Do Shorts get more views than regular YouTube videos?

Usually yes, and how much depends almost entirely on how big the channel is. We took every channel we track that posted both kinds of video in October 2026 and compared each channel's Shorts with its own regular uploads. In 65% of them the Shorts drew more views each, and for the middle channel they drew 2.3 times as many.

That advantage belongs almost entirely to small channels. Among channels with 10K to 100K subscribers the Shorts came out ahead in 69% of cases. Among channels above a million subscribers it is a coin toss, and the middle channel of that group sees no difference at all.

The set is the 51.1M uploads we recorded in October 2026 from the 4.5M channels we rank, those with 10K or more subscribers. 61% of those uploads were Shorts.

The comparison happens inside each channel#

Comparing all Shorts against all regular videos would mostly measure which kind of channel posts which kind of video. So we never compare one channel with another. For each channel that posted at least 3 Shorts and at least 3 regular videos that month, we work out its average views per Short and its average views per regular video, and ask which is higher. That holds the audience, the subscriber count and the channel's own subject matter fixed. It leaves 429.7K channels, carrying 13.3M Shorts and 7.5M regular videos. Live broadcasts sit outside the comparison: a stream's length and its views are a different kind of thing, and they were 5% of the month's uploads.

Two things make this a fair fight. The first is YouTube's own counting: since 24 Aug 2026, YouTube says a view is counted the moment a video starts to play in every format, Shorts, long-form and live alike. Shorts had moved to that rule earlier, on 31 Mar 2025, when YouTube began counting every play or replay with no minimum watch time. For uploads this recent, the two numbers mean the same thing.

The second is timing. The view counts we hold for this month were last read a median of 2 days after upload for both kinds, and nine in ten within 5 days. So this is a comparison of the views a video gathers in its first days, not over its life.

For most channels one kind wins by a lot#

The middle channel hides how far apart the two sides usually are. In 24% of these channels the Shorts drew at least ten times as many views each as the regular videos, and in another 22% the regular videos drew at least twice as many as the Shorts: between them, 46% of the compared channels. Only 27% land in the middle, where neither kind is more than double the other.

So the question has no single answer for an individual channel. A channel's Shorts either find the feed or they do not, and when they do the gap is wide.

The advantage belongs to smaller channels#

The pattern runs in one direction across every size we track. Channels with 10K to 100K subscribers see the Shorts win in 69% of cases, at 2.6 times the views; from 100K to 1M it falls to 57% and 1.4 times. From 1M to 10M it is 50%, and among the 1,094 channels above 10M subscribers it is 49%.

The data cannot say why. Two readings fit it equally well: that the Shorts feed reaches past a small channel's subscriber base in a way its regular uploads cannot, and that a large channel already has the audience the feed would have found, so there is nothing left to add. What the figures do rule out is the idea that Shorts simply draw more views than long-form videos. For the largest channels in our set, they do not.

Comedy and gaming gain the most#

Holding size constant and sorting by the channel's own category, the gap between categories is almost as wide as the gap between sizes. For Comedy channels the middle one's Shorts drew 4.1 times the views of its regular videos, and for Gaming channels 3.4 times. At the other end, Autos & Vehicles channels saw 1.2 times. All 15 categories we can compare point the same way, but the size of the prize is very different.

Most channels never face the choice#

The comparison above covers 21% of the channels that uploaded at all, because most channels pick one kind and stay there. Of the 2M channels we track that uploaded anything in October 2026, 32% posted no Shorts whatsoever and 29% posted nothing but Shorts. Only 39% posted some of each.

The two camps also work at different rates. The middle Shorts-only channel posted 8 videos that month; the middle channel with no Shorts posted 5.

What this means#

For a channel under 100K subscribers, the figures here are a reason to treat Shorts as the cheaper route to views and to expect a wide spread of results rather than a reliable lift. For a channel above a million, views are not the argument for them. Either way, views are not money: YouTube says a channel's Shorts earnings and its eligibility to join the Partner Program both rest on engaged Shorts views, a stricter count than the number under the video, and the bars for it change in February 2027.

To see how a peer group behaves, the top gaming channels are the category with the widest gap in our data, the channel directory filters by size and category, and the category mix by channel size shows which categories these channels come from.