Explained: YouTube Analytics for Shorts

To clear out any ambiguity or confusion around YouTube analytics for Shorts, here are a few insights that would help understand the performance of content put up on YouTube Shorts.

A product manager has " target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">provided some information around how YouTube Analytics for Shorts functions. For the unacquainted, Shorts is YouTube's version of short-format videos.

The most common question by creators experimenting with the new format is, "How can I see how many views Shorts are dragging to my channel through analytics?"

Views are calculated for Shorts in the same ways as regular videos, and they also contribute channel-level view count and don't get filtered out in any way through this metric.

Creators can see the view count from Shorts through the 'Traffic Source' type card on the 'Reach' tab of YouTube Analytics (besides suggested videos, etc). They can also go to advanced analytics for the same information, click on traffic source types, to view the row of Shorts.

Views classified in that traffic source type are views generated from users swiping up to your video in the Shorts player, users clicking to the video through the Shorts section on the home tab would be marked in the normal browse traffic source.

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Shorts impact the average metrics of a channel as they decrease the average time spent on a channel owing to their shorter length. Shorts may also lead to a decline in click-through rate, as the videos are usually discovered by users swiping-up to the video as opposed to a user clicking on the video after seeing the thumbnail.

These metrics are an attribute of the video and the product manager mentions, this shouldn't hurt your channel performance in any way.

Views in the Shorts player aren't monetized, therefore views from this format are filtered out from the RPM population. Revenue Per Mille (RPM) is a metric that represents how much money you've earned per 1,000 video views.

If views from Shorts that are not monetized would be included in RPM, channels would experience a decrease in the metric.

Presently, typical performance indicators are disabled for Shorts as it is a new format, and length, discovery, and more of such factors defining the performance of a video are different from regular videos.