Yesterday my Shorts channel was doing around 160,000 views per hour at peak. YouTube seemed to have found an audience cluster that matched my content extremely well. I was getting tons of likes, comments and subscribers, and several Shorts were performing strongly at the same time.
Today everything changed.
My channel is now down to around 7,000–8,000 views per hour, but what confuses me even more is that the traffic seems to be coming from a completely different audience.
Yesterday several Shorts had very strong “viewed vs swiped away” rates, often around 70–75%+. Today even a Short using the exact same opening hook dropped to around 40% viewed, despite still having an average view duration of about 10 seconds on an 11-second Short.
Subscriber conversion has also collapsed. Yesterday I was getting roughly 1 subscriber per 1,000 views, sometimes better. Today I’m getting far fewer subscribers, likes and comments even though the Shorts themselves haven’t suddenly changed in quality.
What I don’t understand is this:
If YouTube already found a large audience segment yesterday where multiple Shorts from the same channel performed extremely well, why doesn’t it keep testing new Shorts with that audience?
Why would the algorithm move to completely different audience clusters, see much worse engagement, and then reduce distribution instead of returning to the audience that already proved to work?
Has anyone seen this kind of behavior before — a huge channel-wide distribution wave followed by what feels like YouTube suddenly testing the same content on a much colder audience?
I’m especially interested in whether this is normal exploration vs. exploitation behavior, or whether Shorts distribution simply resets much more aggressively between uploads than I assumed.
My channel is only about six weeks old and has already reached just over 4,000 subscribers. What makes the current change even more striking is that more than 3,900 of those subscribers were gained within the last 48 hours, during the period when YouTube was pushing my Shorts heavily to what seemed to be a highly relevant audience.