I've put up a lot of YouTube Shorts. Most of these come from my recent walk, which finished only this past weekend. Except for the three videos I did at the end, the shorts have all been wordless and only a few seconds long. What's boggled my mind is the number of views I've gotten from those shorts. Here's a view-count rundown of a few recent videos (thus far, anyway—the numbers are always increasing):
These viewing numbers aren't huge if you're a big vlogger. Those people get tens or hundreds of thousands of views per video thanks to their gazillion subscribers. I've got only 15. Also: from this same trip, I have videos that got very few views:
And my walk-summary vids have exceedingly few views:
So... bots? I don't think so.
As always, I have no idea why any of this works out the way it does, and various prominent YouTubers, despite being huge, also profess confusion as to why some tossed-off videos blow up while meticulously worked-on videos are largely ignored. It's a mystery.
But on the whole, if I can expend so little effort and get up to 2,000 views for a mere short video, I wonder whether there might really be an audience out there, crouching in wait for the Rise of the Kevin. I suppose we'll see as I continue to explore creative options.
Re: view counts of shorts
ReplyDeleteWhen you open YouTube, it populates with suggested videos that you may or may not be interested in. When you scroll, and your mouse pointer moves over a particular short, the video will begin to auto play, even if you don't click on it. I wonder if that counts as a view?
People are developing shorter and shorter attention spans, so I guess it makes sense that a short video gets more views than others.
Brian