Recently, YouTube Shorts content strategists have noticed a curious trend across channel analytics dashboards. On some channels, viewership of older Shorts has declined precipitously, suggesting that YouTube is tinkering with its recommendation algorithm to favor newer uploads.
One operative who noticed the downturn is Mario Joos, who was appointed earlier this year as the CEO of the brotherly creator channel Stokes Twins. On LinkedIn, Joos shared a telling screenshot that shows anonymous viewership data. Sometime in September, “dozens of channels” experienced what Joos dubbed “the flattening.” Uploads published more than 30 days prior saw sudden and dramatic viewership declines, while newer uploads remained unaffected.
Photo credit: Mario Joos via LinkedIn
Other creators and channel owners validated Joos’ findings by noting the downturns they had discovered in their Shorts analytics. “2B views on this chart, and in September all of the evergreen videos simply tanked,” creator Tim Chesney wrote on social media. “It pushes the creator to produce more instead of better. In the long run, if the trend continues, YouTube will become the same trash bin as TikTok.”
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Joos echoed Chesney by arguing that this sort of algorithmic update makes its harder for channels to put out quality content. “I don’t believe this is a creator focused update,” he wrote. “It feels more like a push to hit internal targets and compete with TikTok. But if that’s the case, it’s creating a massive overcorrection that hurts almost every creator on the platform.”
Both Chesney and Joos invoked TikTok in their commentary, and the prevailing theory seems to be that YouTube is tinkering with its algorithm in an attempt to keep up with its rivals. Meta, for example, has adjusted its algorithm to favor newer uploads as part of a broader effort to promote original content.
If YouTube is trying to keep up with the short-form Joneses, it wouldn’t be the first time. After falling behind TikTok in terms of raw viewership numbers, YouTube adjusted its view-counting methodology on Shorts so that it could make the numbers go up.
Pushing creators to upload more new Shorts could also lead to higher overall view counts, but that growth comes at a cost. Last decade, when YouTube shuffled its algorithm to turn watch time into the most important metric, some creators found it difficult to keep pace. Sure, gamers like PewDiePie used the new algorithm to get ahead, but on the whole, YouTube’s watch time era seemed to favor corporate media companies. Channels with enough resources to post new long-form videos every day gained a crucial algorithmic advantage.
Even if individual creators can figure out how to thrive amid the new Shorts meta, they may feel frustrated by YouTube’s algorithmic switch-up. The observed change seems to be yet another update that YouTube enacted behind the scenes without informing its community. Tubefilter reached out to Google for comment, and we will share updates as they become available.
