"Should I start with shorts?" 48 marketers answer with data

If you are about to start on YouTube, this is probably the first question.

Should I start with shorts?

I do not know your business. But I do have 34,088 videos and 5.85 billion views from people who have already tried. So here is what the data says.

The headline number says yes

Shorts carry 51% of all the views in the full count of 48 marketers.

If you stop there, the answer is obvious.

The median says not so fast

The typical marketer on the list gets 7% of their views from shorts.

The 51% is pulled up by a few accounts posting at enormous scale. Alex Hormozi alone has 30% of all the shorts views.

Here is how the 48 actually spread out:

• 12 get more than half their views from shorts
• 6 sit between 10% and 50%
• 30 get under 10%, and 7 of those have no shorts at all

Most of these marketers built their views somewhere else. 29 of the 48 get more than half from videos over ten minutes.

A short is not automatically worth more

Across everyone, a short averages 187,153 views. Everything else averages 157,810. Close.

Look at the 19 people with at least 50 shorts, and it splits almost in half. Nine get more per short than per other video. Ten get less.

Noah Kagan's 141 shorts average 1,784,496 views. Leila Hormozi's 2,570 average 69,195.

So the format alone decides nothing. What you put in it decides a lot.

It depends on your corner of marketing

These shares are weighted by views, so big accounts pull hard. Still, the gap between 60% and 1% is not noise.

One caveat: views on other people's channels are a floor in my count, so people who mostly appear as guests may look smaller than they are.

So, should you?

My reading, and it is a reading:

• If your corner is e-commerce or offers, shorts are where much of the attention in this data sits.
• If you are in SEO, copy or brand, long videos did most of the work for the people here.
• Either way, more shorts did not mean more views per short. Leila Hormozi has 18 times as many shorts as Noah Kagan, and he gets far more per short.

The better question is what is already working for the people you compete with. That is visible from the outside.

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.