I Blew Up A NEW Gaming Channel With YouTube Shorts

I had 8.5 million shorts views between December 1st and January 30th and thanks to those shorts views my main video has received 253 000 views in that same period on a gaming channel that started December with roughly 3 000 subscribers and then ended those 60 days with over 20 000 Subs this video is going to break down everything I did to get those views every failure I made how I learned from those failures and how I now consistently can get a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand views a day from shorts and how you can

do it too but first if that hasn't convinced you to start using YouTube shorts let me dispel a few worries myths and answer some questions that might have been planted in you from creators out there all of your success were based on understanding these few questions before we jump into actually how to use shorts first will shorts create an audience that only watch short format content no very few people on the planet only watch short form format content and many people who watch short format content will actively seek out longer format content from the same

creators they watch there is a huge demographic of people who watch short format content and what you create will influence the audience that you get channels who produce long and short format have seen far better growth this year than those who only do one or the other YouTube has even done study after study to make sure this is true and I'll add links in the description so you guys can see that you're all good if you use both number two shorts will hurt your YouTube channel and limit your growth no not at all maybe last

year you needed a second YouTube channel but with the semi-new changes YouTube has made shorts have their own place on your main Channel now and they are fantastic for helping your channel be discovered and helping you bring those new audiences in especially if you're a small Creator the third thing I hear is my content just doesn't fit in short format wrong every type of content fits into short format saying this is the same as saying I don't know how to make my content fit so I refuse to learn your content might not fit right now

but you can learn to make it fit I just spent three to four weeks trying different formats and figuring out how to make a specific idea I had work in a short format everything I changed was failing over and over and over until I figured it out and the format the idea I wanted to use started getting hundreds of thousands of views you just have to put the work in Number Four Shorts views are far less valuable than long format views yeah this is sort of true to truly grow using shorts first you need to

accept that views on shorts are technically less valuable and in the same vein you need to understand that when it comes to shorts if you're getting 300 500 or even 1500 views that isn't actually very good you see on long videos you have views and then you have Impressions impressions are when someone sees the video's thumbnail and a view is when someone actually clicks that thumbnail and watches the video on shorts they are fed to viewers through a feed so no one clicks it that means Impressions aren't really a thing and instead you have a

different analytic shown in feed which is how many times the short was shown to people in the feed and then another analytic swipe first viewed which is how many of those people swiped away versus how many stayed to watch if someone is fed your short in the feed and they swipe away well it's not a view but if they stay a tiny bit longer and it doesn't seem like it needs to be that much longer then it becomes a view this makes it far easier to get views and because it's easier to get views we

end up with a larger view count than long format easier views means less valuable in a weird way but why is 500 or 1500 views not good well YouTube needs to learn if you're short that you just uploaded is Worth showing to people to do that it has to show it to people first so it will show the short to a few hundred or even a thousand people as a test of sorts now if those people swipe away quickly or just don't watch the entire length of the short give you a good retention well then

YouTube will stop sharing that short with this in mind you need to be more conscious that views are less valuable because you'll naturally get more views Than You'll likely have ever had before but this is where they have their own value growing a Channel Growing a brand or growing a business in the real world is all about Impressions on you or your product the more people who see you and the more often those people see you repeatedly means the more likely they are to engage with your product which in this case is videos but of

course they have to be the Right audience you're not going to try and show your brand new Fried Chicken business where customers can pick out their live chicken they want to eat strangle it themselves and then have it served to them for lunch to a bunch of vegetarians which leads us to our first step and I know this is pretty far in the video for step number one but here it is the first step is one that you are going to hate to hear but hold on to me here because the only reason you hate

it is because it's been explained to you badly I want you to Niche down don't close the video I know it sucks to hear but I'm not telling you to play just one game or make one type of content I am telling you to make a type of content for a specific audience a key demographic as it's called if you upload 30 shorts across two months that's a short every second day and every single one of those shorts is on a different topic or a different game or it's aimed at a completely different demographic you'll

have far less success if any success at all to be honest but if you upload 30 shorts across two months all targeting the same demographic of people the same audience well you'll have far more success let me give you an example of demographics so you understand I'm not telling you to just be boring and focus on one thing for gamers it could be Nintendo games like Point Crow small ant or alpharad or you could do strategy games like real civil engineer or ambiguous amphibian or you can get into competitive Shooters like tens or indie games

like Northern lion or dangerously funny horror games like Markiplier or lonely shark take note here none of these examples are picking one game to play they're picking a genre that has a shared player base if someone is interested in Rim World they'll probably be keen on Project zomboid people who like Zelda probably like Mario just remember not to get too specific or the viewer base will become too small and you'll have much less growth but starting specific isn't bad because you're able to expand later maybe for now I'll just play Pokemon but in the future

