YouTube shorts statistics

YouTube Shorts is making waves as the new on-the-go platform for bite-sized videos, directly challenging the short-form video scene dominated by TikTok. Designed for quick and easy watching, Shorts allows creators to express themselves in 60 seconds or less.

The feature has quickly turned into a playground for viral dances, hilarious clips, and snappy how-tos, tapping into the massive audience that YouTube boasts. As users scroll through an endless feed of diverse content, Shorts is shaping up to be the new frontier for creators looking to grab attention in a fast-paced digital world.

How many Shorts are on YouTube?

There are 3.86 billion standard videos on YouTube and an additional three-quarter of a billion Shorts, with both types of video seeing explosive growth. This doesn’t come as a surprise, considering the growing importance of video marketing.

• As of November 2023, there are 747 million Shorts on YouTube from 42 million channels.
• In the last year, around 30 million new Shorts have been added to YouTube each month.

• Between May and July 2022, there was a notable rise in the number of Shorts uploaded, followed by a sharp decline in August and September of the same year. This decline is likely due to the increase in spam and the August update from YouTube to combat such spam by requiring all channels to have a minimum of 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in order to monetize their videos.
• Following the current growth trend, the number of YouTube Shorts will pass one billion between April and June of 2024.

How many YouTube Shorts views per day?

• In February 2023, Google announced that YouTube Shorts received 50 billion daily views or 1.5 trillion per month. YouTube Shorts rolled out globally in June 2021 and reached 30 billion daily views in the middle of 2022.
• At the time, there were around 500 million Shorts on YouTube, meaning the average Short received 100 views per day.
• Before being released worldwide, Shorts got 6.5 billion daily views in March 2021.

How long are YouTube Shorts?

According to the analysis of 5,400 Shorts that got 3.3 billion views:

• The average YouTube Shorts length is 33 seconds.
• Most Shorts are 30 to 40 seconds long (28.8%), followed by 20 to 30 seconds (23.6%), 10 to 20 seconds (17.1%), 50 to 60 seconds (16.2%), and 40 to 50 seconds (11.3%). The least common are Shorts shorter than 10 seconds (2.8%).
• Longer YouTube Shorts get the more views: 50 to 60 seconds long Shorts get the most views, while 0 to 10 second Shorts get the least views.

• Shorts that are 50–60 seconds long receive twice as many average views as those that are 40–50 seconds long and 22 times more average views than shorts that are 0–10 seconds long.

Due to the short-time format of Shorts, they rarely use stock footage, while stock video subscriptions are very popular for standard YouTube videos.

YouTube Shorts engagement metrics

• Shorts with a view vs. swiped away rate above 60% perform the best in terms of views.
• There’s no significant relationship between engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments) and the number of views.
• Long-form videos bring in more subscribers per 10K views (22.7) than Shorts (16.9). The trend is flipped for channels with over 1 million subscribers, with an average of 29.2 subscribers per 10K views for Shorts and 11.0 for long-form videos.
• Shorts RPM (revenue per thousand impressions) increased over two-fold post-February 1st update: $0.061 RPM after the update vs. $0.027 before.
• The length of the Short doesn’t meaningfully affect RPM. The highest RPM comes from Shorts that are 40 to 50 seconds long ($0.065), while the lowest RPM comes from Shorts that are 10 to 20 seconds long ($0.055).
• Shorts are still a great way to get subscribers, considering how easy it is to create these videos compared to a full YouTube video.

YouTube Shorts: Demographics

There’s not much data about the audience of YouTube Shorts. But we do know two things: Shorts are part of YouTube, so the audience must be similar to the general YouTube audience, and the Shorts’ audience is likely a bit younger. Based on these assumptions, Photutorial data, Similarweb, and the data from Statista, we can draw the following conclusions:

• Around 80% of internet users younger than 35 years use YouTube Shorts and at least 70% of users older than 35 years watch Shorts.
• YouTube gets the most traffic from the United States (19.41%), followed by India (6.25%), Russia (5.19%9, Brazil (4.23%), and Japan (3.94%).
• Mobile-only traffic (which prefers Shorts) comes primarily from India (13.47%) and the United States (13.36%).