YouTube Opinion Shorts - Unexpected surprises. You never know when they'll pop. (short case study)

[Beanie Draws]

So this video isn't blowing up in the hundreds of thousands of views range (and the money wasn't anything to get excited about lol so I greyed it out) but this shorts have been doing quietly and comfortably since I published at the start of the year. Going by the blue line and grey average, it's done better than average consistently, so I just let it do it's own thing.

I was looking at my analytics and out of nowhere I saw my channel got an extra 12k views in 1 day and I'm like "wait... what?"

So I pretty much knew it was going to be related to shorts, checked out the video that's got the sudden views and yep, it's a short, and all these new views came out of nowhere. Normally I see about 1k view boost when it his shorts, but this time I saw a good 8k+ boost! So that was exciting.

The key points here. I treated the video no differently to how I normally would. WASN'T covering any trends other than shorts itself. I like to think my art stands on it's own, so the thumbnail was the art, which is probably what got people watching even more.

And this was 96 days into it's life span.

So remember, your video might take a few months to take off. It might not take off at all (a few of my shorts never hit the shorts shelf) but sometimes they might blow up.
Don't treat shorts as your golden ticket to views, I'd be lying if I said I WASN'T hoping for views... but I treated this short like any other video. And treating it like any other video meant I was pleasantly surprised when it blew up without even planning on it.

So don't get disgruntled... you never know if or when your video will blow up. Just let it do it's thing and focus on making content you'd be proud to share, not just for the views.

 

[yoChillSmith]

That's so good to hear

 

[Beanie Draws]

Gained another 1,600 views since yesterday. This is kinda wild

This is also the longest it's been in the short shelf. Normally they only sit in there for an hour. This one appears to have been in there for a solid 2-3 days now.

 

[Mariska]

Yup looks like patience is key here.

 

[VideoChannelIdeas]

Yep, have had a similar experience on another channel... uploaded a short and it putted along and then out of nowhere went viral.... now over 2 million views and counting

 

[BraveStar]

Could it be in part because Shorts are starting to become more popular and thus more people are finding them even after weeks or months since uploaded?

 

[Beanie Draws]

Could it be in part because Shorts are starting to become more popular and thus more people are finding them even after weeks or months since uploaded?

Well I know India has had Shorts access for several months, and India is now my second largest demographic, so that's probably a factor, and the video had a good thumbnail chosen, and there's no words, so it can be enjoyed by any language. The public shorts shelf is becoming more wide spread around outside of India, so more regions are seeing it on their home pages now.

The interesting thing is the shorts traffic is directly pushing suggested traffic. Actually, it seems the traffic from suggested pushed shorts up, and the shorts traffic pushed the suggested up, so the two traffic sources have been pushing each other which is why the two seem to have been feeding each other.
Seemas to have capped out at 16,865. There's room for it to hit 17,000 views but we shall see. It seems to have had it's time in shorts shelf now. It was a fun ride!

Massive profits lol but here's the overall results of the last 28 days. Seems to have been the last 10 days that everything happened. very interesting.