The Edge of David "Shorts" Experiment

Alright, so I decided to try out YouTube shorts. They are simple, 1 minute or less videos you post to YouTube. Record your video in portrait mode and upload it.

I went ahead and created "Edge of David shorts." A dedicated channel to my iPhone videos. Basically, whenever I would be inclined to post a story to Instagram or Facebook, I can now post that same video as a "short" to YouTube.

The results?

Crazy.

I got this channel up and over 2000 views a day in days, not weeks or months -DAYS. Anyway, the end result was that I got a lot of views and subscribers and that's it. No money and no engagement on my main channel. Just a fun little distraction.

Update: I decided to close down the shorts channel as YouTube finally integrated short videos into the YouTube experience.

Now I upload shorts to my Edge of David YouTube channel. The videos all perform the same way in that they get a spike in views for a few days then die off:

Short are amazing for growing your subscribers fast, but there currently is no real way to generate money from them. They do make a bit of ad revenue, but for spam purposes, YouTube has disabled being able to link out from your YouTube short videos.

You can only link to a longer-form video on YouTube.

Should you post shorts?

If you have an established channel, go for it. There is no way to know if your audience will like it until you try. Personally, I think it's a fun way to create videos that could potentially drive the growth of your YouTube channel.

Short videos are clearly proven way to drive millions of views to your channel:

This one video from my friend Jay has 25 million views and is responsible for driving tens of thousands of subscribers to both his YouTube channel, Instagram and Twitch stream.

Like always just pay attention to the performance, delete videos people don't like and see if you personally enjoy doing it in the first place.

What I now personally do is turn my Instagram stories I like into short videos for fun.