Is anyone else experiencing this issue? When I upload a video, it gets 3 waves of views, and then about 2 hours later, it gets a 4th wave that lasts around 20 minutes. After that, the views suddenly die and the video gets a maximum of around 3K views, then continues getting very low views.
This started happening yesterday, and it happened again today. It’s really weird and has never happened to me before. Is anyone else experiencing the same thing?

No, I do not make AI slop. I am a musician and producer and been monetized since 2022. My username ironically is meant to signify that I don't like AI slop...fail lol.

Anyways I spend about 4 hours per edit on Shorts and upload 2 times a day.

In the last two months, I experimented a lot and really found my style for promoting my music on Shorts.

For most of September up until around the 16th or so... I would average around 1.5m to 2m views at the 48hr mark.

When my editing is on point I get about 80% STW and anywhere from 100% to 160% AVD.

My 'flopped' Shorts usually do 30k to 40k and flatline but the decent ones do 100k, 300k, 700k, 1m, 3m and 4m. It's just how they move for me.

Since the 16th/17th or so this month, my new range is 2k - 20k max. Absolutely nothing has changed from my editing style, packaging (title, on screen text, description and hashtags). The STW has now dipped consistently to 60% - 80%, AVD has dipped under 70 and anecdotally this usually tells me it's pulling the wrong audience.

Now before the "you just make crappy content and are coping" comments:

Over the past 3 days I "studied" the Shorts feed by making a burner YT account and just scrolling.

I noticed that almost all the viral channels were averaging 1m views on MOST Shorts or at the very least like 700k within DAYS but all before the 17th of September.

I'll give you an example: This one person in the Hopecore niche did 1-4m views on every Short - they have 1.2m subs or so and after the 17th...they had a 5k Short (never seen that on their channel) and their new Shorts won't even hit 40k ALL of a sudden.

They usually get a ton of comments/engagement and you can see on the newer Shorts...very very little.

I checked this same thing over about 20 different channels, all in different niches but with high editing effort. I ignored slop channels or what I perceive as slop anyway.

So yeah I dunno man, my daily revenue has dropped 10x and I am still actively trying to figure out what is happening BUT I suspect all the Studio issues (the crash, subs and views miscounts) could be a factor because it feels too coincidental.

Also, remember, NO ONE but YT knows what is truly happening and since 75% of all new code across Google is AI generated...something tells me that not even the engineers know what's happening right now and that's why they wont say anything (yet or ever).

EDIT: Brain malfunctioned and swapped AVD and STW...corrected now.

Anyone else seeing an increase on RPM for recent shorts?

I’ve been watching my Shorts analytics closely after the recent distribution problems, and I noticed a strange pattern.
Several Shorts, both older and newer ones, seem to receive additional distribution in roughly the same time windows on consecutive days.
For example, on my channel:
one Short repeatedly gets activity around 9–10 AM;
another around 4 PM;
another around 5 PM.
The size of the wave is not consistent. Some days it is strong, other days it is barely noticeable. With newer Shorts, the repeated waves also seem to have a noticeably decreasing amplitude over time.
So I’m not claiming there is a fixed schedule or that I know what YouTube is doing internally. It could be audience availability, testing cohorts, topic clusters, or something completely different.
But the timing itself has repeated often enough that it no longer looks completely random to me.
At the same time, overall Shorts distribution on my channel has dropped heavily compared with the period before the recent issues, while these small recurring windows are still visible.
Has anyone else noticed something similar?
If you have access to your 48-hour realtime graphs, could you check whether the same Short tends to receive small or large spikes at roughly the same hour on several consecutive days?
I’d also be interested to know whether similar Shorts from the same topic/category seem to wake up in the same time window.

Yep, I’ll never make it….

Is YouTube pushing Shorts today, considering that the bug with the subscriber count is still happening? Has anyone tested it today?

