30-Day 3D Shorts Challenge: Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] For the entire month of January, I posted my own 3D simulation shorts every day in an attempt to go viral on a brand new channel. How many views and subscribers can I get in only 30 days? And can I get the channel monetized? Well, let's take a look at the journey.

[00:13] I'm sure you've all seen at least one YouTube short like this one. Or this one. Or any of these. The reasons why I chose this niche for my brain rod are straightforward. One, it's brain rock.

[00:25] You keep watching it, you have no idea why, and I want to see if posting stuff like this actually gets you somewhere in 2025. Two, even though these are extremely easy to make, it requires knowledge of Blender, which 99% of the people don't have, so I can at least be a bit more niche than posting

[00:40] movie quotes and copier jokes and family guy snippets. The internet is f***ing dead. With that, I make a brand new channel, Talladeon, and we can start our research.

[00:52] I found two channels that I assumed to be my main competitors, Flux Animations with 11,000 subscribers and Blendy3D with over 400,000. Cha-ching! What's interesting about Blendy is that this person made the most popular Blender

[01:07] brain rot short with over 50 million views. So I dove deep watching the most popular and the most floppy shorts and taking notes on what worked. After a few hours of research, I came up with a few key points and for our day one animation,

[01:21] I focused on recognition. Objects we recognize are way more likely to capture our attention. If you scroll and see a Minecraft bed, you're gonna keep watching. Well, if you see just a bed, meh. Hell, the most viewed Blender Grainrot short I mentioned earlier is just a Minecraft bed,

[01:36] and it outperforms so many other shorts that are just better. So I made the simplest possible cloth animation in two different variations and published the very first one. No, it wasn't that great, don't worry.

[01:51] At the end of day 1, we amassed 205 views and 3 subscribers. Not bad for a start. Day 2 changes everything as I post the second, almost identical animation and suddenly both

[02:03] of them blow up. This slightly different animation gets only 75 views in the first 6 hours and then suddenly 2000 views. You might think that's a lot, and I did too until I took the first one and it sat at over 10,000. Damn. Day 2, 39 subscribers. Next up on my list is Double Motion. Instead

[02:22] of just letting the cloth fall onto an object, I'm gonna let the cloth fall, and then, something kicks it up again. While I spend hours figuring out how to breast approach it, I make these two to buy some time. Now, the channel's growing well, but there's a problem with the shorts.

[02:39] But there a problem with the shorts and remember this one is gonna be my arch Every time I post a short it gets little to no views for the first 5 hours Then a massive surge of views happens

[02:52] and then it completely flatlines at 15,000 views. Why? But I think I have a solution for it. My first short to include double motion. It's a simple recipe really, just have a Minecraft

[03:07] Piston shoot up the cloth. How did I know this one was gonna be good? Well, while making it, I found myself losing focus on the editing itself and finding the animations super fun to watch. I brain rotted myself and when I posted this short, it flatlined too, but it got more than double the

[03:24] usual amount of views at 28,000. It also brought us 65 new subscribers, jumping straight to 155. That's one milestone done. Day 6, and I must admit, I'm not proud of this one.

[03:38] I posted another double motion animation, but the villager's head didn't really move the claw, and it was more infuriating than satisfying, and since it wasn't getting any views even after like 10 hours, I posted another video the same day to try to make up some ground,

[03:53] but my fears were unfounded. Both videos took off at the same time, each getting around 15,000 views before flatlining again. Day 7 marks the first week of the challenge, and I'll speed this video up, don't worry.

[04:09] Today I posted another double motion, and this time with Golem. And even though it also flatlined after 15,000 views, it did something to the people. They fucking loved Golem, because they also watched all my other shorts, and they subscribed

[04:23] like there's no tomorrow. 121 subscribers gained just this day, skipping the 200 completely. So, week 1 report. 311 subscribers, almost 100,000 views and 700 hours of watch time.

[04:38] Not a bad start all things considered, in 2014 this took me 6 months. I wanna start the second week by trying something new again. Observation number 3. Stuff things. Let's take a look at the Flux animation channel, our small competitor.

[04:52] You can see they do mostly liquid animations and for the most part they're pretty simple. However, look at these two shorts side by side. One has about 100,000 more views than the other, but the smaller one has 6 times more

[05:05] comments. Even this video with over 3 million views has fewer comments. Hmm, maybe I should do engagement base. So I make my very first liquid animation, a white liquid animation of course, I post

[05:18] it and all I have to do is wait for the cha-ching to come rolling to papa, it flopped. It only got 1400 views making it literally the worst short I posted yet 10 times worse than all the others Yeah but it did get 8 comments which is the most of any short Which is nice but the comments don pay the bill

[05:36] And yeah, to save the day, I also posted this Minecraft cloth animation that flatlined after 15,000 views again. Tell me.

