I read 1,675 shorts
to find out what travels.

Nobody could tell me why one forty-second cut does 5 million views and the next one does 900. So in September 2026 I went and counted.

1,675shorts read, one at a time
79channels across 24 industries
719,472,690views between them
23,000views for the typical one

What the numbers said

39%
of all 719 million views sit in just 16 shorts. The other 1,659 split what is left, which is why choosing the right forty seconds is most of the work
1,034×
between the best short on one channel and its typical one. Same person, same camera, same year, same audience
14,000,000
views on a single short from a channel with under 50,000 subscribers. Thirteen channels in the set are that small
3%
of the 1,675 did under a thousand views. Failure is rare; the spread is the whole story

The part that argues against me

Separately I checked 144 organizations where I could read both their best short and their best full-length video on the same channel.

The median gap was 2.4×. Only 17% reached ten times or better, and in 24% of them the short actually lost.

That is the honest number, and it is nothing like the headline figures above. The difference is that those 144 organizations posted a short occasionally, by accident, with no thought about which moment to cut. The channels doing 1,000× are choosing deliberately and posting on a schedule.

Which is the actual finding. Posting shorts is not a strategy. Picking them is.

Where the clips came from

Twenty-four industries, none of them glamorous:

HVAC, aquariums, beekeeping, car detailing, carpet cleaning, chiropractors, church, dentists, farming, foundry, knife sharpening, lawn care, locksmiths, machining, model trains, plumbing, pottery, pressure washing, tattoo artists, tax & accounting, trucking, watch repair, wedding DJs, welding.

View counts are as YouTube displayed them on 13–14 September 2026. Rounded figures are written as rounded. Anything I could not read, I left out rather than estimate.

Curious what yours would say?

Send me one recording and I’ll cut from it, so you are looking at your own footage instead of somebody else’s numbers. Free. Nothing to cancel.

Send me one recording →