NEW 3 Min Shorts. Watch Before You Upload!

Key Takeaways

did this video that I published on YouTube just break YouTube's rules hey Channel makers today we're talking about 3 minute shorts we're going to talk about how to handle these how to avoid many of the mistakes that creators could be making today that could really hurt their Channel as well as how using these could help you grow faster and to a broader audience let's go all right super brief recap the way shorts work is if you have a video that is either square or vertical if it's under 60 seconds long it can be treated as YouTube short and when that happens it can show up on the shorts shelf here on the homepage or in the feed but it can also show up just in the shorts feed where people just sit and kind of scroll and scroll and scroll right shorts have helped a lot of channels to grow we're going to talk a little bit about that briefly in this video because shorts have also heard a lot of channels but what's changed recently is that starting on October 15th if you make a square or vertical video now that's up to 3 minutes long 180 seconds it can be treated as a short as well but as we actually try to apply that in real life we're not seeing kind of all of what we might expect and so I want to break it down for you so you understand what's happening when it's happening and how it's even working today so first let's talk a little bit about how these can help you because shorts spread so differently right because they're seen by a much broader group of people because people are literally just having to choose to not scroll away as long as your short is reasonably engaging it's likely to get more views potentially drive more subscri rers and get your brand your name and your face seen by more people now one of the things I'm excited about for these three minute shorts is for those of us who primarily create long form content on YouTube is a great kind of middle ground because we can create shorts well there's still shorts I guess but shorts that maybe are closer to the type of content we would create as our long form videos and so we're going to do a better job of attracting the Right audience so that if people do subscribe from these YouTube shorts they're the right subscribers the people that are more likely to watch your long form videos I think these might be better for a lot of us than the typical really short shorts now we hear from content creators all the time who say they tried YouTube shorts and it ruined their channel that is incredibly sad and disheartening to hear because frankly we know what causes that like 99% of the time and we know exactly how to use YouTube shorts as well as other YouTube features to strengthen and grow a channel that's literally why we have our membership project 24 is because we want to be able to help content creators know exactly what mistakes to avoid but also to know how to use the features and capabilities of YouTube properly to grow their channels YouTube doesn't have to be hard YouTube success isn't actually a mystery not to those of us who have done it and who have seen it repeated over and over and over again and very soon we're going to be ready to relaunch our YouTube system within project 24 with some major updates to help help you really get your channel growing faster so stay tuned because it's coming really really soon okay so now let's talk about the timeline of these three minute shorts thing because it's a little bit confusing you see YouTube announced that this was going to be coming on October 15th October 15th came and it went and it seemed like nothing was really that different in fact I made a 2 minute and 51 second YouTube short I went to upload it and YouTube treated it just like a long form video so what's the deal there YouTube well I did some digging and this what I found out October 15th was actually a cutoff date you see any square or vertical video that was created before October 15th if it was longer than 60 seconds it is not and will never be treated as a YouTube short not ever but if it was published on or after October for me the timeline goes this way but for you it's mirrored if it's on or after October 15th then it can be treated as a YouTube short and later it definitely will be treated as a YouTube short so it's a cutoff date but it's not a date for which like all these new features were going to be rolled out so the next stage of this is kind of this reclassification of what can be a YouTube short and when and how the role out of all this is going to happen you see not all vertical videos under 3 minutes are going to be treated as shorts right away in fact they're kind of being treated as sort of both Longs and shorts let me show you what I mean right here on channel makers we've uploaded many YouTube shorts right over time and they show up here under shorts under my content shorts but I uploaded this one this 2 minutes 51 seconds long and look it shows up under my normal videos and if I go to my channel it shows up under my recent videos shorts don't normally show up here if I go do a search on YouTube look it just shows up here again as a normal video and it's already been over two weeks since YouTube made this change right so what's the deal well here's the thing if turns out that these videos actually can and are also being treated sort of as shorts if I go to this video and I go into its analytics this is where you can check and you really should keep an eye on this first of all my view count looks really low we're going to talk a little bit about why that would be I published it about a day ago not even a full day ago now but let's go look at the reach and how the viewers found this video 62% of viewers that watched this video found it from the shorts feed yesterday after about two hours it was actually closer to 80% so now YouTube seems to be treating it a little bit less as a short a little bit more as a normal long form video but this is proof to me that YouTube actually did put it out in the shorts feed kind of treated it as a short so right now your long shorts are showing up in kind of your normal long form video stuff within most of your backend as well as on your channel but they're also often going to be pulled out as short videos and put in the shorts feed so we're kind of in this Middle Ground so at what point are they actually just going to be treated more like shorts well the next stage of the process here is for them to start just taking all of these types of videos that meet the requirements under 180 seconds in square or vertical format and just treating them as shorts and they said this will be rolling out over the next few weeks what does that mean to YouTube we don't actually know but they said they're shooting for by the end of November so I guess that's the date we'll kind of hold them to but that doesn't mean that