[05:48] Unfortunately for your dopamine receptors, fried by MrBeast's stuns, this is a realistic results video, and I must disappoint you, the same way I disappointed myself. The next few days, every video flatlined at 15,000 views,

[06:02] apart from the second liquid simulation which only got half, but twice as many comments. So, all the way till day 11, nothing special. Day 12 inspired me with a revolutionary idea.

[06:14] I see gaming channels do this thing all the time where they just take their gaming videos from a certain game and just fuse them together into a two hour long compilation, and that compilation for some reason, then gets 2 million views, even though its videos everyone's already seen.

[06:30] While this is a long form content hack, I don't see why it shouldn't work here on shorts. YouTube did introduce the 3 minute long shorts after all. So I prepared two compilations made entirely out of my Minecraft shorts that are already posted and upload them today and on day

[06:44] 13. Well, would you look at that, they both flatlined again, but one of them flatlined at 24,000, which makes it the second most successful video on the channel, proving that the strategy my guess work. I mean I got almost 100 subs for no extra work. Prime complainin'.

[07:03] Day 14 is the first day I didn't post anything. I forgot. So, week 2 report. Nearly 600 subscribers, over 200,000 views and 1500 hours of watch time. Not bad, but it's getting a bit dull. I started

[07:18] the third week of this challenge as a man fully insane. I started experimenting, six classes at at the same time, flatline at 15,000 views. Spinning oars, flatline at 15,000. Weird broken spinning sticks, flatline at 15,000. I had no idea how to break out of this loop, so

[07:34] I tried experimenting more. Canadian flag simulation to try to get Canadians to comment, video dead at 6,000. Canadians, where are you? Day 20, I made my last three animations. One of them, just old school Minecraft cloth,

[07:52] and the other two just variations, trying to go back to the 50 million view bed that started the whole idea. The Ravager, disappointed, only bringing in 2000 views, and at the end of day 20, I was up to 733 subscribers.

[08:05] On day 21 I scheduled both of these animations to release which flatlined that well have a guess They got me up to 900 subscribers which is very close to the monetization goal on YouTube However the 4000 watch hours you also need only count from long form content

[08:22] In order to get monetized with Just Short, you need 10 million views in 3 months. Well, I have nearly 300,000, which is just about 3% of the way. But, if YouTube is known for

[08:34] something, it's making all videos explode to insane numbers for no reason whatsoever. So I decided to let the channel marinate for the fourth and final week of this challenge, in hopes of a late explosion.

[08:49] So, it's day 30. I have not touched the channel at all. Let's see if YouTube went crazy overnight on last week. We ended day 21 with 900 subscribers, and guess what? Somewhere in the middle of the week, we reached an insane 5,000 subscribers.

[09:06] Thank you. We lost three subs. We're down to 897. The 292,000 views grew to 324, so something along the way did get pushed by the algorithm, but not enough for me to retire, obviously.

[09:19] And now, there's two very important theories I need to share at the end of this challenge. 1. Why did the videos keep flatlining after 15,000 views every time? The videos just weren't good enough.

[09:31] I spent about an hour, maybe an hour and a half creating each of these, and there's tons of creators out there with super well animated shorts with great sound design while I just use the same exact bong sound for every video.

[09:43] 2. Even if I had reached the numbers necessary for monetization, I wouldn't get monetized. YouTube has super strict monetization policies to ensure garbage like AI reddit stories doesn't get paid.

[09:55] This kind of content definitely falls under the repetitive content and I'm about 90% sure it wouldn't get me monetized even if I had the numbers. Which is good. I hate every single brain rot video I see because these are the videos that exploit

[10:09] our minds for emotionless attention. These are the very videos that are dragging YouTube's content quality through the mud. The algorithm cannot detect emotion, it only sees whether you watched the video or not. It can't see if you smiled, got angry or just went numb and existed like a brainless shell

[10:25] of a being, literally deleting minutes of your life. So anyways, Blender Brain Rot is a great way to grow your channel and get better at Blender. I'm pretty sure I would have gotten to 1000 subscribers no problem if I kept posting every day.

[10:38] But if you're looking for an easy, quick way to become rich, this is not the need for you. Life is short, so thanks for wasting a bit of it here. And I'll see you next time.