YouTube Shorts is one of the hottest products on the online video market, drawing trillions of views and endless speculation about the best ways to use it. Here’s an idea you may not have considered: The best use of Shorts may be to (accidentally) not use it at all.
That’s an admittedly hyperbolic way of introducing an unusual-yet-fascinating case study, courtesy of woodworking creator Matthias Wandel. Wandel, who has about 1.7 million subscribers on his primary channel, planned out a minute-long video, which he intended to upload to YouTube Shorts. After Wandel made a few last-minute tweaks, the video’s runtime ended up stretching a few frames past one minute, which made it too long to qualify for YouTube Shorts. Therefore, it ended up on the long-form version of YouTube by accident.
This is where the story gets interesting. The accidental long-form video earned about $1,500 in ad revenue. According to Wandel, that’s more ad revenue than what has been accrued by all of his Shorts combined. “The Shorts shelf just doesn’t earn you money,” he said.
Based on this piece of data, Wandel is becoming disillusioned with Shorts. He doesn’t believe his short-form content can earn enough from the Shorts Fund to catch up with traditional long-form ad revenue.
Wandel’s “accidental” success is amusing, but Shorts may not be quite the money pit the engineer claims it is. His most popular Short got more than twice as many views as his errant non-Short, and there’s some amount of value in that raw exposure. Also, YouTube is currently working on a more robust form of YouTube Shorts advertising.
Ultimately, the solution to the money problem exemplified by Wandel’s case study is probably a multiformat approach, as YouTube has suggested. Both Shorts and long-form content can have their place on the average creator’s posting schedule. And if you’d like to support Wandel specifically, he offers some products that bring him higher returns than anything an ad can provide.
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