It feels bad, right? When I was going through this very same feeling of “Why my Youtube shorts not getting views?”, I stopped getting enough sleep.
Why? Did the channel depend on it?
No. Not really. Actually not at all.
When we started Youtube shorts, it was already really late. Most of the Youtube channels had tried and tested it, used it to their advantage to widen their audience base and of course, get new subs.
Nonethless, we gave this format a shot.
And we failed. Pretty badly.
Honestly, we din’t even know what we were doing back then with this format of content formation for we hadn’t even tried Instagram reels or Tiktok videos till then.
And we had published close to 1500 videos on our channel by then. Still, we were clueless.
Look at this video, still don’t know what was this:
And this crazy experimentation phase went on.
After 10 odd shorts later, we were here:
Then, as they say, crazy people do crazy things, over and over again.
We went on doing so.
After another 30-odd shorts later, we reached here:
Now, this was becoming fun.
Some 100+ shorts later, we found our MOJO.
You know what is MOJO?
It is something every being in this world has, its just very few are lucky enough to know and find their MOJO. Our Mcdonald burger recipe, which made the burger taste the way it does.
So, we were lucky.
And lucky enough to find it at the right time.
But what really was our MOJO?
Well, we followed a specific short-formation strategy.
We imagined the script of our short as a human body.
Our script always had a premise (like the human head). This premise would directly put up a point, ask a question, challenge the belief system of the viewer and things around. This lasted 8-10 seconds, at best.
This was followed by the body of the script (like the body of a human) which was tightly connected with the premise.
The body entailed the story or the answer to the point mentioned in the premise. There were numbers, stats, data, research to back what we say here. No generic statements. No gyaan.
The body was somewhere around 35-45 seconds, depending on the playlist, the video belonged to.
Finally, the script ended with a conclusion. This conclusion had a small connect with any of the strong point mentioned in the premise to give it a recall. This would, then, connect the whole script, as much as the human body is connected, zipless, buttonless.
The conclusion was a summary but had a sharp opinion or a learning or a sattire. Whatever that leaves an impact before the viewer moves to the next short, with no recall about the face, the channel or the story.
This was about 8-10 seconds, again.
There was always one call-to-action with which the video would end. It could be:
- Subscribe to the channel
- Comment your thoughts
- Share the video
- Install our app
- Watch this long-form video of ours and so on.
The whole production of this script was done in a very improvized manner where voice modulation, the narration, the story-telling, the emotions, the eye-movements, the smiles and gestures were all calculated.
There would, sometimes, be 40 shots (not even kidding) to find that 1 shot that would have the right amount of everything. The right way of saying (or expressing) that one 4-second line.
And of course, the edit quality had to be top-notch. The text in the content, the voice quality, the camera movement, the images being used to make that piece understandable enough where the viewer does not really have to ask his sensory system to make an effort to understand whats being shown.
The content making journey becomes beautiful if you know whats working for you and the only thing you have to do at that point in time is – SCALE.
And that is exactly what we did. We scaled our shorts. We started publishing 3 shorts a day, 100 shorts a month. All scripted, produced, edited with the same zeal and passion as the short that made us know our MOJO.
This continued for a long time. We did 500+ more shorts like this.
We still publish a short a day. We never miss the timelines. In fact, we are thinking to go back to 3-shorts a day model again.
So, what really worked for us, apart from us being lucky?
We tried multiple formats of shorts. And that was applicable even at the time when our normal shorts were working. We still continued to experiment.
They say, why fix a tyre that is not punctured.
Well, we were not fixing any tyre. We were upgrading the whole car.
We were challenging our boundries, testing our audience, testing our stories, our playlists, our creativity, our direction(s) and a lot other things.
So, finally to answer the question “Why My Youtube Shorts Not Getting Views?”, well, you need to ask this question to yourself.
- Are you testing your boundries?
- Are you really sure you have touched the epitome of your creativity level or there is more that can burst out of your brains?
- Are you sure, you picked the right niche?
- Also, topics! How do you know people want to know about what you are telling them?
- Are your scripts tight?
- Do you follow any structure or content-formation strategy or your a wild-hog (which is not really a good plan in this case)?
- Are you good in making shorts? Be honest to yourself on this (and to rest of the questions as well!).
- What is your content publishing frequency? Do you follow a timeline or are you, again, a wild-hog (not a good plan dude)?
- How is your edit? Is it par to what is going on in the industry at the time you are reading it or you are chasing time?
- Does your audience even expect Youtube shorts from you or are you making because others are?
- Are you following the basics right? Title of the short, hashtags (not sure whether they even matter, honestly but still).
You must reflect hard on these questions.
While you answer these, somewhere down, you would start getting the right answers in your head. Those answers will guide on what you need to improve on.
Then do one thing.
Improve upon those ideas. One by One.
Don’t wait to become perfect.
Keep making and publishing shorts, while correcting yourself on one thing or the other.
By the way, this is another 500 shorts later:
Also, we have done 500 more shorts after the one shown above.
We will keep doing.
And we will keep asking questions that are mentioned above. For we don’t want to ask ourselves one question, ever “Why My Youtube Shorts Not Getting Views?”.
Chao!