future I'll be able to expand to playing Zelda and Mario once you have your demographic you need to start thinking up ideas and how you're going to structure the idea for a short personally I find the best performing shorts are questions challenges or ideas that can be conveyed to the viewer in roughly two to five seconds and they have to be an idea that keeps them watching to see the ending hey I'm LJ from the future sorry to interrupt I just wanted to say that I'm about six seven months past filming this video and it's

the 12th of July and I'm still getting 100 000 views every single day on my channel and I haven't uploaded in about a week now I'm about to show you examples of some amazing shorts that have had brilliant ideas attached to them but I realized I didn't give you any strategies or tools to brainstorm your ideas so really quickly the first way I brainstorm ideas is with my butt you take something you love say for me catching Shiny Pokemon and then you add a butt and fill in something that makes it more interesting catching Shiny

Pokemon but if I use more than three balls I have to kill it or beating Dark Souls but twitch chat can turn off my controller the second way plain and simple watch shorts watch content absorb content take notes the entire time you're absorbing that content a great concept is to look at creators outside of your Niche and bring those ideas into your Niche for me I made a Pokemon video about surviving 100 days and that idea actually came from the stardew Valley Community a different community and finally using tools you can use things like chat

GPT or all sorts of stuff to generate ideas but specifically I've been using vid iq's daily idea generator you type in some keywords or an idea and it spits back a dozen different ideas based on high performing content and it also generates personalized ideas every day based on your channel and its best performing videos in that topic I'm not sponsored by vid IQ I've used the free version for about six years now but I've been in talks to partner with them for ages because I wanted to get you guys a big discount and we succeeded

if you use the link in the description right now then you can get their paid version for just one dollar it's canceled anytime and it's a great tool for beginners and again their free version exists and I've used it for years it's a great app I'm really Keen to see your butts in the comments and okay let's look at how ideas can make or break your entire shorts retention rate I have three examples for you the first is Jessa a creator with around 11 million subscribers who does IRL content in the vein of Mr Beast

the example I'm showing you is titled how many balloons does it take to make a yoga ball fly and he established that by shockingly saying it in the first six seconds this will increase his viewed verse swipe statistic which I personally aim to make sure that I have a 75 minimum on all of my viewed verse swipe statistics I do aim to get 80 as my real goal but 75 is the minimum for it to do well in the algorithm I find now the rest of Jess's short is adding more and more balloons until the

yoga ball flies away and with each time more balloons are added he gives a quick reaction so that it's not just a boring number counting and instead he includes his personality and breaks up the pacing of the short now once the question is answered once the yoga ball has started flying what does he do does he hang around telling people why it worked does he ask for people to like And subscribe no he ends the short the moment he has given the answer the moment he has given the viewer the value they were watching for

and has answered that question because the moment people get what they want they will swipe away this Creator is aimed at a different demographic than you most likely but don't let that cloud your judgment the structure is important for every demographic no matter who you are the second example is from my channel where my Niche is Nintendo and Pokemon the short I am showing you is Wonder trading Pokemon until I get a dragon type and this has 1.5 million views by now it might be higher than that actually using a similar structure I established the

challenge in the first five seconds by simply saying saying how many trades will it take to turn my Pokemon into a and then a wheel starts spinning on screen little subtitles start popping up with potential options and then the wheel lands on a dragon type and without any delay I start trading Pokemon randomly 10 seconds into the short now I debated not including the wheel because it does add five to eight seconds to the intro but I actually found it was a way to make the short far more engaging people see the wheels start they

see the little jokes popping up and they stick around to see what it lands on the longer they stick around the more they've already become invested and they're likely to watch all the way to the end from 10 seconds till 52 seconds we are constantly trading Pokemon making quick jokes about each random Pokemon we get and at around 53 seconds I get the dragon type and this is where I make a slight mistake in this short I say oh an axu that counts and then I say it only took us six trades saying all of

this added five seconds making the short 57 seconds long in total and if we look at my retention rate graph you'll see those five seconds have a huge drop in retention because people saw me get the dragon and they swiped away if I had ended this short on aksu that counts bam it ends there then this short would have gotten even more views due to having a higher retention am I upset about getting almost 2 million views no would I be hyped if it was way more because I cut earlier and didn't waste time yes

obviously you don't have to do a question or challenge video but these are a great way to show you how a structure of a short can do so much to boost retention rate let me quickly show you another example I made two shorts they're both the exact same format as each other and I want to show you just the intro of each and then you need to pick which one has the better viewed verse swipe statistic here is option a day seven of surprise trading one of every single Pokemon in scarlet and violet here is

the best of box 7 and here is option b I caught every single Pokemon in scarlet and violet and I'm gonna want to trade them all including legendaries right now so what do you think oh that's right if you said option A you're dead wrong option A has a major issue the first being people think day nine I haven't seen the first eight days yet and they swipe away it's also more confusing are we surprise trading every Pokemon out or surprise trading to try to get every Pokemon back it doesn't make sense option b though

