I've always said that the best way to get more views on your YouTube shorts is to sit down and watch shorts from other channels. Doing this often could help you notice patterns and themes that work both inside your niche and outside of it. There is one tricky problem with that advice, though, and it's that when you're watching these YouTube shorts, you don't exactly know which ones are going to be doing better than others.
I mean, there's a few indicators, but it would be kind of nice if we could just see at a glance if the short you're looking at was like a major outlier or a total flop. In fact, we thought this would be so helpful that we decided, "All right, let's make it ourselves. " And it's now available and absolutely free.
So, am I supposed to say it's an ad if I'm just giving it to you for free? I don't know. Let me just show you what it is.
We call it the shorts scorecard, and you'll find it on the desktop version of YouTube when you have our Vid IQ tools installed, which are linked down below. What this is going to do is pop up on the side as you're swiping through Shorts, and you can see a lot of information at a very quick glance. So, here's an example.
You have a channel here that uploaded a short that is a 100x greater than 100x outlier for them. It has 4. 8 million views.
It was uploaded 14 days ago and the channel has under 100,000 subscribers. You can also break this information down a little bit more if you like. We can see what the first 24 hours were doing and that the video wasn't doing too great in its first few hours and then exploded.
We can see that it's getting about 12,000 views per hour right now and its engagement rate is 3. 7% and that's just a measurement of the likes and comments and things like that. Now, the reason this is such a great way to watch shorts as a YouTuber who makes shorts is that you get to do a lot deeper research a lot faster.
Before, if you wanted to see just some of this information, you'd have to click the three dots. Then you'd have to go to the video's description, and then you'd have to see that the video has this many likes and this many views, and it was uploaded at this time. And that's only a fraction of the information that our scorecard is showing you.
If you see an outlier short you really like, you can actually click into the outlier score and you'll get a whole list of similar shorts that are also huge outliers for this topic. But why is doing this kind of research helpful for making shorts in the first place? I kind of alluded to this a little while ago, but the hardest part of making videos in general, shorts or otherwise, is just having a solid idea and understanding if your idea is going to work or not.
Maybe you have a talent where you compose music, but you're not sure what is working in the music space. Carter here is a really good example of a channel that is killing it right now in the space. Comedy music videos are incredibly popular on Tik Tok and shorts and platforms like that.
So, this could be one avenue for you to explore. Even if you write more serious stuff, maybe that's something people learn about you as they continue to follow your channel. Or maybe you see a video that looks like it was a really good idea, but it just didn't have a lot of success.
Here's one example. This channel has almost 6,000 subscribers, and this video didn't do too bad. It has 3,400 views.
But why do I think just looking at it at a glance that this idea didn't quite work? It looks impressive. I couldn't throw a javelin.
Well, if I were to offer this creator some unsolicited advice, I would say, "Hey, where does the Javelin end up? It'd be really cool if you added a second camera to this so we can see the entire arc of the throw. Now, obviously, our tool isn't going to tell you how many cameras you should add to your videos that you're recording.
But just sitting here and putting yourself in research mode makes you start to wonder about the shorts that did well and the ones that didn't. And then you can ask yourself, what could I do differently if I were to make a short? What mistakes can I avoid making?
Here's a short that was just uploaded about a week ago that's been doing gradually better and better and better. Busk Inc. has 29,000 subscribers and they currently have a short with 25 million views getting 703,000 views per hour.
This is a short with an incredibly powerful visual hook where you take a fully constructed Coke can and quickly unfurl it just to make what ends up becoming a really unique piece of art. It's no wonder this has 25 million views. And when you see a short like this, it's always really important to ask yourself, why did I stop scrolling?
What is it about somebody looking down holding a can of soda that made me go, "Oh yeah, I need to see more of this. " Well, it's because in less than 1 second, that can of soda becomes a canvas. Now, I'm just giving you these examples because this is how I watch shorts when I'm in research mode.
But getting to see right there on the screen what's been working and what's not is very, very helpful. However, what if you just want to unplug and watch some shorts without being in research mode? You don't probably don't need all those stats pestering you constantly.
So, you can actually just take the scorecard and toggle it off and enjoy your regular shorts viewing experience. if your regular experience is watching them on a desktop, which is a bit unusual, but I'm not going to judge you. So, that is our shorts scorecard, and you can download it for free by using the link down below.
And once you do, you will get access to all of our free tools that show up in the browser when you're using YouTube going forward. And if you'd like to see more of our tools in action, you can click this video right here. Enjoy.
