In an era where more digital content is being produced than ever before – and where YouTube is talking up both its living room TV viewership and the ever-multiplying views on Shorts – what kinds of videos and creators are actually grabbing and keeping viewers’ attention?
That’s the question digital video production, distribution, and monetization company Little Dot Studios examines in its new whitepaper, Understanding the New Era of YouTube Viewing in 2026.
Using data from 800+ managed YouTube channels, 930 million subscribers, and 11.2 billion monthly views, Little Dot looked at multiple years of viewing habits across formats, from Shorts to long-form to ultra-long-form (aka videos over 120 minutes, with some clocking in at well over 180 minutes).
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Its core finding echoes something companies are realizing now that AI generation is omnipresent: People are drawn to real human storytelling, and tend to join passionate fandoms and communities built around creators, content, genres, IPs, and characters they love. This draw happens across different content lengths and formats.
“The real story isn’t just the scale of YouTube – it’s how audiences behave while on the platform: where they watch (increasingly on the living-room TV), how they find what they watch (algorithmic suggestions over subscriptions), and how deep fandoms are reshaping what ‘TV’ even means,” Little Dot says in the paper. “YouTube’s algorithm creates a new, programmable attention economy, rewarding the formats and behaviors that keep viewers engaged the longest.”
Despite every platform planting a flag in the seemingly fertile ground of short-form programming (a trend that’s now omnipresent with creators and traditional entertainment entities getting into microdramas), in 2023-2024, ultra-long-form was delivering disproportionately well for creators, Little Dot’s data shows.
“[O]ur analysis showed that ultra-long videos didn’t just accumulate more watch time (a truism given length), but they also often earned more views and higher RPM (revenue per thousand views),” Little Dot says. “On a representative cohort of channels, >3-hour uploads were a tiny fraction of output but delivered a disproportionate share of watch time and revenue.”
Just how disproportionate? A 120 minute video, on average in Little Dot’s dataset, earned 100x more revenue than a 20-minute video.
Little Dot also saw another interesting trend within the same dataset: Channels that produced long-form content often saw a higher percentage of watch time (and revenue) coming from YouTube Premium subscribers.
That makes sense for two reasons: One, the sort of people who want to watch three-hour video essays about esoteric subjects are likely to be willing to compensate the creators who are experts in said esoteric subjects. And two, ultra-long-form videos come with a lot of ad breaks – and those breaks tend to be several unskippable minutes, especially when you’re watching on connected TV. People paying for ad-free viewing won’t have to deal with those frequent interruptions.
During the ultra-long-form boom from May to November 2024, the format as a whole was bringing nearly 30 million views per month.
“As the ultra-longform crest rose in 2023-24, it was fuelled in part by the behaviour of superfans – viewers who treat YouTube like a streaming archive, watching multi-hour compilations, episode marathons and deep-dive formats as if they were TV box-sets,” Little Dot says.
But from December 2024 to May 2025, the average length of YouTube’s most popular videos dropped 21%, from ~35 minutes to ~28 minutes.
“Although a 7 minute drop might seem insignificant in isolation, across YouTube’s vast ecosystem it represents a seismic shift in audience behaviour,” Little Dot says. “When billions of views are condensed into shorter watch times, the cumulative impact is huge: fewer ad breaks mean less revenue, shorter sessions lead to weaker engagement signals, and less total watch time signals lower relevance to the algorithm, weakening a video’s chances of being recommended.”
This is compounded by the fact that in January 2025, there was a “significant update” to the YouTube algorithm, Little Dot explains. YouTube, it says, regularly updates the algorithm “to improve their recommendation systems to better surface engaging content more accurately.”
In this case, the update “had a near instant impact on ‘ultra-long-form’ video viewing, dropping by more than 90% from its 2024 average in just three months.”
The YouTube algorithm’s average length of suggested/recommended videos went from 80 minutes to 40 minutes.
“YouTube as a platform is not static, and whilst some of this is driven by audience behaviour, there is a huge influence exerted by YouTube itself via the multiple algorithms that determine which videos are suggested to users,” Little Dot says.
The paper goes on to say this change is noteworthy because typically YouTube’s algorithm prioritizes content that “dr[ives] longer viewing habits and mimic[s] the traditional TV experience. But just when you think you have the answer,” it adds, “think again. As we’ve learnt in the last 12+ years of Little Dot Studios, the only constant is change.”
While ultra-long-form viewership tanked out of the gate post-update (and ultra-long-form creators who wanted to keep the same amount of viewership needed to shorten their video lengths in response), things did end up steadying. By 2025, average views per video had evened out across short-form, long-form, and ultra-long-form. That means viewers are watching about the same amount of content in all three formats.
Little Dot says this shows “that fandom is not format-fixed; it is dynamic. Fans will follow great packaging, clever curation and platform-native storytelling – but only if channels keep pace with how YouTube is evolving.”
“The lesson here isn’t ‘long-form is dead,'” it explains. “[I]t’s that format advantage is not constant.” On top of that, “YouTube’s scope is now too large – and too televisual – to be anyone’s afterthought. The picture six months from now will differ again, because the system and its viewers won’t sit still. The job, then, isn’t to divine the permanent rule; it’s to build the permanent capability to read the room and pivot. Program boldly, measure honestly, iterate fast.”
Graham Swallow, Little Dot’s Director of Data, Tech & Product, tells Tubefilter creators who want to stay on top of format trends “should always be looking at both their own content and other content to identify what their audience is engaging with.”
That being said, “Every channel is different so what is right for one, won’t be the same for another. Discovery on YouTube is algorithmic, not subscription-led, so creators can’t assume their audience will simply ‘find’ them if platform behaviour shifts,” he notes. “Agility is more valuable than any single format strategy.”
We also asked Swallow about the discrepancy between YouTube pushing both TV and short-form viewership hard. It’s already the #1 streamer in the U.S. by watch time. So should it focus there instead of continuing to try to copy TikTok?
“YouTube (publicly) recognised that they had leaned too hard into Shorts content and it was damaging their traditional video model,” he says. “So there has been some rebalancing in their product as a result. In a way, ultra-short (snackable) videos are detrimental to attention spans in general – this is not solely a YouTube problem. The key is being clear about the role each format plays in your ecosystem rather than treating them as interchangeable.”
Little Dot’s ultimate recommendations to creators? Listen closely to audience wants and “program for superfans, casual fans, and future fans simultaneously.”
And if there’s another algorithm update that cuts deep into viewership? “Ha, take deep breaths!” Swallow says. “It felt to us like this was in many ways a wave that would at some point break – which it did. In that sense, we have seen a return to the norm, rather than a long-term change. Whilst still difficult to swallow, it is a reminder that platform changes are useful, but the fundamentals often remain the same. We often advise our own teams to not become too trend-focused. Good, engaging content is evergreen. One practical takeaway is to avoid over-indexing on a single structural bet, whether that’s length, cadence or format, because platform incentives can change quickly.”
Sounds daunting. But creators have some of the most dedicated (and brutally honest) fanbases on Earth, along with constant access to them. Fans are only too happy to share what they dig and what they don’t. Creators can use that input as guidance – but in the end should never stray from making what they want to make, across whatever format suits them best.
You can check out Little Dot’s full whitepaper here.
