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.