Can YouTube Shorts hurt the performance of your long-form YouTube videos?

From the get-go, lots of established YouTubers suggested having separate, “Shorts-only” channels as a safety measure to insulate against any possible algorithmic side-effects of Shorts. That advice was, in my opinion, highly prudent — after all, Shorts were brand new.

Notwithstanding, Search Engine Journal recently published a Q&A with a YouTube representative that offered some new guidance. Here are a few highlights I noted:

1. YouTube maintains entirely separate viewer watch histories of Shorts versus traditional, long-form videos. So, in other words, the Shorts you watch don’t have any algorithmic influence on what long-form videos YouTube may or may not recommend to you — and vice versa.

2. The rate of growth for channels producing both long-form and short-form videos outpaces channels only producing long-form videos. So, mix it up, basically.

3. The primary reason to start a separate YouTube channel isn’t to sequester Shorts from long-form videos; it’s simply to ensure that a channel’s videos align around a specific interest shared by its intended audience.

If you wanna give the full article a read, just type the LINK into your web browser:  https://bit.ly/Shorts-Algorithm.