Why my content has changed

Am I becoming a Shorts channel? No.

Then why have I been posting so many Shorts and not as many long-form videos?

I face an interesting conflict in my content creation. I can’t really call making YouTube videos a side-hustle. It makes some money—less than $400 a month—but not enough yet to call it a legitimate stream of revenue. But it takes a lot of time to create the videos. And that was interfering with my job.

Around October of 2021, after producing a video every week since January 2019, I realized that I was spending so much on YouTube that I wasn’t spending enough time on my research. I decided to scale back video production and see if I could strike a better balance.

On the bright side, my research is going much better. I’m writing better papers and getting them sent to journals. But this is economics, so of course it comes with a cost. I wasn’t making videos. I missed it, and I was worried I was not living up to a promise I made to my audience.

Then a few weeks ago Tyler Cowen issued a challenge. Create economics TikToks. I am not a fan of TikTok. I jumped on around January 2021 and made some videos, but I hated using the app so much that I didn’t want to create for it. But I agreed with Tyler that there were not enough economics videos on there. His post inspired me to try Shorts on YouTube.

That experiment has led to a game-changing revelation. That night I scripted, filmed, and edited two Shorts in one hour. It was so easy. And I saw how this could solve my problem. By experimenting with short-form content, I can create more videos without hurting my research. It won’t be my only content, but it will at least give me regular contact with my audience.

Then I saw another use for Shorts. There are topics I want to cover but I struggle to make a full video out of them. But they can easily be covered in under 60 seconds. These include observations on economic principles in Don’t Look Up and Encanto. I’ve tried doing the “economics in movies” videos, but they don’t perform well. Yet the Don’t Look Up video is turning into one of my best videos ever.

Another category of video that doesn’t perform well for me is the book recommendations. I get a lot of people clicking on my book reviews, but as soon as they see the title of the book they are gone. Here’s an example below from my video “The 5 Best Books for Learning Economics.” The blue line tells you what percentage of viewers are still watching at every second. Only 6% of people who start the video make it all the way to the end. You’ll notice there are 5 bumps along the graph. Those are the times I name the five books. That means people jump to those scenes then leave the video. This kind of behavior taught me that people don’t want 12 minute videos on economics books.

So then I tried a Short on an economics book. Here’s what retention looks like for that one. It’s only a 28 second video, so we can expect it to perform better. But I’m super impressed that 70% of people are still watching at 26 seconds, and even better at the first few seconds 140% of people are watching. That means 40% of the people who started the video decided to watch the beginning again (thank you loops!). This signals to me that I can be much more effective spreading book recommendations through Shorts rather than through long videos.

And this brings me to the final connection Shorts helped me make. As I explained in an earlier post, the purpose of Market Power is to change the way people are introduced to economics. While this isn’t a huge source of revenue for me, that’s not super important to me because I’m just excited it’s a way for people to be introduced to economics. If a 28-second Short reaches more people, that means more people hear the book recommendation. And maybe only one person buys it, but that’s one more person who is exploring economics because of my videos.

And the potential for reach is huge. Below is how many views my channel got each day over the last year. Each spike is the day I released a video. In July you can see some big days from a video I made on the assassination of Haiti’s president. Then at the far right you can see what has been happening since I posted Shorts. This past week was the channel’s best. More people are seeing Market Power videos than ever before.

The cost of making Shorts is so low, yet the benefits are pretty high. If I can reach more people with Shorts and get only a fraction of them interested in economics, that’s a huge win for me!

Am I done with long-form? No. I might be doing even longer form content. We’ll see. But I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to expand the community. So I hope you’ll check the Shorts out and stick around for the regular videos too.