[00:00] YouTube just released a brand new YouTube Shorts algorithm for 2026 that completely changes everything. It will release brand new settings, brand new features that you need to make sure that you're using, and they completely change what analytics you need to actually care about.
[00:12] But I don't want you to panic, because by the end of this video, you're going to know everything you need to do right now in order to not only skyrocket your views and your subscribers, but also help you get monetized faster than before on YouTube.
[00:24] Change number one is that YouTube is now refusing to push out posts that have messed up metadata, and there are multiple different things that go into this, but we need to cover each of them. Okay, so in order to actually prove to you how much metadata matters, I want to go into one of my most viral shorts.
[00:37] In fact, this short right here has gotten 4.7 million views, and if we come into the analytics right here, we can see that this video gets almost 17,000 views every single day, and it's mainly because of the metadata here.
[00:49] So, the first thing that you are going to notice about the metadata of this post, if we come over here, we can see that in here, on the thumbnail, It says turn on these settings to grow faster. Now, if we actually come over here and we look at the title right here, we see that that also matches.
[01:04] It says YouTube settings that ruin small channels. If we come over into the description, we can see YouTube settings here and then YouTube turn on these settings. So, so far, we have that same exact keyword that this video is about showing in the thumbnail, showing in the title, showing in the description.
[01:22] We're not even done yet. Actually, YouTube just released a brand new feature that will actually go through and actually fix all of your thumbnails if you've been doing this the wrong way. So now we're going to see right here, set a thumbnail that stands out and draws your viewers' attention. You can do three things here.
[01:35] You could change this and actually upload a custom thumbnail if you want to. You could download this or you could change this from the actual video itself right here, which is pretty cool. We can see that I've added a custom one. I didn't actually select a frame from the video.
[01:48] That's one of the reasons that this video has gone viral. In addition to that, if we scroll all the way down right here, we're going to see the YouTube setting shows up multiple times here. So we have it showing up inside of that thumbnail.
[02:00] If we come over here into the tags, it shows one, two, three, four, five, six. It shows six different times, actually seven different times. If we come up over into the description, we can see that it shows two different times.
[02:13] And if we look at the title, it shows one time. And this is what you need to make sure that you're doing. In addition to that, though, if we come over here and we actually click on Subtitles right here, we'll see the same exact thing. It says Settings in the first sentence.
[02:26] Basically, what you need to do is you need to determine what keyword your video is going after. You need to make sure the thumbnail, the subtitles, the title, the description, and the tags all match up or all lined up and actually have that there.
[02:41] In addition to that, whatever the broad keyword is, so on this one, it's YouTube. The niche keyword is going to be settings or just YouTube settings together. The broad keyword is going to be YouTube. What you'll actually notice is that if I actually come into my YouTube channel tags,
[02:55] then I have YouTube show up multiple different times. So it's not only that individual post, but it's also going to be the actual tags that you have on your account. All those things need to be aligned.
[03:07] Change number two is you need to make sure that you creating your content in the length that actually does best for the exact topic that you are actually posting about on YouTube Because if you make your content too long or too short and it can literally be off by one to two seconds this could be the difference between you going viral on YouTube
[03:23] or your video flopping. Now, in terms of what lengths are actually doing best, what you are going to notice is that this is going to be different depending on what niche you're actually in. If you want to be able to figure out what length you should be posting about for your niche,
[03:35] you want to come over here into your analytics. You then want to click on trends, and you want type in whatever you're going to be posting about. For example, I'm going to make a video about YouTube settings. We can come over here and type in YouTube settings, and then we can see what
[03:47] people are watching. If we click on show all right here, this will actually allow us to see this for all these different shorts. So we can see this short's 20 seconds, this one's 27 seconds, this one's 16 seconds, this one is 53 seconds, 12 seconds, 40 seconds, 41. And basically what we
[04:03] actually want to do is we want to take screenshots of this. So we're going to take a screenshot of this and we are going to take a screenshot of this and then we are going to take a screenshot of this. We can see that there are a ton of different shorts on there here.
