Why Your Shorts Get Stuck at 400 Views...

so you keep posting YouTube shorts and they're not getting any views well there's two things you need to fix over the last year I've posted 40 shorts onto my channel some of them only got a couple of thousand views whereas others went completely viral but why when I cracked this code I gained 34 million views and 95,000 subscribers in less than a year so what's the real difference between a short that gets 100 views and a short that gets Millions the truth is that all successful shorts look exactly the same inside your YouTube analytics this

short that I uploaded currently has 15 million views but before the views came flying in there were two more golden signs that told me it was about to explode the first one was the viewed versus swiped away graph this shows you the amount of people that saw the start of your sh and chose to carry on watching instead of swiping away which is extremely important long form videos on YouTube have titles and thumbnails that try to convince people to click but nobody chooses to click on YouTube shorts the overwhelming majority of your audience discovers them

by scrolling through the feed which YouTube chooses for them so the first 5 Seconds of your video needs to grab attention and convince people to carry on watching this is your title and thumbnail as you can see 76% of people chose to watch this short and it got 15 million views in my experience if your short gets less than 65 or 70% after a few days it will stop getting recommended but don't take my word for it this other short I uploaded has 9 million views and this is the swiped away graph here's another here's

another one and here's another one as as you can see they are all over 70% and they all ended up getting over 1 million views and just to prove that point even more here's another video with just a few thousand views and the viewed number versus swiped away is much lower but what if this metric is really good on your video but you're still not getting any views well I'm sorry to say that grabbing attention with your intro just isn't enough if people stop watching after that you still won't get recommended you need to hold

attention throughout your entire video always keep in mind that if the viewer gets bored they can just swipe away there's literally thousands of other videos waiting for them in the feed so you need to keep convincing them to carry on watching and that they're in the right place which brings us nicely onto metric number two if we take a look at this short you can see that despite having a good retention at the beginning it quickly drops off this steep curve downwards is people leaving the video and swiping onto something else and this is a

big red flag for the YouTube algorithm swiping away is one of the most negative actions you can take on a YouTube sh and YouTube sees this as your content just not being good enough to hold attention so they won't recommend it more but if we now look at one of my short with millions of views you can see that the retention graph is a lot flatter and this is what you should be aiming for the audience retention for this video is at 89% which means it kept attention throughout the whole thing here's some more examples

from my other viral shorts and as you can see they are all over 80% which really needs to be the minimum that you aim for and again just for comparison here's one of my lesser viewed videos and as you can see the retention is much lower it's all connected you can Captivate your Audience by keeping an engaging Pace with your editing and consistently making sure that the content is relevant interesting and most importantly entertaining cut all the fat now these two golden metrics are all well and good if you have some views to work with

but how do you get that view count to move from zero well it's all about giving YouTube enough information when you upload if YouTube has the right data it'll be able to show your content to the right people an audience that's actually interested in your Niche and topic will be more likely to watch all the way until the end and that process starts at the very beginning with your video ideas you need to be making YouTube shorts that you know people will actually enjoy watching and a great way to do that is to use ideas

that you've already seen working and just put your own spin on it my top performing shorts are not original ideas all of them have been made by other creators before and I'd already used the same ideas on my long form videos as well so I already knew that the interest was there before I started recording and I just added my own perspective I then always research keywords related to that topic that I use in my title and description search for some phrases in chebe buddy and try looking for keywords with a high search volume but

low competition I also fill my tags with these phrases as well and it's easy to forget that YouTube shorts get recommended on the homepage in the sidebar next to other videos and they appear in search results as well so adding keywords actually increases your chances of being discovered outside of the short speed and by using this method of adding relevant information my shorts normally get between 1,000 and 3 ,000 views within the first day and this is a really important step you might have noticed that your shorts get a very quick surge in views in

the first 24 hours but then the growth stops so why does this happen well it's because you failed YouTube's big test like I said before YouTube shorts don't have thumbnails so the algorithm needs another method to test if your video concepts are actually any good and YouTube does this by throwing your shorts into the feed and judging the reaction from that test audience but if those two golden met trick aren't good after showing it to that small audience they'll stop recommending it completely but to be honest even if you do get the right results from

that test audience you still might have to be patient the big numbers don't always come right away most of my viral shorts popped off almost exactly 3 months after posting even when those first two metrics were looking good but once your video does go viral it can keep happening again and again even a year after uploading my most viral shorts still get pushed into the feed so all of that time I spent researching and optimizing my video right at the start is still paying off today then there's consistency how many YouTube shorts should you post

every week many YouTube gurus will tell you to post as many shorts as possible posting every day or even more and obviously the more you upload the more chances you have of going viral but I'd also be careful with that way of thinking the key to our success with YouTube shorts on this channel has been quality over quantity by focusing on making quality videos from the very best ideas only we've managed to explode this Channel with only 40 videos we often take ideas from our best performing long form videos and reoptimize them for shorts we

don't just use Clips I rewrite re-record and re-edit those same ideas to fully cater to the shorts platform and my analytics tell me that this method works it's a longer process but it pays off and if you're looking to post YouTube shorts just to make money it can be very tempting just to make videos in the most lucrative Niche possible but if your passion for the subject isn't there people can tell the truth is is if you're passionate about a subject that energy is very engaging even if the audience doesn't have a particular interest in

the same thing right away for example I've got no real interest in trains but when I watch this guy's YouTube shorts they're so charming and engaging that I watch a lot of his content his enthusiasm for the subject matter keeps me watching and you can't fake that so if you choose a topic that genuinely inspires you it makes things a hell of a lot easier and you might be surprised how much the views come flying in now shorts can be a really great way to grow your channel but a lot of people don't know about

the hidden dangers in fact a lot of channels are now saying that posting YouTube shorts can actually kill your channel in the long run and I explore that exact topic right here you should check it out