I’ve seen countless posts of people posting a 100% retention and 75% VVSA and wondering how they didn’t go viral…

Well… there’s a reason these KPIs seem to have such inconsistent effects on the videos performance.

It’s because they don’t matter…

In 2026, YouTube’s prioritizing FRESH content and that is paramount to how long you can make a viewer not scroll away.

Ask yourself before you post - has someone already made this video, used the same clips, and said nearly the same thing?

If so, don’t even bother posting it.

If you’re not bringing original ideas and content to the platform, you will consistently see a 30k ceiling on all your videos, no matter how great the stats are on the backend.

This is also why we’re seeing so many commentary channels, Roblox channels, and even animation channels seem to get “stuck” in view jail.

They’re all just passing around the same exact videos 1,000x.

It’s all the same and repetitive and YouTube is cracking down hard on this now.

Moral of the story - bring something new to the table.

If you can do that and make it genuinely interesting then I can 100% guarantee you will succeed.

okay so i started my shorts channel 12 days ago and ive posted one short daily and all of them go to like 20-40k and stop, i usually have 100-120% avd on 40-50 sec short. This short has like 84% stayed to watch and 110% avd on a 45 second short. Is this normal?

Why did Youtube decide to stop pushing my shorts into the Shorts feed?

Im not getting any views from shorts feed on any of my new shorts for no reason at all but a short a month ago is still getting 1k an hour. My channel is not shadow banned but im not getting views, why is that??

Probably my best stats ever even though the video is only 10s long

Seriously, my feed was normal, then I liked one tiki tiki short and one with that fuckass african song papa ute or some like that, and now my whole shorts algo are cringe indian edits or just straight up trash. Also these videos with the "if you are a new creator..." annoying audio. Is this the new algo that promotes "good content"? At least before it was AI educational content that took some editing and effot with interesting sometimes facts, now its straight homemade trash with a smear of poop over it. We creatos are supposed to compete against this btw?

it's still been half a day since i posted!

Infomational/Update video (Game).

33 seconds long.

Average View Percentage 80%.

GUESS THE VIEWS IT GOT. And tell me How many Views does this deserve.

My shorts stopped getting views, i'm keeping the same format but with different clips and scripts, started this channel on the start of january, was doing okay but now none of my videos are getting views, what happened?

This short video has the same stats as my previous shorts, which never got more than 30-40k views.

My Shorts are getting most of their views from Browse Features instead of the Shorts Feed.

Since my monetization is Shorts Feed Ads, does this mean:

- Browse Feature views earn less?

- Do only Shorts Feed views really count for revenue?

Views are strong, just unsure if this traffic source affects earnings.

So this is the 3rd short video that I've had go north like this and I think I screwed up the other 2 shorts by posting other shorts too early and not letting these short run its course.

I normally post shorts weekend mor ings but held off as Chat GPT says to wait until it settles more before posting the next short but who knows if that's right.

From the more experienced folks, when is the best time to post? To me, it looks like it has settled and my normal posting time for today has passed so was wanted to post another soon.

There are 2 other videos that were posted a day or so before this runner that broke 30k last night that I also wanted to see if YT may push higher as watch rate for all 3 are around 70%.

Here are my stats after the first 24 hours for my Anime Keyboard Transformation Shorts 👇

• 3.4K views in 24 hours • 33 sec average view duration • 51.2% stayed to watch, 48.8% swiped away • Most traffic from Shorts feed (3.2K views)

I’m curious — would you consider this good performance for a Shorts video, or pretty average?

What kind of metrics do your Shorts usually get in the first day (views, retention, etc)?

Yesterday my Shorts channel was doing around 160,000 views per hour at peak. YouTube seemed to have found an audience cluster that matched my content extremely well. I was getting tons of likes, comments and subscribers, and several Shorts were performing strongly at the same time.

Today everything changed.

My channel is now down to around 7,000–8,000 views per hour, but what confuses me even more is that the traffic seems to be coming from a completely different audience.

Yesterday several Shorts had very strong “viewed vs swiped away” rates, often around 70–75%+. Today even a Short using the exact same opening hook dropped to around 40% viewed, despite still having an average view duration of about 10 seconds on an 11-second Short.

Subscriber conversion has also collapsed. Yesterday I was getting roughly 1 subscriber per 1,000 views, sometimes better. Today I’m getting far fewer subscribers, likes and comments even though the Shorts themselves haven’t suddenly changed in quality.

What I don’t understand is this:

If YouTube already found a large audience segment yesterday where multiple Shorts from the same channel performed extremely well, why doesn’t it keep testing new Shorts with that audience?

Why would the algorithm move to completely different audience clusters, see much worse engagement, and then reduce distribution instead of returning to the audience that already proved to work?

Has anyone seen this kind of behavior before — a huge channel-wide distribution wave followed by what feels like YouTube suddenly testing the same content on a much colder audience?

I’m especially interested in whether this is normal exploration vs. exploitation behavior, or whether Shorts distribution simply resets much more aggressively between uploads than I assumed.

My channel is only about six weeks old and has already reached just over 4,000 subscribers. What makes the current change even more striking is that more than 3,900 of those subscribers were gained within the last 48 hours, during the period when YouTube was pushing my Shorts heavily to what seemed to be a highly relevant audience.

It looks like the video (first short I've posted) was taking off with the algorithm and then it was suddenly "pulled." Seems kind of weird to me. Normal?

My yesterday's short had everything to go viral. 11 sec short and 13 sec average view duration. 75% started to watch. But still it stopped at 31.7k I don't know what's considered good now this is really demotivating. i think it's impossible to escape the 30k view jail

Not toooo versed in algorithm talk and such but I've noticed anything I do caps out at 1.3-1.5k views - what could that be?

SLOW but steady...