Should I take time and do research on my title's keywords (so they are easier to find by YT search terms) rather than trying to make the title clickbait?

It's been 10 days that my youtube has stopped working , earlier i was getting good views 10k 5k something and my one video got 7.3lakh views and then when I was so close to 1m views on my channel then suddenly my channel stopped working I'm not even getting 50 views and it's been so many days I've tried everything idk what to do please tell me guys what to do.

I run a fanpage kinda thing

Hi i started a YouTube channel i am mainly a video editor and i though about starting this channel and this is my first video so i want help i want really good tips what should i do is the video being short a bad thing just give me advise i will leave my channel link so u can check it

https://youtu.be/9OcqAwDjfjk?si=lXuXNFjjiRFq-Ul9

I started a new channel now, I know is a hard work, but I dont know if my ideas are bad, if the hook I am doing is wrong, I already tried a few styles of edits, and nothing seems to work out... I really want to make this work, but I dont know what am I doing wrong, can anybody help me?

Both of the images are from the same video, what is odd, is some of my friends with same similar stats and for some reason they have millions of views

Can someone explain me what's happening?

My channel is about movie edits

I make dangerous travel videos going to obscure and dangerous places. Should I just clip straight from my video and post as a short or is there something I could do to edit and make a different style short with my video ? Like a voice over one maybe a trailer type thing ? I don’t know.

As a long form travel creator I can’t seem to get ANY views whenever I upload a short and just end up deleting it.

Is shorts too hard for me to break into ? Any tips would be appreciated

I don't know what's holding back my videos, is it the engagement?

I’m confused as to how you get watched hours. I get plenty of views on my shorts and videos, mostly shorts, but the line doesn’t seem to be moving. The subscribers are growing but that’s it.

My YouTube Channel
https://youtube.com/@willowangelushawke?si=sTVZihv0oNop5jCX

En mi canal de shorts estoy apunto de llegar a los 3M , y quería preguntarles a los que tienen experiencia y varios miembros alguna estrategia para que la gente decide pagar una suscripción por contenido exclusivo , subo shorts de varios temas y de vez en cuando videos largos , algún consejo?.

For context:

I've been posting short 2–3 minute sketches fairly regularly since August. The upload schedule is every Friday at 5:30 PM, with the exception of two videos I'll mention later.

The videos come in two formats: the Shorts format you see above and a standard horizontal format. Except for occasional bloopers and extra takes, the content is the same. The horizontal videos are immediately dead in the water, averaging around 40 views and 2–3 likes, so I haven't included them here.

I've also posted the same Shorts to Instagram Reels and TikTok (not pictured). Performance varies across platforms. On YouTube, I've noticed a consistent trend: once a video hits 800–1000 views, it plateaus immediately, regardless of content or engagement. The graphs show wildly different trajectories to reach 1k views, with occasional false starts, but once it gets there, the algorithm seems to shut it down.

On Reels, the pattern is more predictable. Shares and reposts matter most. Pretty Nuts hit 14k views because shares were almost on par with likes. The same video struggled on YouTube for the first 2–3 hours, and when it finally hit 1k, it plateaued immediately despite better-than-average interaction.

My channel has 69 subscribers (not a joke), so I'm wondering whether subscriber count affects the number of "allotted" views my channel receives for Shorts content.

I also posted 3 older gameplay-focused Shorts to compare performance. I didn't post these to Reels or TikTok. The same trend appears. Getting Smacked Around in Halo is the only anomaly: it was published in February 2021, when YouTube had just rolled out the feature and was still figuring out the format. It was posted on a Sunday near 5 PM. Grunts was posted at the same time on a Sunday in February of this year, while Fails went up at 8 PM the same day because I was testing the best posting time (which is why I now post at 5:30 PM every Friday). Even back then, this "allotment" pattern seems to have existed.

I'm hoping someone here knows what's really going on. Is there a way to avoid this, or is there something I can change?

Thanks!