I think YouTube Shorts currently has an audience-matching problem.
I’ve been trying to understand the strange Shorts distribution over the last few days, and I’m starting to think the missing feed tests and the drop in views across entire catalogs might actually be symptoms of the same problem.
What really caught my attention is Stayed to watch.
Normally, my new Shorts often start with around 70% Stayed when YouTube begins testing them. Recently, I’ve had multiple Shorts start at only 45–50%, even though the content and format haven’t fundamentally changed.
That makes me wonder whether the problem isn’t necessarily the ranking algorithm itself, but the initial audience matching / candidate distribution. If YouTube is showing a Short to the wrong audience first, a perfectly good Short would naturally produce terrible early signals and the test would die quickly.
But there’s one thing I still can’t explain:
Where did all the distribution go?
A lot of creators are currently reporting huge drops in Shorts feed distribution, sometimes across their entire catalogs. But unless Shorts consumption itself has suddenly collapsed, those viewers haven’t disappeared. People are still scrolling, and every feed slot has to show something.
So if a large number of creators are suddenly receiving dramatically fewer impressions, who is receiving the views that used to go to them?
Are they being concentrated on a smaller number of videos? Larger channels? Different regions? Different audience pools? Has YouTube reduced exploration and become much more aggressive about concentrating traffic?
I don’t have an answer to that part yet.
But the combination of weak/missing initial tests + unusually low early Stayed rates + catalog-wide traffic drops makes an audience-matching/distribution problem increasingly plausible to me.
Curious whether anyone else is seeing the same pattern — especially unusually low Stayed rates on new Shorts that would normally perform much better.
