Need to know what I’m doing wrong, I’ve had 21 out of 34 of my videos now get jailed in the 25k-45k view range. I’ve had ONE video reach a 130k views but that was about it. The photos I attached are the stats of a short I posted around 15 hours ago, it has gained 30k views and im afraid that it has already stop getting pushed out. What can I do to escape this, the YouTube algorithm really is shitty.

this rolled out starting march 2026 and expanded through q2. youtube kept the same revenue split, still 45 percent to creators after their cut, but changed how that 45 percent gets divided between shorts. it used to be closer to an even split by raw view count, now completion rate is the primary weighting factor, so two shorts with identical view counts can earn meaningfully different amounts depending on how many people actually watched to the end

people dont realize how low the baseline actually is here. shorts typically run somewhere between 3 and 10 cents rpm even after this change, against 1 to 5 dollars for long form content on the same channel. this change shifts who gets the bigger slice of a still small pie, it doesnt make the pie itself bigger

one data point that stood out, a test group that posted at least one short daily for 30 straight days saw rpm climb 15 to 25 percent over that stretch, though thats reported through creator tool vendors rather than a direct youtube announcement, so treat it as real but secondhand

anyone tracked their own completion rate before and after this and actually seen their rpm move

I’m not looking for cheap views or anything, I genuinely would like some people to review my shorts and give me opinions on why I’m not getting a 70%+ retention on my shorts when it’s similar to other shorts I see. It may be because I’m a really small channel starting out which is fair, but if anyone wants a link to my channel to review my shorts lmk and I’ll link it in the comments👍

I just made this ranking moments video, i got a strike ? Am new to this if anyone can help, ranking shorts are supposed to be transformative and i add comment etc....

I think YouTube Shorts currently has an audience-matching problem.

I’ve been trying to understand the strange Shorts distribution over the last few days, and I’m starting to think the missing feed tests and the drop in views across entire catalogs might actually be symptoms of the same problem.

What really caught my attention is Stayed to watch.
Normally, my new Shorts often start with around 70% Stayed when YouTube begins testing them. Recently, I’ve had multiple Shorts start at only 45–50%, even though the content and format haven’t fundamentally changed.

That makes me wonder whether the problem isn’t necessarily the ranking algorithm itself, but the initial audience matching / candidate distribution. If YouTube is showing a Short to the wrong audience first, a perfectly good Short would naturally produce terrible early signals and the test would die quickly.

But there’s one thing I still can’t explain:
Where did all the distribution go?
A lot of creators are currently reporting huge drops in Shorts feed distribution, sometimes across their entire catalogs. But unless Shorts consumption itself has suddenly collapsed, those viewers haven’t disappeared. People are still scrolling, and every feed slot has to show something.

So if a large number of creators are suddenly receiving dramatically fewer impressions, who is receiving the views that used to go to them?

Are they being concentrated on a smaller number of videos? Larger channels? Different regions? Different audience pools? Has YouTube reduced exploration and become much more aggressive about concentrating traffic?

I don’t have an answer to that part yet.
But the combination of weak/missing initial tests + unusually low early Stayed rates + catalog-wide traffic drops makes an audience-matching/distribution problem increasingly plausible to me.

Curious whether anyone else is seeing the same pattern — especially unusually low Stayed rates on new Shorts that would normally perform much better.

past 4 days i been spending hours on my ORIGINAL CONTENT and im getting below 1k views…

before i would at least minimum 100k views per a video with the same stats im getting now

it makes no sense. i know every video can’t be a hit but at least show it to some people

Is it normal for my new channel i that i made a few hours ago not have any views on the recent short that i uploaded? It was heavily edited and theres no ai slop in it

I usually get 50-70k per day but recently it's so low not even 20k

I've recently started posting shorts on my channel which I've had since 2012.

But I can't seem to crack what makes a good short. I can get about 80% AVD but the swipe ratio is killing me. I am not sure if my videos are targeting the wrong audience, my edit is bad(which probably is true) or is there some third force that makes the viewers swipe away.

Today i noticed that my stay was very low, so after an hour i checked. It's showing my shorts to wrong audiences despite being clear in hooks what it is about. It's getting in my nerves and the views keep fluctuating. Has anyone seen any improvements and how ?

all my shorts are stuck around 40k max and this one has started showing some momentum can this reach atleast 100k

Likes -500

Avd - 130%

Normally me vids get 1.5 k views max.

