Photo credit: YouTube
YouTube today announced that it is expanding its Analytics for Artists tool by adding YouTube Shorts-related data to the Total Reach metric, which gives artists and their teams an overview of how their music is reaching audiences on YouTube . Prior to this expansion, the Total Reach metric included only official content uploaded by the artist and long videos uploaded by fans. According to YouTube, the new updated metric shows how many people an artist’s music reaches across all formats.
Lyor Cohen, YouTube’s global head of music, said in a blog post that fan-made shorts increased the average artist audience from unique viewers by more than 80% in January 2023. Additionally, artists active on shorts saw more than 50%. of her new channel subscribers, on average, come directly from her shorts posts.
The company is also introducing a new “Songs” section in its analytics tool to help artists and their teams see how fans are listening to or working with their music, across all video formats. In the new Songs section, artists can see their top songs from the last 28 days and which songs are used the most in shorts.
“Shorts are the appetizer to the entree,” wrote Cohen. “They are the entry point that drives fans to discover the depth of an artist’s catalogue, including music videos, interviews, live performances, lyric videos and more. Watch Rema & Selena Gomez Win Big Using All Video Formats Available On YouTube. After surpassing 60 million unique viewers of their official music videos and Shorts for Calm Down, fans uploaded shorts with their track and took viewership to a new level, adding 350 million unique viewers in January, an increase of over 500%. “
Photo credit: YouTube
In another example, Cohen noted that artist Oliver Tree uploaded 20 short films and four long-form videos associated with his song “Miss You,” causing his channel’s monthly viewers to grow from six million to 75 million in over four months . Users garnered an additional 1.8 billion views in January by uploading shorts featuring the song.
By including YouTube Shorts data in the overall reach metric, the company may be trying to encourage more artists to use Shorts to promote their new music, which in turn would result in more daily views of Shorts.
Today’s announcement comes after Google announced last month that YouTube short films are now viewed by more than 1.5 billion logged-in users each month and averaging over 50 billion views per day. While this is a notable milestone, it’s worth noting that Shorts’ number of views on Instagram and Facebook is lagging behind. Last October, Meta said Reels was getting 140 billion daily views across both social networks.
YouTube has been looking for ways to increase viewership of shorts. For example, the company introduced shorts on television last November. The move was seen as a way to help YouTube better challenge TikTok, which had also launched its own TV app across platforms last year.
