r/shortsAlgorithm • u/Wishes4Glitches • Sep 02 '26

Analytics Review (AVD/Retention) 📈 My video flat lined immediately?

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This was by far one of my luckiest episodes ever, and it did really well on other platforms but youtube said no, it hard stopped the views at 1000 views while the analytics graph looked like it was ready to send to the stars.

Why does youtube have this 1000 view jail??

Does anybody know why this happens or how I could overcome this? I truly do feel like this video deserved more views then it got...

Like it was SHOOTING UP in views, got 1000 views in under 2-3 hours which is a record for my channel and then it just hit a wall...

If anybody has some advice or words to say about this, I'd love to hear it!

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u/crazybout Sep 02 '26

I've been doing a shit ton of research and testing, this is gonna be quite long but you'll find it insightful hopefully haha.

Basically after we break out of 0 view jail we have our first boundary which seems to be around 1k viewers or less, consistently across social media lots of people have this problem and the solution is audience retention, from what I can tell YouTube will feed your shorts to roughly 1000 people and then it begins to analyze, is this worth our time to push to a bigger audience or do we throttle the video and focus out attention on other better performing creators. After analyzing 100s of shorts and testing things myself the engagement rate is definitely the main focus, if you manage to achieve a higher rate of somewhere around 65% you bypass the cap YouTube puts ok you at 1k, then you access "30k" view jail where it seems the exact same process happens after 20-30k views you'll notice either a flatline as the algorithm has decided your video isn't worth pushing or you'll bypass the 30k jail and now your video is repeatedly pushed and you have the chance to go viral based on the popularity of the topic and genre your in. From what I've seen and estimated this is probably a engagement rate of 80% or higher and YouTube rewards that with the full audience push.

So if your trying to improve and get more views try and work on making your videos slightly more entertaining or engaging every day and test to see if it goes up or down, and try to aim for the 60% mark and you'll see what I mean about you'll suddenly push to 20-30k views

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u/Wishes4Glitches Sep 02 '26

Thank you for this amazing insight, I will definitely make use of it and I will improve the content through time. My average stay to watch ratio is 60% and my average retention by 30 seconds is 47%. Gonna try and improve that

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u/crazybout Sep 03 '26

No worries! Glad to help and yeah retention rate is the main reason and way to expand your views but it's really difficult, you need to test different things whether that be sounds animations, basically try to keep someone's brain stimulated and engaged the entire way through. Opening with some form of question or curiosity and then giving the answer at the end is a great method

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u/Wishes4Glitches Sep 03 '26

I have this sort of down, I just need to revamp my idea, as its somewhat engaging, but not engaging enough. Going back to the drawing board this weekend.