YouTube Opinion Oberservation about pattern of views .......

[sjs94704]

My shorts are basically just a few seconds long, meaning 4 to 9 seconds and they are very short inspirational quotes.
VidIQ says the best time to post my videos is between 6PM - 8PM. I was a tad late and posted mine Last night (11-18-2022)at 8:30PM.
The entire evening all the way until I went to bed around 11:30PM, totally dead....maybe one here and there, so I at least knew it was up there.

But then, I got up at about 4AM to get a drink of water and I was surprised to see that between 2AM - 3AM there were 686 views!
I am a new channel and have about 10 of these short shorts out now and there is a pattern that is emerging that I see several hundred
views and one has over 1K views and they ALL happened in the middle of the night!

It is 5AM as I am writing this and the view count is at 890 !!! Who knew ??!!??!!

The first thing that comes to mind is the unpleasantness of the fact that so many people are up all night with stress in their life
and they are trying to use YouTube as an outlet for relief (I will for SURE be praying for them!) and the other is that it might not
be that at all and it is just that the views are at that time of moring for an entirely different reason altogether.

Do any of you out there experience similar patterns of views and the time of day/night?
What do you attribute the reason for your view patterns?

 

[MediaMan]

Shorts success or failures in regards to initial views after 1 hour or 24 hours are just too random when you're a new channel to dial in any useable conclusions in my op. As a new channel it's better to just focus on good quality content with proper desc, thumbs, etc, and let the chips fly. Now I WILL add...always if possible to dial in similar content if a particular video does well. Ride that wave as long as you can.

 

[sjs94704]

Shorts success or failures in regards to initial views after 1 hour or 24 hours are just too random when you're a new channel to dial in any useable conclusions in my op. As a new channel it's better to just focus on good quality content with proper desc, thumbs, etc, and let the chips fly. Now I WILL add...always if possible to dial in similar content if a particular video does well. Ride that wave as long as you can.

I hear you! I understand what your saying. I was just sharing an observation and realize it might be total coincidence as to when those veiws did happen. My focus has always remained on those things you mentioned but I just thought it was a curious pattern, even if totally random!

 

[sjs94704]

UPDATE: I continue to work on better content, but a couple od days ago, once again
in the middle of the night one of my shorts blew up and got just over 2,000 views
between 2 AM and 3:30 AM pacific time! I was so please by that but once again
thought it so curious that YouTube is ending up pushing out my shorts in the middle
of the night!

 

[MediaMan]

What time are you releasing the video to the public? Also, check your analytics/topgeographies. Maybe some of your content is getting viewed by a country with a different time zone?

 

[sjs94704]

What time are you releasing the video to the public? Also, check your analytics/topgeographies. Maybe some of your content is getting viewed by a country with a different time zone?

I try to make up my shorts ahead of time and schedule them for release. I do use VidIQ and it recommends publishing between 6-8PM, so I usually schedule for 6:15 PM Pacific Time. (I am in California). Now that I look a bit closer, I do think you might be right that this is not necessarily about being the 'middle of the night' activity. Since I am so new, for the longest time so far my dashboard and all the statistical screens have said there is not enough data to populate the information. So, I think I am realizing that I am just at the extreme beginning state of being able to see that information. I only have 12.5K views on my entire channel, mostly which are shorts. So, since you asked about topgeographies, I went and took another look and it looks like there is now some information starting to come in now. The views are coming from other parts of the world which does explain why for me the activity is in the middle of the night. My biggest audience is in UK, Canada, Austraillia, India, Philipines, Germany and Indonesia in that order. There are several other countries but these are the largest share of my audience.

I think for me, this is part of when the fun starts and is part of the motivator to keep making more content is to see all the different parts of the world that watch my videos!

And now, knowing what countries people are from who are watching my videos I can also know what languages to put for subtitles!
I can also use this for all my future videos and do the subtitles before I ever publish my videos for the first time!
LOTS of work, but I hope others would feel it would be well worth it!

Thanks MediaMan for your input!

UPDATE:
Someone can check me on this, but I've just been spending some time translating my videos into some of these other languages.
Yes, it is a BIG job, but I think well worh it! ...... I might be wrong but for me, I am having to translate the transcript of the actual video before it
is letting me translate the title and descriptin ??!!??

 

[Anthony Miyazaki]

YouTube Shorts are a strange creature due to how people view them. It's like Instagram reels where they get started on one topic and then shortly (no pun intended) get sucked into another topic until after about 10-15 reels/shorts/etc., they're far from where they started. They move so quickly that people rarely engage. Unless you have tens of thousands of views across a large number of Shorts, I'd be careful attributing any rationale for the timing of the views. In the meantime, enjoy them though!

A bigger concern I have with Shorts is that they distract creators from the long-form content that YouTube has been known for. YouTube pushing shorts is a concern as well for me. It will never be TikTok or Instagram, but it's trying to compete with both. It could be a huge mistake for the platform if it continues to push views in that direction.

 

[sjs94704]

YouTube Shorts are a strange creature due to how people view them. It's like Instagram reels where they get started on one topic and then shortly (no pun intended) get sucked into another topic until after about 10-15 reels/shorts/etc., they're far from where they started. They move so quickly that people rarely engage. Unless you have tens of thousands of views across a large number of Shorts, I'd be careful attributing any rationale for the timing of the views. In the meantime, enjoy them though!

A bigger concern I have with Shorts is that they distract creators from the long-form content that YouTube has been known for. YouTube pushing shorts is a concern as well for me. It will never be TikTok or Instagram, but it's trying to compete with both. It could be a huge mistake for the platform if it continues to push views in that direction.

I think you're right! It's not always a good thing to try to compete with someone else who has a good thing going because you can end up destroying what you have!

 

[mad mat]

Yes, this is a good way for subtitles, but if you need a voice, then I recommend contacting Air Media-Tech and using their product AIR Translate. Because they have several translation options: from faster and cheaper with the help of artificial intelligence (translation quality is very good by the way) or by professional native speakers

 

[Xavier De Buck]

A bigger concern I have with Shorts is that they distract creators from the long-form content that YouTube has been known for. YouTube pushing shorts is a concern as well for me. It will never be TikTok or Instagram, but it's trying to compete with both. It could be a huge mistake for the platform if it continues to push views in that direction.

Very fair point, Anthony.

I'm also wondering (worrying?) how valuable a shorts video subscriber is to one's long-form content channel. They saw one of the shorts video you put up, decided to subscribe right off the bat, but they'll be confronted with 'boring' long-form video in the days/week after...then what? Disengage, unsubscribe etc?

Curious to hear your thoughts.

Xavier