Experiment: 12 Shorts in 8 Days | What Did I Learn?

Short form vertical videos seem to be here to stay. TikTok, YouTube, Instagram. They all have them. So I did an experiment. Now I want to tell you about what I learned.

This video is going to be a departure from my typical content, but I thought it was interesting enough to share at least with the core subscribers since you all had to endure the pain of 12 shorts in 8 days.

0:00 - Intro
0:33 - Recaping the Shorts Experiment
1:28 - What Did I Learn About YouTube Shorts?
3:23 - The Results Of The Experiment


What’d I Do?

If you aren’t familiar with the experiment I ran it was pretty simple. I wanted to try to see if I could use the short form vertical format of YouTube Shorts to share bite sized pieces of a game’s build using Swift Playgrounds.

The game I built was a simple game built with SwiftUI called Bug Smasher, but it did have some complex elements to it like drag & drop, changing shadow colors to create a hover effects, and more.

At first things were pretty easy and it was going well. The first few videos came together quickly as the complexity of the project was fairly low. At the same time, I think YT was giving me a bit of a push beyond the typical audience due to the newness of YT Shorts.

However, as the experiment went on I noticed that I started to lose traction and videos stopped performing. Was I doing something wrong? Is this bad content? I really didn’t know.

As the videos started to go live I noticed some interesting things about YT Shorts… Yes - they do bring viewers, but they have a strange behavior. It seems like YT will put a video onto the YouTube Shorts feed shortly after uploading it feeds the video to waiting viewers.

This is counter to what a long form traditional youtube videos are like. As they are intentionally selected by the viewer.

Another interesting observation about YT shorts is that it seems to have a pretty short life cycle. A video gets published, hits the shelf, stays there for a bit. Then dies. Forever…

Except… maybe not forever.

So it’s been a bit since final video in the series went live. At the time of recording this video the 12 shorts have made just 1600 views and added 7 subscribers to the channel. Not that impressive.

However, there is a chance that this story is just beginning. Traffic from search and browse has the potential to continue pushing people into this series. Now, Swift Playgrounds isn’t the most searched for topic on YouTube in fact it’s probably pretty low on the list of search terms. However, it’s also pretty low in competition which means these videos have already started ranking in search.

The hope is that any one of these videos could be an entry point into the channel. They could find the playlist, watch through the entire thing, and then find long form content and subscribe.This video is going to be a departure from my typical content, but I thought it was interesting enough to share at least with the core subscribers since you all had to endure the pain of 12 shorts in 8 days.

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