I posted 77 YouTube Shorts in 1 Month. Here's What I Learned

I posted 77 YouTube Shorts in one month, and I want to share the results—what worked, what didn't, and why I'm doing this in the first place. Below is a slightly edited transcript of the video above.

I'm on a journey toward YouTube monetization. My primary focus for monetization is wide-format videos, not YouTube Shorts.

I started my channel in 2017, but I was just posting podcast episodes without understanding the platform's opportunity. At the end of last year, I realized the potential and decided to get serious about YouTube this January. I went from 68 subscribers at the beginning of the year to 271 subscribers now. I'm about a quarter of the way towards monetization in both subscribers and watch hours.

I wanted to figure out if YouTube Shorts could help me gain the watch hours and subscribers needed to reach my goal. So, I decided to do an experiment: I would publish three Shorts every weekday. Since April 21st, I have posted 15 Shorts every week. The analytics we're looking at today cover the period through May 22nd. My main question was: can I drive people who watch Shorts to watch my long-form videos?

The short answer is, I don't know. The long answer is, it's been rough.

While there are some advantages to Shorts that have helped, it didn't quite work out the way I wanted.

Let's look at the analytics.

Over this period, I posted 77 Shorts, which generated 37,000 views. Thanks to Shorts, my channel was able to hit 100,000 views this month. However, only 11,000 of those were "engaged views." Those views translated to 73 watch hours, but watch hours from Shorts do not contribute toward monetization requirements. The good news is that I gained 11 subscribers from this challenge.

You might wonder if it was worth it. I could have put all that effort into normal videos and perhaps gotten more than 11 subscribers. There's an opportunity cost. However, I can also use all these clips on other social media channels, so I get a lot of benefit from that. The Shorts are also easy for me to make. They are just clips from my podcast episodes or YouTube videos, and Riverside lets me easily generate them with AI. It takes about five or ten minutes to make three of them.

Shorts are definitely helping me get more subscribers. Looking at the entire year, I've gotten 29 subscribers from Shorts. It's helping me get a little bit ahead on the subscriber front. Every person that watches a YouTube Short is now part of my YouTube audience profile. The problem is that many of those people don't watch long-form content. As a friend of mine said, he only watches YouTube Shorts.

This is what I've discovered. If I look at my traffic sources for the year and filter by "related shorts"—where you can link a full video from a Short—the results are not impressive. From 104 YouTube Shorts published this year, I got only half a watch hour on my long-form videos. It just doesn't seem to work.

I have tried to optimize this. I evolved my Shorts' branding to be more intentional. On the bottom right, I added the word "WATCH" with two arrows pointing to the orange bar where the related video link sits. People still aren't clicking.

I have two ideas left.

First, since Shorts are good for getting subscribers but not watch hours, what if I lean into that? For the related video, what if I just connect other YouTube Shorts instead of long-form videos? I've received 50 views on related videos. I imagine if those 50 views were on other Shorts, they would have kept watching instead of clicking the long-form video and leaving. I could create a chain of Shorts to get them into the ecosystem.

The second idea is to make a specific video where I look at the camera and make a direct appeal. For example: "Here's the hook. I have a full video where I talk about how to be successful as a freelancer." I could try that a few times to see if it makes a difference.

Everything I'm seeing so far is that YouTube Shorts aren't helping to get watch hours, at least for a channel of my size. Maybe when I get a much bigger audience, that could change. Perhaps my clips are just not good enough because I'm repurposing content instead of creating videos specifically for Shorts.

What I've learned is that YouTube Shorts can help you get subscribers, but I haven't figured out how to make them help you get watch hours. I am building a Shorts audience—I get views, likes, and even comments—but I don't know how anyone makes a living on Shorts unless their videos are going viral with millions of views. For a business, I'm not sure it's a viable path beyond brand awareness.

My original plan was to do this for three months, so I'm going to stick it out unless I can't bear it any longer and see what happens. Maybe there's a tipping point. I believe content has to be created specifically for Shorts to be more engaging and target high virality, which is not what I'm doing. I'm trying to focus on creating evergreen, valuable content, which is why I prefer YouTube's normal format.

That's where I'm at. The time I spend on Shorts may be more fruitfully spent on normal videos.