Here is a number that sounds like a verdict.
Shorts carry 51% of all the views.
That comes from a count I did of 48 well-known marketers on YouTube: every video they appear in with more than 10,000 views. You can see the full count of 34,088 videos here. 5.85 billion views, and 15,973 of those videos are shorts.
So the lesson writes itself. Post shorts.
Except then I looked at the median.
The typical marketer gets 7%
Line the 48 up by how much of their views come from shorts. The one in the middle gets about 7%. Not half. Seven percent.
Both numbers are true, and they describe two different things.
The 51% is a pile. Add up every view, then ask how much of the pile came from shorts. Big accounts count more, because they put more views in the pile.
The 7% is a person. It asks what a normal marketer on the list looks like.
Who tips the pile
A few accounts post shorts on a scale the rest do not.
- Alex Hormozi has 5,319 shorts and 30% of all the shorts views in the group.
- Gary Vaynerchuk has 2,976.
- Leila Hormozi has 2,570.
Take Alex Hormozi out on his own and the shorts share drops from 51% to 46%. Take out the three biggest accounts (Hormozi, Vaynerchuk, and Colin and Samir) and it falls to 41%.
One person moves the total by about five points. That is what an average does when one account is that big.
What the middle looks like
Now count people instead of views.
- 29 of the 48 get more than half their views from videos over ten minutes.
- 12 get more than half from shorts.
- 7 have no shorts at all.
The middle of the list is long videos. The shorts story belongs mostly to a dozen accounts, and a few of those are very large.
One caveat. Views on other people's channels are a floor in this count, because a clip channel that never names the person is missed. If anything, that probably hides more clips, so treat the 7% as a rough middle, not a precise one.
Why this matters for you
My guess is that most "everyone is doing X" claims you read are built on the pile, not the person. A handful of loud accounts become the average, and the average becomes advice.
Which is fine if you are one of the loud accounts. Most of us are not.
The more useful question is not what works on average, but what works for the people who look like you.
That is a question about specific competitors, not a category. 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. Start here.
Pick one competitor. See what we find.
Your first benchmark is free. One domain, measured against you, no card and no call.