When YouTube introduced Shorts in late 2020 most people were confused on how they would work. YouTube was not known for short form, vertical, content. This was probably the biggest change to the platform since they re-introduced monetization in 2018. Many find it difficult to convert Shorts viewers into long form, horizontal, viewers. I have a potential solution in this article.
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Set Aside Preconceived Notions
This is probably going to be the hardest part for most content creators. Basically, set aside what you know already, set aside the ego, whatever you want to call it. The goal is to look at long form in a new light.
Most YouTube content creators push to publish content longer than eight minutes due to the opportunity to put more ads in their video. More ads equal more money, right? No, not always.
That is a topic for another article though.
What needs to be rethought when trying to figure out how to bring over Shorts viewers to your long form content is the overall video length.
The reason viewers are viewing Shorts and short form content on platforms such as TikTok, Reels on Meta’s platforms, etc is because it is bite sized. They can get whatever they wanted – information, entertainment, etc, in a quick manner.
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The side effect is viewers often do not realize they started out with one goal. Maybe that goal was to learn about a topic that interested them. Maybe it was to just get a dopamine hit and forget their day for a bit.
Suddenly they realize they have been watching videos for several hours, much longer than they intended.
To Win Over Shorts Viewers Requires a Change In Your Content</h2
As mentioned, most content creators on YouTube feel they must create content that is eight minutes or longer. They simply cannot create anything shorter.
Those creators likely have the hardest time converting Shorts viewers over to long form. The reason is quite simple.
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio
Long videos are scary. They feel like a big commitment and feel like they are time consuming to, well, consume.
People in general feel more pressed for time than ever before. You, reading this, probably have done this on social media – scrolling, checking out status updates then you see that the dreaded “see more” text in the bottom corner. Your reaction was probably a moan or negative thought as you scroll on.
The same thing happens on YouTube. People see 8:54 or 24:42 for the length of the video and scroll on.
Of course, it all depends on your content. If you are doing in depth documentaries on a topic viewers may be more forgiving on the length. Most content creators are not though.
Most content creators are eeking out the bare minimum to get to that eight-minute mark. Stretched a one- or two-minute topic out to a few seconds or so over eight minutes. Much like TikTok creators stretch a 20 second video out to 1:01 to 1:09 in length (that is the minimum to be paid on TikTok).
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I am doing it even in this article. Attention spans are not what they used to be. As this article is nearly 600 words including title and abstract, I have worked to wind it down. Most readers see longer articles and simply don’t read.
I have kept this focused on a topic and kept the article as short as possible. You must do the same with your YouTube videos if you want Shorts viewers to convert over.