Seeing how I’ve been spending a large portion of my time working on a YouTube channel with my brother, I realized I could write more content, sharing our experiences and hopefully helping readers like you gain insight into what it’s like to be a YouTuber.
Almost a week ago, I wrote an article detailing our YouTube channel earnings so far from our long-form content.
How Much YouTube Pays Per 1,000 Views (Google Adsense Revenue Breakdown By Country)
It’s only natural for me also to detail our YouTube Shorts experience and why we stopped making them.
How Much Money YouTube Shorts Pays Us Per 1,000 Views
Let’s dive into our YouTube Shorts earnings first.
After reaching the 4K watch hours and 1K subscribers requirements for YouTube ad monetization, we applied and were approved shortly after on July 29, 2024.
From July 29 until August 28, 2024, we earned $21.14 USD from 413.4K YouTube Short views. If we do the math, that’s about $0.05 earnings per 1,000 YouTube Short views.
It’s also worth mentioning that our channel is in the sports niche, and the majority of our audience comes from India, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
If you read my last article on how much YouTube pays per 1,000 views, you’ll know that ad revenue is significantly affected by where your viewers are located due to the differing ad demands of various countries.
For example, viewers from the United States generate far more ad revenue for our channel than viewers from India because companies are willing to spend more on advertising in the United States than in many other countries.
Take a look at the two charts below:
Screenshot From Author | Estimated Revenue and Views From Our YouTube Shorts Ordered Descending By Views
Screenshot From Author | Estimated Revenue and Views From Our YouTube Shorts Ordered Descending By Estimated Revenue
The first chart shows our top 10 countries ordered by views, while the second chart shows our top 10 countries ordered by estimated revenue.
What’s interesting is that despite making up only 4.4% of our Short viewers, United States viewers have generated 20.6% of our Shorts ad revenue.
A similar story can be told about countries like Canada and Australia, which are ranked eight and nine in the first list but third and fifth in the second.
Locations like Japan, Hong Kong, Germany, and the United Kingdom also make our second list and not the first. In contrast, other places like Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand all fall out of our top 10 earners despite making up 18.1% of our viewers combined.
Essentially, if we make more Shorts that attract viewers from the United States, our earnings would go up.
It would still pale in comparison to long-form videos, though.
With a similar number of views at 411K, we made $488.95 from our long-form videos — 23X more than our shorts.
The Real Reason We Stopped Making YouTube Shorts
Low earnings aren’t the main reason we stopped making YouTube shorts, though.
In fact, we didn’t care about YouTube Shorts earnings at the start anyway. We already expected to make pennies from Shorts, seeing how people only generated a few hundred dollars from tens of millions of views.
In a small niche like badminton, we just weren’t going go viral with millions of views in a short timeframe—or at least I didn’t see anyone do so.
However, we had a theory that making YouTube Shorts was a great way to attract viewers to our long-form content.
Since Shorts were very easy to make, especially since we were already creating long-form content, our idea was to repurpose long-form content into Shorts and attract Short viewers to view our long-form videos after seeing the Short.
And if that didn’t happen, we were hoping that at least the new subscribers would eventually watch the long-form content recommended to them down the road.
Unfortunately, however, our theory was flawed.
After watching various channels discuss their experiences with YouTube Shorts, we learned that YouTube Shorts and long-form content audiences are very different.
People watching YouTube Shorts are interested in quick dopamine hits from scrolling and often have very low attention spans, while long-form viewers are more capable of sitting down for more than 5 minutes watching one video.
If you plan to make both YouTube Shorts and long-form videos, you may experience a potentially cannibalizing effect.
What will happen is that the subscribers you gain from YouTube Shorts won’t watch your long-form videos or watch them for very short durations.
This hurts your overall long-form video performance because YouTube uses the way your subscribers react to your videos to recommend them to others.
If many of your subscribers don’t click on your long-form videos or watch them for only a few seconds, YouTube will think your video isn’t very good and recommend it to fewer people.
It’s like if you were to create a channel that makes both gaming and fashion videos. There’s some crossover, but most of your gaming viewers will not watch your fashion videos, and vice versa.
We noticed this when we were creating a lot of Shorts. Our Shorts began to overtake the number of people watching our videos, and a noticeable portion of people on our channel watching only Shorts emerged.
We went from having about 1% of people who only watched our Shorts to 20% at its peak.
Screenshot From Author
It has gone down now, given that we haven’t published a Short since August 12.
Make A Dedicated Shorts and Long-Form Channel
Now, this article isn’t here to say that you can’t succeed from a channel that makes both Short and long-form content, but from personal experience, you would be better off dedicating efforts to one over the other.
Do you make YouTube Shorts? Let me know how your experience has been!
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