30-Day YouTube Short Experiment (YouTube Channel Growth Case Study)
Ever since YouTube introduced Short, competing against the likes of TikTok and Instagram Reels, every other content creator on the platform has been sharing their insights on how Shorts can be used to build a following and get more views on a YouTube channel.
I thought why not do an experiment myself and see how I can use these Shorts to grow my YouTube channel, thus I decided to challenge myself to post a short video every day for 30 days straight.
At the end of this experiment, I wanted to see how my channel had grown (in terms of subscribers and views) as a result.
And now, here I am sharing the results of this experiment with you!
Before we go to the results themselves, let's have a short look at the strategy I used as well as the tools I used that helped me come up with topic ideas, edit my videos and other usual stuff.
But before we begin, here's a short disclaimer, this post contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links and make a purchase, I’ll receive a small commission without any additional cost to you.
So, let's begin with my strategy…
YouTube Short Experiment: The Strategy
My channel consists of my online entrepreneurship journey and related tutorials about various tools that can be used for online businesses. It is a broad category centred around creating my own personal brand, similar to how I am constructing my blog which has been active over the past year.
So I came up with topics for the Shorts from my blog itself where I cover things about different online tools and apps, blogging and affiliate marketing etc.
Apart from that, my channel has always been connected to VidIQ, an awesome tool for YouTube growth. VidIQ gave me topic ideas from my channel data, which was really helpful for creating Shorts videos.
I used Writesonic (An Ai copywriting tool) to create scripts and titles for my videos, a pretty amazing tool for writing blog posts, video scripts, Ad copies and much more.
As for the recording, I recorded my videos in batches, 10 videos at a time as I have other businesses to look after (My local business) and being a family guy with two kids it's difficult to manage time for my work.
Then about the recording device, I used my Canon EOS750D camera which I have owned since 2018 but never really used. I also used the Camera's default Microphone itself for the audio as I didn't have another audio recording device.
And for the editing, I used Wondershare Filmora and Veed.io to add subtitles to my videos which have an automated subtitle feature.
I'll leave a list of some additional software that I used to create my videos along with the ones mentioned above.
Quick list of the tools I used
- VidIQ for topic ideas. (And my blog).
- Writesonic to help me with the scripts and titles.
- Canon EOS750D for recording.
- Wondershare filmora to edit the videos.
- Veed.io to add automated subtitles for faster editing.
- Epidemic sound for music.
- Canva to create elements for the videos.
Now let’s look at the advanced tab and analytics.
Stats and Analytics
The advanced tab is where you get detailed statistics of your YouTube channel and its content, its performance and things like that. For this post, we’ll look at the most important stats.
Let's begin with…
The Top 5 Video Views
The top 5 videos got me a total of 930 views combined and they gained me a total of 16 subscribers in total. I’ll leave the Image table of the stats below in the image.
Traffic sources
I got the most views from the shorts to feed and this implies that YouTube is really trying to boost Shorts as much as it can. The stats are below.
Geography
I got the most views from the United States and second from India.
Subscription status (Where the views are coming from)
Around 95% of my views are from the people who are not subscribed to my channel and I think it’s great as my content is being pushed to the non-subscribers too.
And finally, the time for the final stat!
Final Stat and Result
When I started this challenge on the 19th of November 2022, I had 24 subscribers and I wasn’t posting content on a regular basis in fact I had only 2 (Two) long videos with less than 10 views.
And after the challenge I got:
- 1.8k views.
- 12.5 watch hours (Although this won't be counted for monetization).
- 24 subscribers.
I was really impressed by the result as I knew my contents were mediocre at best and I wouldn’t have been able to gain this many views and subscribers in such a short amount of time with the long-form videos.
Apart from that, Shorts are a bit easier to shoot and edit which makes them an amazing addition to the platform.
Further, I found that average content doesn't do much well, while educational and entrepreneurial topics have a lesser chance of going viral compared to entertainment videos.
The key is to find the right combination of creativity and engagement in order to maximize the reach of your videos.
Lastly, I hope you had a great read and got what you expected from this post. And if you want more content like this but prefer it in the form of a video, “Subscribe to my channel”.