[04:16] Now from here, we have three screenshots. We can actually come over and open up ChatGPK or whatever LLM you want to use and what you can do is actually upload all these screenshots right here and you're going to say, I want
[04:29] to make a video about and we're going to put YouTube settings in here. Obviously, whatever topic you're choosing is the topic that you would put and you're say it's going to be a YouTube short based on the views and length of the
[04:44] shorts shown in the screenshots how long should I optimally make my video to maximize average view duration versus my competitors now what this is actually
[04:59] going to do is this is going to then analyze these photos and this is going to spit out exactly how long we should actually make the video right here. And if we scroll down, we can see that the best videos are in these different lengths. So the actual takeaway here
[05:15] is that we should create a short video that's going to be 16 to 18 seconds long. And Chat to Bedeen literally tells you that by analyzing the actual data, seeing what is actually working. And this would be completely different if we did this for a different topic. For example, if I did this
[05:29] for ChatGV settings or Google Gemini settings or TikTok or Instagram settings, I would get a completely different length. And ideally, you should be going through and doing this every single time because if you make your content the wrong length, for example, it says 16 to 18,
[05:43] that would have made it 20 seconds. It might not have gone viral the way that it did. By changeover 3, you need to begin to actually use AI in order to gauge whether or not your channel is doing well or not on YouTube. But in order to actually do this, you need to make sure that your AI tools
[05:57] have access to your YouTube channel. Lucky for you, today's video sponsor, Metricool, makes this incredibly easy to do. In fact, they just released their first ever dedicated YouTube study that publishes a bunch of different data around what the fastest growing channels are doing right now.
[06:11] In addition, they launched a brand new quad skill that you're going to be able to download and set up in seconds, and it will tell you how your channel actually winds up and what you need to do differently. And the best part about it is if you want to get started with it for free,
[06:25] go to the pinned comment below and you can download it and get it set up in the next few seconds In addition to that Metricool makes it incredibly easy for you to be able to track all your competitors reply to all your comments and even post content not only to YouTube
[06:37] but to Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and every other social media platform that you can think of, all from one place. So if you want to spend less time creating content and more time getting the views that you actually deserved, I would strongly suggest you go to the pin comment below and get started with Metricool today for free.
[06:53] If you use CodeRobber, you're going to get 30 days free access to any of their premium plans. Now, I did want to show you just very quickly what this is actually going to look like and what the process looks like. So what you're going to do is you're going to click the link at the pinned comment below. You put your email in here, and then they're going to send you an email with the actual skill that you're then going to be able to upload into Quad right here.
[07:11] And you can see right here that this is actually what this is going to look like. And it's going to go through, and it is actually going to analyze your channel. the long-form content, the short-form content, shows you what you need to do differently, and whether you're above or below average.
[07:24] Check this out. And by the way, in the email that they're going to send you, they literally walk you through everything that you need to do in order to actually get this running. And from here, I simply just upload it, and I say, let's run this for my channel,
[07:36] and now it's literally going through and setting this up. We can see that it's seeing whether or not Metricool MCP is actually set up right here. I'm going to allow this to actually do this. I just want to grab my brand settings because I have that already connected to Metricool.
[07:48] We can see that this is the channel right here that it's going to go through and look at. I'm going to tell it that it can do that and then check out what this does. It's going through, it's actually getting my analytics data here, and it's going to compare this to the study that Metricool has
[08:01] in order to tell me how I'm doing and what I need to do better. And you can do the same exact thing for free if you go to that pinned comment below. It will literally give you instant instructions on how to actually improve your channel. So now this goes through, and this tells me everything that I need to actually change.
[08:15] It goes through my long form, it goes through my shorts. Actually, let's me know that both of these are below average. But the good part of this is this actually goes through and tells me what I need to actually change, what I should change, and it goes through everything that I can actually fix.
[08:30] And then I can use Metricool to help me actually fix these things. And again, nobody's channel is perfect. Even if this comes back and says that your channel is doing above average, it will still tell you what you should change and what you should fix in order to grow faster.