in the upload process and stuff they're going to be uploaded as shorts and that you're going to have the same tools as shorts in fact all of the normal shorts tools that you have when you upload them to YouTube those are not going to be available for long shorts until sometime early next year they said so at this stage we're still kind of in this weird limbo and since we can't really guarantee exactly how YouTube's going to be treating these videos we need to be deliberate about how we go about uploading and publishing these videos so that YouTube treats them or is most likely to treat them how you want them to treat them so there are a couple things we can do that should help YouTube to treat this video as much like a short as possible the first one is I didn't put a thumbnail on this video I felt like if it had a thumbnail YouTube would be far more likely to treat it as a normal long form video I don't have any data to back that up that's just a suspicion for me but there is one more thing that YouTube did mention and that I think is really important if you want YouTube to treat this only as a short and if you don't want to disrupt the normal flow of videos to your normal long form audience you see if you have subscribers that have the notification Bell rung when you put out a long form video they get a notification saying there's a long form video and then they get there and they see oh this is this is different than the normal content I see this isn't what I normally want to watch and then that video suffers right and it can slow down the momentum of your channel we don't want to confuse our audience we don't want to confuse the algorithm them so what we need to do is we need to try to get this video treated differently the easiest way to do that is to check the box so that you don't notify your subscribers I know that probably sounds counterintuitive but let me explain when we don't notify subscribers it's obvious to YouTube when that video gets fewer views because it will get fewer views when you don't notify your subscribers it's obvious that that's the reason why and so YouTube doesn't just completely put that video sweep it under the rug because it underperformed they're going to treat it a little bit differently this is also going to prevent that video from getting pushed out to your normal subscribers and have them see it and feel like ah this is different only watch 2 seconds of it and bounce because it's not the stuff they're used to from you keep your audience happy keep the algorithm happy turn off the notification let me show you how to do that real quick when I put in all the information here to upload this video at the bottom of the video details okay then I scroll down and there is a check box box here that says publish to subscriptions feed and notify subscribers just uncheck that box before you schedule it out okay so we've talked a little bit about a couple things we can do to help make these shorts work as well as possible but the reality is is should you even be doing these we need to talk about what to do about these shorts so let's dig into that but first I want to answer a couple of other questions that I think are going to help clear up a few more things the first question is why why is YouTube even doing this 60 seconds short it's like 3 minutes as long why why is that as short I think the real reason is because people cross post all the time right and so you have people creating content for Tik Tok YouTube shorts Instagram reels and Facebook reels Etc right they're going everywhere but here's the deal on Tik Tok for your videos to get monetized they have to be at least a minute long a minute and a second and so if your video is long enough to get monetized on Tik Tok it's too long to be a YouTube short so here's what's happening people are either having to create two edits of a video one that's slightly under 60 seconds and one that's slightly longer than 60 seconds and upload them separately or content creators are picking one platform and if it's not YouTube YouTube's going to do whatever it takes to make sure that they're either going to also pick YouTube or exclusively pick YouTube they certainly don't want to be the kid left out of the game honestly I think that's the main thing I think it's just going to make it a lot easier for more content creators to cross post and that allows YouTube to get substantially more content on their platform all right so back to this main question should you start creating long shorts at this point because there is a lot more crossover in the kind of content you can make in 3 minutes with the kind of content you're probably already making on your long form videos if you're primarily a long form content creator I think there's value in creating some content in the vertical format that's a little bit shorter but that closely ties in and resembles the kind of long form content you would make we always treat YouTube shorts as sort of a promo for our channel that doesn't mean that it's just like clips from long form videos but there should always be a reason why people want to come check out your channel and see the long form content on it what we don't do as long form content creators is create YouTube shorts that are intended to be viral as a short in and of themselves if on this channel I made a really comedic funny video that millions and millions of people wanted to watch but that attracted not the right people for the rest of what we do on channel makers that would not serve the channel I'd get one cool video and that would probably be the end of that it would actually probably hurt the rest of the channel quite a bit so if you're a long form content creator start thinking about that and maybe start producing some of these two to three minute YouTube shorts that could be used to help promote your channel to Showcase really good things about what you do in your long form content and then go ahead and publish them the way that I described without notifying the audience pushing them out there in a way where hopefully they're being viewed mostly As YouTube shorts now if you look at those videos in your analytics and see that they're not being primarily viewed as shorts then you might consider unpublishing them for now and waiting to put them back out there until they are being treated more consistently as YouTube shorts now if you like that and you want more updates about what's going on with YouTube the stuff they're announcing as well as our take on what these things might mean for you and your channel you're going to want to make sure that you're subscribed and that you click that notification Bell so that you're the first to know and that's it thanks Channel makers for joining me today gosh what is three minute shorts there's nothing short about three minutes we going to have next 30 minute YouTube shorts