While YouTube’s most successful creators have focused on long-form content in the past, the shorts niche has exploded in popularity ever since the format was launched in 2021.
Now, YouTube shorts rack up an incredible 70 billion views per day, and the upward momentum is unlikely to slow down any time soon.
If you have a new content format you’re excited to share with the world, or you want to use youtube short to promote a product or service, learning from the successes of YouTube shorts creators can be a great way to maximise your chances of success.
In this post, we’ll look at four of the top YouTube shorts creators currently on the platform, and how you can engage and delight your audience in the same way they have. 🚀
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MrBeast is nothing short of a phenomenon. With 236 million subscribers, he’s the most subscribed-to individual YouTuber on the entire platform, and the second most-subscribed channel overall. Even people who spend barely any time on YouTube have heard of him on account of his meteoric rise to fame.
While MrBeast remains active with his long-form videos, he’s credited as one of the biggest influences of the concise, snappy style that have made youtube shorts videos such a wildly successful format. 🔥
Shorts creators can learn from MrBeast in the way he builds a rich and varied content calendar based on a close understanding of his audience, leading to an upload schedule where both shorts and long-form content stay distinctive, and rarely overlap in terms of topics.
Conceived as a video format for Buzzfeed, The Try Guys is an 8 million subscriber YouTube channel centered around three main presenters.
A large part of The Try Guys’ success on YouTube can be attributed to their wacky and original content ideas, but the YouTube shorts format has also been a huge help in propelling their growth online.
Using shorts to share quick summaries of their long-form content, as well as funny and interesting looks at their video production process behind the scenes, The Try Guys provide a great example of how you can use shorts to pique your audience’s curiosity and funnel them towards longer-form videos or your other online profiles. 😎
Comedy / language learning YouTuber Loic Suberville got his start on TikTok video platform and quickly transferred this popular format over to YouTube.
Loic grew up speaking English, French, and Spanish, and is known for Youtube shorts where he plays native speakers of these languages interacting with one another in sketches that are both entertaining and educational. 😉
Loic’s style of content illustrates how having a niche that covers more than one audience segment can help you supercharge your channel’s engagement. Attracting both people who are interested in language learning educational content, and those who are just looking for something funny to watch, Loic has been able to rack up millions of subscribers without spreading himself too thin.
Joanne Lee Molinaro, who posts on YouTube through her channel The Korean Vegan, offers a master class in tailoring her content focus to the shorts platform.
As host of the popular wellness podcast ‘Are You Ready’, Joanne uses her Youtube channel to distribute highlights from the podcast, as well as short cooking videos showing her viewers how they can make delicious plant-based dishes at home.
The Korean Vegan is not only a great place to learn how to condense traditionally long-form content into engaging, bite-sized clips, but also a source of inspiration in how genuine and vulnerable she comes across as an internet personality. Be sure to study this channel if you want to create successful shorts, but don’t want your content to become lost in the same old conventions set by other YouTube shorts creators. 🧡
Tips and Tricks for Successful YouTube Shorts Creation
Now that you’re familiar with some of the biggest YouTube shorts creators currently seeing success on the platform, we’ll get into some practical tips on how to make YouTube shorts content that’s engaging, polished, and professional.
Understanding the YouTube Shorts Algorithm and Ranking Factors
Just like Google, YouTube serves content to its users based on a complex algorithm.
This algorithm is designed to help people find the content they’re looking for as easily as possible, helping to improve the user experience in general and increase the likelihood that users will spend more time on the platform. 🔥
There are countless tips and strategies for boosting engagement across the different variables that go into the YouTube algorithm. To start, however, YouTube shorts creators should look at the following three variables and plan their short video strategy around them:
Engagement Metrics: Metrics showing positive user engagement, such as views, comments, likes and shares, can all have a major impact on how the YouTube algorithm manipulates your content’s visibility. This is why it’s common for YouTube shorts creators to remind viewers to leave a like and a comment at some point in their videos. If you can encourage your viewership to bump up your numbers in these areas, without being too obtrusive or begging for likes and comments, you should see a positive effect in your engagement.
Watch Time: Watch time is another key metric that Youtube uses to determine the value of content and rank it in their algorithm. The longer a viewer stays on your videos, the more visible your channel will be. This is why it’s important to meticulously plan and script your videos to keep them as engaging as possible, and encourage people to watch until the end.
Audience: When determining whether or not to serve a certain piece of content to a user, the YouTube algorithm will also look at the viewing activity of previous viewers, and how well this correlates with the behaviours of the next potential viewer. For this reason, it’s important to be clued-in on who your target audience is, the kinds of content they watch, and how you can find common threads to make your videos more appealing.
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Using Effective Editing Techniques for YouTube Shorts
Using the right editing techniques for your YouTube shorts will help you make consistently compelling content, and drive engagement using the same conventions utilized by some of the most successful YouTube shorts creators.
Some of the best editing techniques you can use to optimize your YouTube shorts include:
- Using YouTube’s video timer feature to film impromptu videos for more personable, “update” style videos.
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Crafting Compelling and Viral YouTube Shorts Ideas
Like with anything creative, the YouTube shorts creators who are most successful get there by breaking down conventions and thinking outside the box. With the modern demand for upload consistency, however, creators can benefit from analyzing trends and taking inspiration from video formats that have been successful in the past.
Some of the shorts genres you might want to adapt to your own content include:
- Before and after videos.
- Product unboxing and benefits summaries.
- Your take on emerging news and trends.
- Bite-sized fun facts and educational content.
- Mini tutorials and life hacks.
Finding Your Niche and Developing Your Style
More than anything, your niche and style as a content creator is going to be one of the major variables that will determine your success as a content creator. This is going to be what sets you apart from the sea of content your audience sees every day, and convinces people in your target market that your videos are worth their time.
New YouTube shorts creators often find it difficult to determine their niche at the start, and this can adapt as you build a following and develop an understanding of who’s engaging with your videos. However, it’s important to have some idea of your niche when you first start creating your content, and to avoid spreading yourself too thin by attempting to please too wide an audience.
Focusing on topics you’re passionate about, exhibiting skills or knowledge that are unique to you, or developing a unique charismatic charm that makes ordinary topics more appealing, are all common ways that YouTube shorts creators can develop a unique niche. Just remember to research similar creators in your space, and find an effective way to set your content apart.
Monetizing Your YouTube Shorts
Understanding how YouTube shorts monetization works can give you clear objectives for growing your channel and extracting the maximum possible value from it.
Here are some key requirements to bear in mind for monetizing your YouTube shorts content:
- Be based in a country where the YouTube Partner Program is available.
- Have a minimum of 1,000 subscribers to your channel.
- Have either 10 million public views on your Shorts content over the last 90 days, or 4,000 public watch hours across long-form content in the past year.
- Only have content that complies with YouTube’s Channel Monetization policies.
- Have a channel that’s free of unresolved YouTube Community Guidelines Strikes.
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