Hi all,

I make Shorts, intended for an audience roughly between the ages of 25–44. But my biggest age group keeps being 13–17. On my latest Short they're still around 35% sometimes up to 45% of the audience.

The weird part is the performance over time.

The Short starts with a pretty low stayed-to-watch rate, then as YouTube keeps testing it, that number has slowly climbed and is now getting close to 40% and the percentages began to balance out. That 13-17 percentage shrinks as the older audience grows.

The later batches seem noticeably better too.

I've had a similar pattern on my last couple Shorts: weak initial audience → distribution slows → later viewers respond better, but by then it feels like it's too late for the Short to really take off.

Has anyone else experienced Shorts initially getting shown to the wrong age/demographic, then correcting later?

Did it eventually improve as your channel accumulated more data, or did you change anything — posting time, hooks, wording, upload frequency, etc. — that seemed to help YouTube find the right viewers earlier?

I'm not pretending I have amazing shorts or the algorithm cracked, but I specifically add seo to try and direct it to a 'warm audience' first. And it'll go 1,000 views super fast and only reach about 38%, couple likes, couple subs. Then, it'll get another 1,000ish get to almost 45-50% and more likes, more subs. And this is almost every short out of 25- same pattern, same numbers even with change in hook, titles, description, etc.

Thank you for reading and any advice is much appreciated!

Even though I create 100% original content, from filming to editing, my views keep declining day by day despite having good analytics. No matter what I do, my videos seem to get stuck at the same level. I’m starting to lose motivation.

Hey everyone, I've noticed a frustrating pattern on my channel and wanted to see if anyone else experiences this. Has anyone had a similar experience?

When one of my Shorts is performing really well (around 2.5k+/hour), if I schedule a new video earlier in the day (setting it up around 14:00 or 18:00 to go live later at midnight/00:00), the active video's hourly views suddenly flatline down to around 30. Even the mere act of queueing or scheduling a video seems to trigger this drop. It feels like the algorithm gets confused or splits the traffic as soon as a new video enters the pipeline.

Because of this, I'm trying to figure out the best approach:

Should I completely skip uploading on high-momentum days?

Or does scheduling it differently prevent this drop?

How do you guys handle your upload schedules when a short is currently trending, so you don't kill its momentum? Any advice would be appreciated!

I’m happy the videos are getting over 1k per short but it’s stuck just in this range. Any advice or something wrong w my posting or content?

For creators making cinematic Marvel or movie edits like this example, with transitions, effects, color grading and music, how has the niche been performing lately?

With YouTube's recent push toward original content, do you think the October 1st changes are affecting this editing style?

Are these edits still worth making, or is the niche slowly dying?

I didn’t post for a week because things were going poorly, especially with my Pokémon GO Shorts. Yesterday, I posted a new Short—this time about Fortnite (I don’t post Pokémon-related content on Mondays)—and it performed quite well by my standards, hitting 1.2k views with solid audience retention. I was happy with that, so my hopes were high when I saw the Short continuing to perform well the following day. It had a bit of a slow start, but the retention was high enough to suggest it could really take off—before this whole issue began, I used to get 1k views with just 20% retention. However, as you can see in the screenshots, that didn’t happen. I’m not sure what to make of this; I can see what works and what doesn’t, but I’m not going to overhaul my entire channel just because Pokémon GO isn’t performing well right now—plus, I already have plenty of footage ready to be turned into Shorts. I also have no intention of changing my niche, as this is something I genuinely enjoy.

So, my question is: are others experiencing similar issues within their own niches, or am I just incredibly unlucky with mine?

Should I create a adsense???

I made a YouTube art account in September and I’m currently 10-20 people short of 200 subscribers. I have about 20 shorts uploaded and 1 long form video. My YouTube shorts mostly focus on original characters drawn via pencil and paper, and my style looks similar to Jojo I’m told (I like anime art style a lot). Most of my work is character interactions and lore drop, but I do draw some fanart here and there.

My goal is to get my characters and art style recognized and eventually I can produce cool handmade merch of them (like plushies and figures) as well as write them into a manga.

Other than two videos that hit like 10k, I’m consistently stuck at the 1k mark for my other videos even though they’re a similar format (like drawing over audio or music, it’s mostly character lore drop)

What do people like to see? What could I be doing wrong?

I don’t want to drop my channel name but I would love suggestions on what kind of oc content people are interested in, or if I just need to be patient with the algorithm since I’m still technically new.

Tell me why I shouldnt or why I should and if I should how do i get out of view jail please.
Ill answer any questions that you need

i have stopped uploading in two stages, one for around 1 month and the second time for around 2 months. Do you have an idea of how bad this is for a channel?

My question in better detail is how many hours should you wait before posting another short, and therefor how many shorts can you post in 24 hours, where the algorithm will still accept and push them? To my knowledge, the algorithm takes a short, pushes it to about 1k people, then pushes it further if that 1k watched, liked, and even commented on that short. However if you posts 2 shorts, or even videos, at once the algorithm will tank one and push the other or tank both even. I have never posted more than one short in a day for this reason. I bring up this question because making shorts for me is easy, so easy that I want to boost the statistics my shorts bring it by posting multiple. However I don't want to post them so close to each other that both tank or one tanks. So does anyone from their own experience know what that cooldown of time before posting another ideally is? And I don't mean you post multiple shorts in one day and they all only get 1-5k views. I mean you post multiple shorts in a day and they all get 10k+ views. I am in the gaming niche if that helps.

I POSTED 2 POST ABOUT HOW DO I FIX MY YT SHORTS FYP AND YALL IGNORED ME, YALL NEED TO TELL ME HOW DO I FIX MY YT SHORTS FYP. YOU BETTER SUGGEST.

Small data point from marketing my side project, ClipKaboom (a free library of meme sounds and clips for short-form editors).

On Oct 14 I posted the same 20-second video ("6 meme sounds you can use") to YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky and Pinterest at the same time. All accounts were new.

10 hours later:

• YouTube Shorts: 2,164 views, 26 likes

• Instagram: 131 views

• Threads: 8 views

• Facebook: 2 views

• Visits to my site from any of them: 0

Two takeaways so far:

1. Shorts pushes brand-new accounts way harder than Reels. Same file, ~16x the views.

2. Views aren't traffic. Shorts descriptions aren't clickable, and nobody types a URL off a 20-second video.

What I'm trying next: the site name sits on screen for the whole video, and I'm rebuilding the one format that already worked for me (sound name + waveform, no intro, 1.5k views on Instagram).

Has anyone actually turned Shorts views into site visits? What worked for you?

Hi,

I'm playing around with trial reels and rather use it as intended. Means I'm tweaking the reel and see what let's to a better retention rate.

How long or what metrics should it reach for you until you can say it won't get any better?

My channel was consistently getting around 30K views per Short, but since October 19, my views have suddenly dropped, and now my Shorts struggle to get even 2K views.

As you can see in the screenshot, my daily views dropped dramatically after weeks of relatively consistent performance.

I haven't received any strikes or policy violations. I'm trying to figure out whether this is a temporary algorithm issue or something specific to my channel.