had a 77 viewed because people didn't need prior knowledge they didn't feel like they needed to watch eight earlier days and they understood the concept quicker and easier and obviously clearer you want to establish offered value provide the content and then deliver on the promised value and then you want to end before the viewer even realizes the short is over but that leads me to the most common question how long should shorts be be after all if you just ask one question and answer it instantly in eight seconds won't the retention rate be amazing well

the answer is no the retention rate on that will do terribly let me show you our third example which is again actually two shorts both shorts are the exact same format Guess the Pokemon in 60 seconds or release a shiny they both open the exact same way and they both end instantly after value is given the energy the editing everything about these shorts is the exact same the first short short a has a 110 retention rate the second short short B has an 87 retention rate which one do you think did better and got more

views you'd assume short a would have better performance because of the higher retention rate right well wrong that short only got 7 500 views in total but short B with an 87 retention rate has a hundred and fifty two thousand views so why did B do so much better well the difference is the short length short a is 12 seconds long long and short B is 43 seconds long thanks to this test and test by my friend lonely shark we have managed to figure out a few rules for length and retention rate I've broken these

down into three rules specifically rule number one don't bother going under 25 seconds unless you can make a short people want to watch twice or engage like commenting or sharing it before swiping away and really do not go under 15 seconds rule number two the shortest to aim for I find is 30 seconds and it requires a 90 to 95 retention rate minimum in order to gain traction as a rough guideline rule number three for millions of views I found that 45 to 55 second long shorts with a minimum of 85 percent to 90 retention

rate will often perform better obviously the shorter the short the higher retention is required so 45 seconds aim to get around 90 55 seconds you can go a little lower to 85 again these are just rough guidelines but every every single channel that I've worked with has said the same thing getting a 75 percent viewed versus swiped minimum and then getting an 85 to 90 retention rate on content that is 45 seconds long minimum and that's how you get numbers but does this mean that any short content that's too short won't get views God no

it's just far easier to create a piece of content that is 45 seconds long and get 85 retention from someone watching it once before leaving than it is to make something 20 seconds long and get someone to watch it two or three times before leaving but of course it's important to remember that just because you reach these numbers doesn't mean every single short will boom to millions of views let's say You release a short and it has 1 000 views and you've successfully reached all of these analytics it's 55 seconds long 95 retention rate 80

viewed versus swiped you are crushing it so why is YouTube not sending it out well it might be that 800 of your views are returning viewers people people who have watched your content before people who are invested in you and your content but 200 viewers are new viewers people YouTube tested the content too and they swiped away instantly or maybe they didn't watch much which is what brought that retention rate down YouTube doesn't know if this short is good for new viewers so they'll stop trying to show it to New viewers right now until they

know who the right person is because it could also be that YouTube just doesn't know who your audience is yet which is why I also recommend aiming for the same audience every release because the people who it's meant for will keep watching it over and over and over and it will know who to show the short to so say we have the right length shorts how do we increase the retention rate well the first step is to obviously follow the structure established earlier in the video and cut anything that doesn't align with the value you

are setting up the value you are promising at the start this obviously takes practice so don't worry if your first one you leave a bit too much in just keep trying I still mess this up weekly trying new things but remember failure equals opportunities to learn failure is personal growth if you do it right other tips for increasing retention well remember where our eye is drawn you want to keep your content centered and in the middle of the screen especially for that opening hook think about where we naturally are looking on our phone screens as

we're swiping through and put your content there an example if we look at my Wonder trades short we have a Graphic and my first subtitle in the very center so the moment someone swipes up and my short appears they'll start reading it and then that first subtitle they're reading well it actually moves with an animation up to just below my cam before the next subtitle Pops in underneath where it moved to the core content and the trades stay in the center but we draw our eye to the rest of the subtitles which keep popping up

in the same place so the viewer continues to read them over and over and over becoming engaged in the short which leads to our next tip subtitles these are mandatory on shorts and can be done in almost every video editing software I really recommend looking up how to add your own text with your own editing software so that you can add subtitles as well just start simple add them word by word and I promise you the more you do it the faster you'll get at it and the more Dynamic you can be with your animations

as well I promise if you just work towards it you'll crush it next up is sound design yes most shorts are watched without audio AKA another reason why subtitles are crucial but for those who do watch with the sound on having good sound design is crucial so consider adding music or light sound effects where possible so it isn't just your voice or gameplay and please remember to level your music and voice tracks properly so people can hear you and finally once you have cut the short down to just the valuable Parts it's time to make