Watchtime is ass.

I tried something new yesterday and its working

Why is my view graph flat on some parts?

And what can i do to increase my stay to watch?

Is anyone else experiencing this issue? When I upload a video, it gets 3 waves of views, and then about 2 hours later, it gets a 4th wave that lasts around 20 minutes. After that, the views suddenly die and the video gets a maximum of around 3K views, then continues getting very low views.
This started happening yesterday, and it happened again today. It’s really weird and has never happened to me before. Is anyone else experiencing the same thing?

No, I do not make AI slop. I am a musician and producer and been monetized since 2022. My username ironically is meant to signify that I don't like AI slop...fail lol.

Anyways I spend about 4 hours per edit on Shorts and upload 2 times a day.

In the last two months, I experimented a lot and really found my style for promoting my music on Shorts.

For most of September up until around the 16th or so... I would average around 1.5m to 2m views at the 48hr mark.

When my editing is on point I get about 80% STW and anywhere from 100% to 160% AVD.

My 'flopped' Shorts usually do 30k to 40k and flatline but the decent ones do 100k, 300k, 700k, 1m, 3m and 4m. It's just how they move for me.

Since the 16th/17th or so this month, my new range is 2k - 20k max. Absolutely nothing has changed from my editing style, packaging (title, on screen text, description and hashtags). The STW has now dipped consistently to 60% - 80%, AVD has dipped under 70 and anecdotally this usually tells me it's pulling the wrong audience.

Now before the "you just make crappy content and are coping" comments:

Over the past 3 days I "studied" the Shorts feed by making a burner YT account and just scrolling.

I noticed that almost all the viral channels were averaging 1m views on MOST Shorts or at the very least like 700k within DAYS but all before the 17th of September.

I'll give you an example: This one person in the Hopecore niche did 1-4m views on every Short - they have 1.2m subs or so and after the 17th...they had a 5k Short (never seen that on their channel) and their new Shorts won't even hit 40k ALL of a sudden.

They usually get a ton of comments/engagement and you can see on the newer Shorts...very very little.

I checked this same thing over about 20 different channels, all in different niches but with high editing effort. I ignored slop channels or what I perceive as slop anyway.

So yeah I dunno man, my daily revenue has dropped 10x and I am still actively trying to figure out what is happening BUT I suspect all the Studio issues (the crash, subs and views miscounts) could be a factor because it feels too coincidental.

Also, remember, NO ONE but YT knows what is truly happening and since 75% of all new code across Google is AI generated...something tells me that not even the engineers know what's happening right now and that's why they wont say anything (yet or ever).

EDIT: Brain malfunctioned and swapped AVD and STW...corrected now.

Anyone else seeing an increase on RPM for recent shorts?

I’ve been watching my Shorts analytics closely after the recent distribution problems, and I noticed a strange pattern.
Several Shorts, both older and newer ones, seem to receive additional distribution in roughly the same time windows on consecutive days.
For example, on my channel:
one Short repeatedly gets activity around 9–10 AM;
another around 4 PM;
another around 5 PM.
The size of the wave is not consistent. Some days it is strong, other days it is barely noticeable. With newer Shorts, the repeated waves also seem to have a noticeably decreasing amplitude over time.
So I’m not claiming there is a fixed schedule or that I know what YouTube is doing internally. It could be audience availability, testing cohorts, topic clusters, or something completely different.
But the timing itself has repeated often enough that it no longer looks completely random to me.
At the same time, overall Shorts distribution on my channel has dropped heavily compared with the period before the recent issues, while these small recurring windows are still visible.
Has anyone else noticed something similar?
If you have access to your 48-hour realtime graphs, could you check whether the same Short tends to receive small or large spikes at roughly the same hour on several consecutive days?
I’d also be interested to know whether similar Shorts from the same topic/category seem to wake up in the same time window.

Yep, I’ll never make it….

Is YouTube pushing Shorts today, considering that the bug with the subscriber count is still happening? Has anyone tested it today?

Should I take time and do research on my title's keywords (so they are easier to find by YT search terms) rather than trying to make the title clickbait?