A short experiment with Shorts yielded some interesting results.
Short form, vertical orientation video emerging largely from TikTok have a tendency to empower skits, memes, and short clips with supercharged discovery rates in a way traditionally long form content has not for some time.
As a creator and fan of review, retrospective, and video essay content surrounding media most often presented in a 16:9 aspect ratio, finding ways to thoughtfully adapt my own content style to this format was challenging. We've probably all seen at least one of our favorite channels hastily cut and repost clips to short form platforms in hopes of redirecting traffic to their long form content.
I wanted to be a bit more intentional with my strategy.
What can best be garnered from an often 60 second promise? A nugget of criticism, education, or entertainment? What can a low-stakes, super discoverable format provide my viewers that my usual videos cannot?
I set out to learn by making a series of videos—some quick and dirty like a few silly clips cut from a Nintendo Direct reaction video. A couple one-off ideas that would feed the Nintendo speculative beast, discussing features related to The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and the Nintendo Switch 2 prior to launch.
However, what drew the strongest response were two videos featuring under the radar indie games still in active development paired with my commentary. While these videos performed okay on TikTok as the wizawhat footprint there is very small, the performance was vastly outpaced on YouTube.
I also found that the vast majority of traffic was coming not from the shorts feed, but traditional YouTube browse features. I let the games do most of the talking for me while framing the action in a more intentional way.
For Maple Forest, I recut the trailer in a way that still fit the music to meet a 60 second requirement. For Demon Tides, I recreated certain effects used in the trailer from scratch to better fit a vertical frame.
The results were quite interesting.
The Takeaway:
1. Traditionally long form YouTube viewers can be marketed to with low-stakes Shorts using long form tactics. Employ an intriguing title and embed a highly clickable thumbnail image into the video itself or rely on striking character design or other visuals to grab attention.
2. Provide a strong hook within the first 5 seconds. Non-negotiable.
3. Authentic commentary can significantly boost visibility and lead to product conversions.
wizawhat Shorts have generated over 750,000 views and over 5 million impressions to date across just 9 videos.
