I counted every YouTube video that 48 well-known marketers appear in. Over 10,000 views, on their own channels and on everyone else's.
The big headline from the full count of 48 marketers on YouTube was that shorts carry 51% of all the views.
Then there is Iman Gadzhi.
588 videos. 244 million views. Three shorts.
Those three shorts have 107,421 views between them. That is 0.04% of his total. Rounded, it is zero.
The 100M club, minus the shorts
12 people on the list have more than 100 million views.
Alex Hormozi has 5,319 shorts. Gary Vaynerchuk has 2,976. Leila Hormozi has 2,570.
The lowest count among the other eleven is Noah Kagan, with 141.
Iman Gadzhi is in the same club with three.
One caveat. Videos on other people's channels only count when his name is in the title, description or channel name. So three is a floor. A clip channel that never names him would slip past me. But his own channel is counted in full, and that is where 82% of his views are.
So where do the views come from
Long videos. Almost nothing else.
226 million of his views come from videos over ten minutes. That is 93% of everything.
Only three people on the whole list get more views from long videos in absolute terms: Alex Hormozi, Simon Sinek and Gary Vaynerchuk.
His 585 videos that are not shorts average about 416,000 views each.
For comparison, Alex Hormozi's non-short videos average 319,538. Colin and Samir's average 401,305.
So the man with almost no shorts gets more views per non-short video than the biggest shorts account in the set.
What I make of it
The data can't tell me why. It can only tell me what is there.
My guess is that the shorts question gets asked too early. Everyone asks "should we do shorts" before asking "what do we already do that people watch".
Iman Gadzhi is proof that the 51% headline is an average, not a rule. You can sit in the top dozen of this list and skip the format almost entirely.
It also works the other way round. Noah Kagan has 141 shorts that average 1.8 million views each. Shorts work for him.
The format decides very little. What decides it is what already works for that person, and how much more of it they make.
So what does this have to do with you?
Your competitors are running the same kind of experiment in public. Some are all in on one format. Some barely touch it. Their numbers tell you which bets paid off, long before your own would.
Pick one competitor and see what is already working for them. The first benchmark is free: one domain, measured against you, no card and no call.
Pick one competitor. See what we find.
Your first benchmark is free. One domain, measured against you, no card and no call.