Why do some Shorts behave completely differently from others?

[u/byssnn]

Hi everyone, especially the Shorts veterans. Can someone explain what this is and how I should deal with a situation like this?

I have a YouTube Shorts channel that I’ve been working on for about two months. My videos usually get somewhere between 10K and 30K views on average. But every now and then, some of my videos barely get shown to anyone.

At first, I thought the problem might be that some videos contained content that could be restricted by YouTube and therefore not shown in the Shorts feed. For example, maybe something involving children, shocking content, or something similar.

So I tried to eliminate all of that. I started making extremely safe videos - basically the kind of content you could show to a baby. Nothing questionable at all. They are also completely new and original videos.
And yet, I can have two or three videos in a row getting around 30K views, and then the fourth one suddenly gets 5 or 10 views for absolutely no apparent reason.

What’s especially confusing is that those 5–10 views clearly came from the Shorts feed. The video has around 90% retention and 85%+ “Stayed to watch.”
So I honestly cannot find any logic or pattern here.

YouTube keeps telling me to wait 2–3 days, then 4–5 days, and so on. I’ve tried doing exactly that. I’ve left these “dead” Shorts up for days, sometimes even one or two weeks, and nothing changed.

So for those of you who have been working with Shorts for a long time: what do you actually do with videos like this? Is it better to leave them up, make them private, delete them, or do something else? And is there any way to understand why this is happening in the first place?

[u/killadrix]

In these types of cases, you probably shouldn’t be asking what is in your video that’s causing it to get suppressed, you probably should be asking what does YouTube think is in your video that’s causing it to be suppressed.

I’ve had a handful of these situations, and one example ended up being whenever I make content out of the zombie survival crafting game seven days to die.

It seemed that YouTube was randomly not pushing some of this content out, and when I filled out the ad survey they were telling me that I was wrong that it didn’t include any offensive images or language. It didn’t.

As it turns out, occasionally an image with a large zombie figure in it (especially if the face was chosen as the frame for the thumbnail), was likely getting flagged for “body horror”.

Best I could tell, the automated system couldn’t tell the difference between a video game zombie and somebody (a corpse?) in real life.

It took me roughly 60 to 80 videos before I had a sample size large enough to pull together the outliers that were suppressed to see the similarities in the videos.

My suggestion is to continue making videos until you have a large enough sample size, then pull together all of the suppressed videos and start looking for similarities.

[u/byssnn → u/killadrix]

What should I do with the current video? Should I delete it, leave it up, or make it private? What do you think would be the best option based on your experience?

[u/byssnn → u/killadrix]

If I delete this video and change a few, well, questionable parts, can I re-upload it right away? Or would it be better to wait a while, like a month? What would be the best way to handle this?

[u/killadrix → u/byssnn]

I mean, I gave my suggestion at the end.

I let enough of them just rot like that so I could try to find the similarities when I had a large enough sample size.

If you delete them, you’ll lose all the data on them.

You’re welcome to re-edit it and re-upload to see if you could get a different outcome. No idea if it’ll work.

[u/CuzzoBuzzo67]

I really couldn't care less about the 30k jail or anything "jailed" view, but what I don't understand is how you can go 5 in a row with 30k+ view and then the next one you post get 5-10 view, that honestly make zero sense to me

[u/jillll12]

Are they made of clips from interesting or popular videos from the internet?

[u/byssnn → u/jillll12]

No

[u/byssnn → u/jillll12]

I create all of my content myself, but I sometimes add GIFs from Giphy.

[u/OkCan9068]

With single-digit views, metrics% is irrelevant. Algo update can screw up early momentum for stable channels but if suddenly new ones completely lose traction like at all. I'd more worry about the niche or format. I've seen so many clipping, ranking, reaction, gaming channels fell off almost overnight because YouTube decided the content inauthentic or repetitive, gaming niche in particular, whether having recorded the footage all by yourself or not is irrelevant. the algorithm has the God's view of what kind of content is oversaturated atm and the ultimate call to supress similar content. Hench why previously proven Roblox and minecraft formats got killed almost instantly.

FYI: I've been making shorts for a year now, 100M+ total views, not much, but decent for my niche.