that more engaging visually by adding Graphics or simple but effective cutting for example when I was trading to get a Pokemon smaller than a Jam Jar I had it pop up an actual Jam Jar on screen as a graphic and then later I photoshopped potential Pokemon into the Jam Jar to be visually more engaging this might be a bit Advanced if you're just starting out so instead you could try to do something simple like when I say a Pokemon Ash is caught Ash appears in the edit so that people can go oh that's a visual

change it's interesting to watch or if we're going even simpler that's totally fine as well you can just cut from wider shots to close-ups to where the action is in my guess the Pokemon shorts whenever I pick a Pokemon to guess I cut and zoom into the footage of me clicking on the Pokemon Sprite that I'm going to guess and then I cut right back out to the wide and if I'm wrong I'll do the same thing to cut in close to when it says that I'm wrong doing this brings valuable information to the center

for the viewer and it also means that your short stays energetic and interesting it keeps the viewers engaged without feeling bored and it directs the eye with visual storytelling so they don't get confused and lost and swipe away if I stayed wide on those guessing shorts you wouldn't be able to see what I guess you wouldn't be able to see that I was wrong or what moves the Pokemon we're using it's all about putting the information where they can see it easily so they don't get distracted but you might not feel confident when you first

start out you might just be learning to edit don't worry that's totally fine shorts are the perfect learning tool for an editor it teaches you how to tell stories in a short space of Time how to convey information value and you can make them quicker than a full video meaning you get more feedback faster and can learn more lessons if you don't know I I actually went to University for film and digital media and in one of my very first classes of my very first year at that University our lecturer said that we had to

make a 60-second short film we all lost our mind how were we meant to do that how can we tell a story in such a short space of time this was way before Tick Tock this was way before short this was early Vine days and honestly we didn't think we'd be able to make a short film in 60 seconds but little did I know that activity of forcing me to tell a story concisely in 60 seconds was more valuable than any other editing class I have ever taken so play with your style keep creating and

remember that you're trying to find your own unique voice and share that with people along the way you'll find an audience learn a lot and probably make a lot of mistakes which are all opportunities to learn from which leads me to the mistakes to avoid let's cover a few of the small common mistakes before I wrap this video up with the most common mistake and the worst mistake a shorts Creator can and will make now again making mistakes isn't a bad thing if I hadn't made the mistake of editing and scheduling seven shorts or 15

to 18 seconds long before going on my honeymoon and then coming back and having absolutely zero views then I wouldn't have learned about how long shorts should be or the correct retention rates so I'm gonna say it again that is mistake number one making your shorts far too short without a reason to watch them multiple times now mistake number two that is putting important information such as visuals subtitles in places that will be hidden behind the like dislike subscribe the title at the bottom or even the mobile phone speaker at the top while editing you

should use an overlay similar to this Tick Tock safe overlay and remember that anywhere gray is going to be is hard for viewers to see your content should be front and center in the middle and upper third because that is where our eyes are drawn to normally if you want this overlay that I'm showing you right now it will be hosted in our Discord server which is Linked In the description and mistake number three just quickly before we drop the most common mistake I just want to say again edit your shorts holy crap oh no

seriously why is nobody editing their shorts anymore blanket converting gaming Clips or long-winded Rants and uploading them is the laziest thing I've ever seen I do not know what is going on it's like the last two months there has been this massive increase in people not editing their shorts they just convert it to vertical and push it out I'm losing my mind Auto converting a landscape video into vertical and posting it isn't going to work it's not good why do I why do I have to say this someone is someone telling you guys not to

edit your shorts what's going on why is no one editing their shorts anymore it was like everyone was editing up until two months ago and now all of a sudden all these gaming creators are just not editing their shorts hold on please edit your shorts but finally the emo most common mistake for shorts is just not watching shorts in your Niche seriously you'll never succeed if you don't spend time researching watching and most importantly actually enjoying shorts content in your topic search up your Niche hit shorts and check out some of the most popular learn

from what they're doing use them to inspire you teach you and most importantly learn to respect short format content short format isn't worse than long format it's a different format with its own unique value its own challenges and its own things that it can deliver and give to you once a week I spend an hour or two literally just watching shorts in my Niche and writing out the things I notice the things I like the other day I actually timed every single shot I watched I watched 110 different shorts and I timed every single one

of them I counted how many Cuts they had and how long each shot was that's right I went a little bit too aggressive but I learned something I learned that I was over editing my Shores I had too many Cuts in mind compared to what other successful creators were doing and that's why some of my more intensely edited shorts were failing all these Cuts were happening constantly and people were falling off because they couldn't follow along what was going on so I had to slow my editing down a little bit but essentially too many people

make the mistake of never watching shorts in their Niche and so they make terrible shorts that won't work or they just upload boring unedited Clips you can skip all of those hours of failing with just one or two hours of research a week and you'll be so much better at being a content creator and if you want to keep researching well click this video right here it's hero here it covers all the new YouTube features that were added recently because you need to know about them I'll see you guys next week