A YouTube Shorts Study Worth Checking Out

Is TikTok prioritizing longer content?

I’ve done some pretty extensive research to answer that question, and I can give you a confident yes.

But, a new study from Paddy Galloway (a YouTube Consultant working with folks like MrBeast) found that YouTube Shorts might be moving in a similar direction.

You can go read the entire thread on Twitter, but I’m going to do my best to summarize a portion that covers video length.

The research was conducted across 33 YouTube channels with 5,400 different short-form videos.

It’s important to note that the channels fell into different niches and it’s unclear how many subscribers each channel had.

Regardless, most channels appear to be making shorts that fall within a range of 20-40 seconds in length.

The videos that performed the best fell within the 50-60 second range, with an average view count of 1.7 million.

The length that came in second (in terms of average views) was 40-50 seconds, with an average of 800k views.

When the average view duration fell between 50-60 seconds, the average view count was 4.1 million, with 40-50 seconds being 1.8 million views, and 30-40 seconds getting 1.3 million.

But, after dropping below 30 seconds, the views tanked drastically, to just a .2 million view average for 20-30 seconds(200k views, no big deal).

If you can hold a viewer’s attention, longer content should be your focus.

Paddy covers much more than video length in his study, I definitely recommend you go read the entire thread.

Talk soon!