[08:44] The change number four is that YouTube has actually completely changed what metrics they're looking at in order to determine whether or not you're going to go viral. So here are the new ones that you need to pay attention to. So there's new metrics that you need to be paying attention to.
[08:56] They're actually going to be completely different than probably anything you've ever looked at before for your YouTube shorts. Now, we come over into this video right here, into the analytics, and I'm going to show you exactly where you can find this. So if we come down here, we're going to see this right here. It says key moments for audience retention, state to watch, average view duration.
[09:11] We click into this and click on see more right here. These are going to be the new analytics that you need to be paying attention to. Because if we come over into segments right here, you can actually see how different people are reacting to your content differently between subscribers and non-subscribers.
[09:24] What you want to make sure is happening is that your subscribers are giving you better metrics. We can see I've gotten over 100,000 views from my subscribers on this video. State to watch is higher amongst them. Average view duration is higher amongst them.
[09:36] average percentage viewed is higher amongst them, you need to make sure that same exact thing is happening inside of your content In addition to that you could look at audience retention right here We could look at compared to other videos You want to make sure that this actually looks how this looks You want this to be above average versus your average If not
[09:52] you want to go to where it's dipping below the average line, making sure that you're fixing it. In addition to that, if we come over to details activity right here, this will actually show you where people stopped watching and how many people stopped watching there. You want to make sure that
[10:05] you're going through and you are changing that because you want to make sure that whatever you are messing up and this is literally going to give you this inside these detailed analytics is what you're actually focused on fixing. For example, let's say right here we've noticed that
[10:18] a lot of people are leaving at the 24 second mark. We click on this. It'll bring us to 24 seconds. We could watch it and see what we were doing wrong and see what we need to fix there in order to increase our reach. And if you're not looking these new detailed analytics, this is actually
[10:33] going to be hurting you and what's really cool about this is you could look at this for several different things for example since published for the first 24 hours you can see how it changes over time and this is going to help you increase your reach right here and we could also come over here
[10:46] we could see real-time performance how it's currently performing first 24 hours we could look at this by audience and we could look at this by audience retention and again this is going to help us actually increase the views that we're getting with all these different advanced reports
[11:00] the YouTube is now released. Now, change number five, the YouTube has now completely changed how frequently you should be uploading on YouTube Shorts. And now, this isn't YouTube specific, it's actually going to be news specific. So here's what you need to make sure that you're doing
[11:12] in order to determine how frequently you should be uploading. So in order to actually figure this out, here's what you should be doing. You want to come over here and you want to look at whatever you post about. For example, I post all the time about how to grow on YouTube.
[11:24] So we come over here and type in how to grow on YouTube and what we will actually be able to do is we could click on Shorts right here. We want to see all the creators that are actually uploading here and see how frequently they're uploading,
[11:37] but we want to make sure that it's people that are consistently uploading in it. So these three will be good enough. You don't need to do this with hundreds of channels. I would just do this with the first few that show up whenever you type in a keyword that you should be searching for.
[11:50] Now if we come over to VidIQ right here, we could see that they're posting about two times a day on YouTube Shorts based on their frequency. We come over to this creator, we can see that he actually hasn't posted in over a year, so again, this would probably be somebody that they ignore then.
[12:03] If I look at Think Media right here, I can see that they're posting about four times a week. So ideally, based on these, I should be posting one to two times a day on YouTube Shorts, and what we've noticed is that even though they post less,
[12:15] they're not getting more views than this creator right here, so that actually shows that, hey, having an increased posting frequency in this niche isn't going to hurt us. if what you find is that the creators that you find,
[12:28] the ones that post more, are getting way less views, then that might be a sign that you don't want to over-exhaust your audience and you don't want to post too much. Because then what will happen is you'll be putting out a ton of content, but you'll be getting less views, even though you might be getting a higher aggregate number of views,
[12:42] it's still going to hurt you and it's not going to look as good to your audience. Now, if you enjoyed this video, I would strongly suggest you check out this video right here that walks you through the best tags and the best hashtags that you need to make sure that you're using right now on YouTube in order to go viral.
[12:56] If that sounds interesting, I'll see you over there.