Are YouTube Shorts Worth It? 30-Day Challenge to Get Views And Subscribers to Grow A Channel

Are you looking to use YouTube Shorts as a way to get more views and subscribers, and to grow your channel?

In this blog post, I’m going to show you exactly what happened when I used only YouTube Shorts to grow a brand new YouTube channel - showing you my views, watch time, and subscriber count after 30 days and 30 videos.

After that, I’ll discuss the results and tell you whether I think YouTube Shorts are worth it as a way to grow a new YouTube channel or promote the growth of your existing one.

If you’re totally new to YouTube Shorts, you might want to check out my full guide to them here - complete with a full explanation and tips for optimising Shorts videos for success.

Let’s go!

Testing Out YouTube Shorts: My Experiment

In my case, I wanted to test how effective YouTube Shorts would be at launching a new YouTube channel from scratch.

I posted one short video per day for 30 days, around the same time each afternoon.
As best I could, I optimised each upload’s title, tags, description and thumbnail.
I tracked the results in YouTube Analytics, taking account of views, watch time, and subscribers.

What was my channel about?

My YouTube Channel made up of YouTube Shorts videos

I bought an e-bike last year and know that it is an area of growth, so I wanted to use YouTube shorts as a way to answer frequently asked questions about e-bikes; stuff that prospective buyers or new owners might have.

Here is an example of one of the videos I posted. All followed the same format - text captions over stock video.

My YouTube Shorts Experiment: The Results

Let’s deep-dive into my YouTube Analytics to see what happened over the 30 days of posting shorts.

YouTube Shorts: Total Views

Over 30 days, my videos were viewed 8,185 times.
There was a total of 48.6 hours watch time
The average watch time per video was 21 seconds.

That big spike at the beginning was my second ever video (“Can E-Bikes Go up HILLS?”) - a popular question amongst e-bike customers. That video made up over 1,300 of all my views. I never reached those loft heights again.

As you can see above, the average watch time for my videos remained pretty consistent for the whole duration of the experiment. Since my videos were all 45-60 seconds long, not that many people will have reached the end - where my call to action to subscribe was.

Here’s a look at my top 5 videos and their view count over the 30-day period:

Quite surprisingly, a good proportion of my YouTube Shorts (beyond the ones shown in this screengrab) gained several hundred views.

YouTube Shorts: Viewer Sources

It appears that, for a whole host of reasons (recency, length, SEO, popularity, etc.), the YouTube algorithm wasn’t giving them much visibility to desktop users of the site - 99% of my views were on mobile devices.

Perhaps unsurprisingly (since it’s a new feature that YouTube wants to promote), a huge majority (94.5%) of my views came through the Shorts section on the YouTube app - there’s a Short Videos section a little way down the mobile app home screen.

Barely any traffic came from external sources (to be expected, I didn’t share the videos elsewhere and only a fraction of people shared them on my behalf).

And as far as search traffic goes, hardly any views either - just 0.6% of the total came through search.

And just to cap that off, above you can see that just 0.1% of my views came from YouTube suggesting my videos.

YouTube Shorts: Total Subscribers

Over 30 days, I gained 53 subscribers and lost 7, giving a final total of 46 - over one per day, not too shabby. All but one of the subscribers was gained on the watch page of a video, with one subscribing from my channel page.

YouTube Shorts Experiment: Observations and Discussion

After 30 days of posting Shorts to YouTube, and in light of the data above, here are a few things that stood out:

YouTube is seemingly promoting Shorts (for now) and I was able to generate hundreds of views for many videos with relatively little effort. Creating and publishing a 60-second video like mine took around 15-20 minutes, rather than the hours that might go into a long-form YouTube video.
After initially promoting a newly-published Shorts video, there was little to no obvious growth in view count for any video days or weeks after it was published. The algorithm seems to favour new Shorts, but disregard them afterwards. This seems similar to what TikTok does - prioritising the discovery of brand new content.
People were engaging with a brand new channel made up only of Shorts, and I was able to gain a subscriber or two per day, despite the data suggesting that not many of them would have made it to my “hit subscribe” call to action at the end of each video.

Are YouTube Shorts Worth It?

Based on my experiment and the idea of YouTube Shorts as a whole, are they worth making to grow your channel’s views and subscriber base? I would say that yes they are, but how you use them depends on your situation.

Are YouTube Shorts good for growing a channel?

If my experience is anything to go with, Shorts certainly do give you quite a generous amount of exposure on the platform, with comparably less effort required than creating traditional, long-form content. If you’re shooting videos on-the-fly, too, rather than piecing Shorts together like I did, you can push them out with even more ease.

With a new channel, assuming you get some traction with subscribers, you could then use Shorts as a platform to expand into longer form content that your new subscriber base might enjoy.

And if you’re looking to monetise your channel, then you can’t rely on Shorts alone, because at the time of writing they don’t count towards the 4,000-hour per year watch time requirement that YouTube requires before you can apply for monetization. Subscribers gained from Shorts do count towards this total.

For existing channels, Shorts seem like a neat idea to engage your audience with off-the-cuff clips, but do be aware that YouTube hasn’t yet separated long-from watch time analytics from Shorts, so your channel’s average view duration will likely take a hit.

YouTube Shorts Conclusion

What are your thoughts on YouTube Shorts? At the present time, I see them as an interesting way to build a launchpad for a channel that will eventually contain long-form content.

Existing channels may want to be a bit more cautious about how they use Shorts - introducing them slowly to see the impact they have on channel growth and the overall positive growth in analytics.

Andrew Macarthy is a social media consultant and the author of the #1 Amazon Web Marketing Bestseller, 500 Social Media Marketing Tips.

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Are YouTube Shorts Worth It? 30-Day Challenge to Get Views And Subscribers to Grow A Channel