Transcription
So, every new YouTuber faces the same seemingly impossible challenge of reaching 4,000 hours of watch time to get monetized. It is extremely hard. Only about 3% of an estimated 114 million YouTube channels ever reach enough subscribers and watch time to get their channel monetized. It is incredibly difficult.
But what if I told you that there is a simple strategy that top creators have been using, one that I've seen consistently boost watch time on smaller channels, often pushing them right into monetization. But the one requirement is that you are an active creator who publishes both long- form videos and shorts. If you meet this requirement, I want to share with you this method that I learned from this ex employee on how any channel can increase their watch time fast.
All right. So, in late 2023, YouTube started letting creators link shorts to other videos. So, a short could link to another short or that short could link to a long- form video as long as the video was public and on your channel. Initially, what most creators would do is they would take a popular moment from one of their long- form videos, clip it out, and then post that as a standalone short, and then use this feature to link from that short to the original video. I call this the billboard method because essentially all they were doing was using the short as an advertisement for the long- form upload. And when we analyzed creators who used this billboard method and looked at the traffic sent to the length long- form video, we consistently saw a spike in views.
Now, this is really important for monetization because shorts have been known to help creators get a ton of views. However, the watch time on those shorts do not count toward monetization. only long- form video watch time counts toward that monetization requirement. So, a short could get a ton of views and you could get a ton of watch time on that short, but if your channel wasn't monetized and you still needed to hit 4,000 hours, well, it it didn't matter cuz only long form videos count. But by using the linking feature to funnel traffic from their short to their long form video, where YouTube did track their watch time, they could benefit from the crazy amount of views that a short can get and also benefit from the watch time that YouTube will track on their long- form video. And this is the way that most creators use this linking feature for a while.
But then John Ushai, that exYouTube employee I was talking about, he had this crazy method that not a lot of creators were thinking about. Most creators would link shorts only to related long- form videos. But John did something completely different. Every time he posted a short, he linked it directly to his newest long- form video, even if the topics weren't related at all. But this is what he did differently. That was genius. He didn't just update the links on his new shorts. He went back and updated the links on every single short he ever published. That way, whenever John dropped a new fresh long- form video, his entire shorts catalog drove viewers straight to it, creating a flood of views. And he called this the flood method.
Now, this works so well to increase your watch time because you're not just relying on that long- form video to get watch time or just one short linking to it to send some viewers. You're using your entire shorts library to funnel traffic into that brand new upload. For example, our shorts got around 200,000 views last month. And this target long form video gets around 3 minutes of watch time per view. If just 5% of those 20,000 shorts viewers click through to watch the long form video, that's 10,000 new viewers. At 3 minutes per view, that's 30,000 minutes or an extra 500 hours of watch time added almost instantly from the traffic that you already have.
Now, John's not the only one who saw the benefit of this method. The top YouTube creator, Mr. Beast, if you go to his channel right now and look at his shorts and you look at the linked video, they all point traffic to his brand new upload because I mean, it's a powerful method. You can go back years. You can go back all the way to his very first short and see that he uses that to link to his brand new upload. And every time he uploads a new video, all the links change again.
Now, I want to show you how to do this on your channel really efficiently. The first method is completely free, but if you have like hundreds and hundreds of shorts on your channel, there is a paid feature that I want to share with you that's going to help you do this in a matter of seconds.
All right, starting with the free one. All you have to do is go to YouTube Studio, click analytics content, and then go to the shorts tab. In the top shorts section, click see more. Then open up your top five to 15 shorts in a new tab. These are the ones driving the most views right now. Manually edit each of these top performing shorts to add or update the related video link to point to your newest long- form video. Since these are your top shorts driving the most traffic, updating these links will have the most immediate and largest impact. And if you have hundreds of shorts on your channel, this allows you to focus on a more manageable amount. So you're not like updating hundreds of links manually. That's that's literally going to take forever. But these shorts will still drive significant traffic because they're your top shorts on your channel.
Now, if you have a ton of shorts on your channel and you want to do what Mr. Beast and John have done and update them all with ease. You can use a tool like TubeBuddy's related video manager. I'm going to leave the link to this in the description. With this tool, you can select the target long- form video you want all your shorts to link to and then update all your shorts in bulk with just a few clicks. Optionally, you can deselect specific shorts you don't want to upload. This right here will save you a massive time compared to doing it manually. And if you're uploading a lot of long- form videos and you want to change your entire catalog's links to point to that newest upload pretty often, oh my goodness, this is exactly what you want.
I tried this method already on a channel that I worked on. We got these results right here. We turned their brand new upload into one of the most successful videos on the channel just by linking all the shorts to this new upload. And if you look at the traffic sources, you can see that related videos is one of the top sources, showing you that this method works incredibly well. You should try it out on your channel and let me know how it goes for you. And if you want to know how you can revive a video from the dead and have it come back like ours did to get over a 100,000 views even though it was a 10 out of 10 video, go ahead and watch this video right here.