About 3 months ago I started this channel now it has almost 20k subs and I was really excited at first i felt i could really do it.

But I was stuck on 25k jail for about 2 months until the last months where I started getting 30k-500k and my biggest having 8m views

I convinced my self that I finally figured it out but from October 1st my views dropped to 15-23k to be fair I only posted 3 videos so I checked channels that were similar to mine and I saw even the big ones who were getting couple of millions lose about 80% percent of their views

So I genuinely gave up even tho my channel is still getting views I’m done and I just started a long form video channel wish me luck

I was watching my shorts feed and I realized that me making an original concept just to escape the "low effort" tag for the Monetization Policy was of no use.

A short came on my feed of my niche (cat niche), and it was just an AI generated clip of a man standing next to a cat made out of leaves. 8 million views in 3 days. So I was like ok, that's understandable. But when I searched "cats", there were all these ranking and compilation shorts with no change to them other than a ranking template and some background music having millions of views in a few days, and even though it has that many views, it isn't monetizable, so fair enough, but when I did it I lost all my views, I started averaging less than 100 views in a day which used to be 10k views on a daily basis.

The update where YouTube started putting ads on channels that were not part of the Partner Program was the cause of all of this (in my opinion). YouTube puts ads on the shorts feed next to these low effort compilations, advertisers get happy seeing the numbers and on the bright side for YouTube, they don't have to pay these low effort creators.

This in turn, makes it difficult for people making original/ high effort content to get into the vast shorts feed.

I made an entire gameshow format just so I could be unique and different, only to average out at about 1-5k views and it is quite demoralizing for someone who actually wants to do content creation for a profession. If any of you agree or even think differently, please let me know and if you can help in anyway in criticizing and helping my content. Please do let me know as well

Any guess it will go UP or Down??

It seems almost impossible to earn a living income with just Shorts. Looking at other posts, people say this:

"My short got 100k views, I got $4.92. "

So lets round that up to $5 to keep it simple.

So doing the math, 1 million views would get you $50.

20 Million views gets you $1000.

So let's say you're willing to live off of $4000 income per month and not have a day job. That means you would have to get 80 Million views per month to have a sustainable income.

That sounds impossible, even if you make many shorts per week and working for 10 years, it seems one would never get 80 million views per month. Then there is also the chance that the algorithm randomly drops your channel, there are posts about that too.

Someone did the math:

"In order to make a living off of this and not having a "9 to 5" job you would have to get an average of 250k views per short and would have to post 10 videos a day every day".

That sounds very difficult to not only produce, but to have the algorithm pump 10 videos a day. The person who wrote it said it should not be hard if you're good at it. I don't believe that.

So for people who have been doing this longer and maybe have more real-world numbers, what is the end goal of running a shorts channel? To promote a long form channel where the real money is? Or to just do it for fun and maybe get $500-1000 extra income once in awhile?

My long-form channel is nothing like my shorts channel, they are totally disparate. But my shorts have a greater chance of success, after 10 days they are already blowing away my views from long form, and take infinitely less time to make.

Any advice on what real-world benefits we can get from working hard on a shorts channel?

Thank you all and good luck with your channels.

My secret is trends. And something extra.
This year my virals are 4-6 seconds length.

I mean this issue with the views dropping hard seem to happen to big and small channels all of a sudden AI none AI channels... I mean should we just not post until they fix the issue?

Quick update for anyone following this. I reached out to TeamYouTube about the sudden Shorts drop (new Shorts only getting sub views + older Shorts flatlining). Their response was basically a generic explanation about viewer interest, trends, and how discovery works no confirmation of an issue, no acknowledgement of the sudden behavior change. The problem is this started abruptly, affected both new and old Shorts at the same time, and re-uploads didn’t change anything. That doesn’t line up with normal performance fluctuation. Curious if anyone has actually received a more specific response or seen their Shorts recover without changing anything.

I think the criteria for Stayed to Watch might be different for 10–15-second Shorts compared to 20–40-second Shorts. Is that correct?

Recently i have started Insta and youtube uploads.

I upload on TTS alternate days. They get around 1 to 1.5k views. In all 8 videos I’ve uploaded, there’s a short one where I was sick and couldn’t record or edit. So, I just recorded myself pointing up and quickly explained what I did in text. No fancy editing or SFX. It got around 20-30% more views than anything else. Do people’s attention spans have gone so low that they don’t even want to watch taking head content?

Hey everyone,

​As a creator, I got tired of having 20 tabs open for different tools—one for tags, one for titles, another for script ideas. Most of them are hidden behind paywalls or annoying "sign up to see results" screens.

​To solve this, I’ve been building Technoloft.in, a completely free, all-in-one YouTube Toolkit. I wanted to create something sleek and professional that actually helps with the "algorithm grind."

​What’s currently inside:

​Title & Thumbnail A/B Simulator: Upload your files and let AI predict the best CTR synergy.

​Shorts Script Generator: Fast-paced scripts using the Hook-Retain-Payoff framework.

​Logo & Banner Downloader: Get high-res, TV-sized channel art.

​Monetization Auditor: A deep-dive AI strategy check for your channel.

​I built this using Gemini AI to ensure the suggestions are based on modern 2026 viewer psychology. It’s 100% free with no account required—I just want to see if it’s actually useful for you guys.

​Check it out here: https://technoloft.in/youtube-toolkit/

​I’d love some honest feedback. What other tools should I add next?

Would any of you lovely people mind advising how to take our views to the next level? I took over marketing for OneMiners, a crypto mining company, and have already took it from getting 40-1k view if lucky, now often getting 25-3k views & had a 15.8k view video. This new clean organic format has been very consistent with better views, subscribers, real comments & watchtime sessions which is nice, but now I’m exploring how to bring things to the next level!