally as we’re recording this podcast, we are in the final minutes of our battery life and at the end of our shoot day and all that stuff too. And I’m sure that our community has a lot of questions about. Shorts as well. And so I do want to highly recommend one take short seriously to do your research and do your study, and then three, if you actually want just some step by step information to take the shortcut into mastering shorts, we did do a 90 minute master class on YouTube shorts. It’s at. shortsclass.com And you can check that out. And this is one of the things we’re really geeking out on here at think Media. And so we’re putting in really combined hundreds and thousands of hours of research and testing, consolidating those best practices. And we’re including some cool bonuses with this shorts master class as well. So if you’re serious about shorts and want to check that out, you can check it out in the show notes. shortsclass.com it would definitely be worth your time. And Nolan, I’m excited to see what this year brings when it comes to YouTube shorts.
Speaker 2 :
I’m excited. I’m sure we’re going to have a few followup episodes in the future, so stay tuned for that. Hit the subscribe button and we’ll see you guys in the next episode.
