YouTube Shorts Algorithm — Explained!

Hello insiders, I am your friendly neighborhood creator liaison and today I'm talking to Todd Sherman. Todd, what do you do at YouTube? I am the product lead for YouTube shorts. A lot of questions we get from creators around shorts. First of all, the shorts algorithm. Is it the same as the long-form algorithm? And when we say

things like don't think algorithm, think audience, does that also apply to shorts? It really does. I think that that is a sort of durable mental construct way to think about it. The audience is the algorithm. We do do different things in short form because it is a different format. For example, on long form, a lot

of the times people are choosing which video um by tapping on it on their phone or clicking on it on the web and and that choice is something that um drives a lot of engagement on long form. Our short form, you think that people are swiping through a feed and they're discovering things as they go. And so, that's like

one important difference and that leads us to need to measure in different ways and, you know, at the core of it we're in long form and in short form trying to get videos to people that they value. We want them to feel satisfied with it, but there's a lot of things that we do in

short form that sort of are different and and kind of focused on the fundamental of short form. For example, how diverse the feed is is a little bit different when you have hundreds of videos versus maybe uh 10 or 20 videos, right? What counts as a view in shorts? If I'm just flipping through the feed, is every

video I'm flipping through, does that count as a viewed video for me? It doesn't. And, you know, I across the industry at large, I think different platforms count views differently. So, some platforms treat a view as the very first frame. Yeah. Where like if you were to just flip through a feed, you