Short-form video is where the audience is. We’ve all heard this. But does it actually work for news?

I spent six months embedded with a mid-sized Australian news outlet testing YouTube Shorts for news distribution. The results were more nuanced than the platform hype suggests.

The Experiment Setup

The outlet—which prefers not to be named but gave me permission to share results—committed to publishing 5-10 Shorts per week for six months. They already had a YouTube presence with traditional video but hadn’t invested in Shorts specifically.

They tested different content types:

• Breaking news clips
• Explainers and context
• Reporter on-camera updates
• Repurposed longer content cut into Shorts
• Native Shorts created specifically for the format

I tracked performance weekly and interviewed the team about their process throughout.

The Numbers

Let’s start with raw performance:

Total Shorts published: 187 Total views: 3.2 million Average views per Short: 17,100 Highest performing Short: 890,000 views Lowest performing Short: 230 views

The variance was enormous. Some Shorts took off; most performed modestly; some flopped entirely.

Subscriber growth: The channel gained 12,000 subscribers during the experiment period, up from 8,000 at the start. It’s impossible to attribute all of this to Shorts, but the correlation was notable.

Watch time: Short-form content doesn’t contribute significantly to total watch hours, which matter for YouTube monetization. This creates a tension between reach and revenue.

Traffic to main site: Minimal. Very few viewers clicked through from Shorts to the main website or longer content.

What Worked

Several content types consistently outperformed:

Local breaking news with strong visuals. A Short showing flood damage got 400,000+ views. People wanted to see what was happening in their communities.

Personality-driven updates. When a recognizable reporter delivered news directly to camera with genuine energy, performance improved significantly over anonymous voiceover.

Unexpected angles on big stories. A Short explaining something most people didn’t know about a major news story consistently outperformed straight reporting of known facts.

Genuine emotion. Community stories with real emotional content—not manufactured drama, but genuine human moments—performed well.

What Didn’t Work

Other approaches consistently underperformed:

Repurposed traditional news clips. Taking segments from longer packages and cutting them to 60 seconds almost never worked. The pacing and format are wrong.

Text-heavy explainers. Shorts with lots of on-screen text performed poorly. The format rewards visual storytelling, not reading.

Complex policy stories. Stories requiring significant context or nuance struggled. The format doesn’t support complexity.

Promotional content. “Watch our full coverage at…” callouts were ignored. Viewers weren’t interested in being marketed to.

The Production Challenge

Creating Shorts that work requires different skills than traditional news video.

The team’s video journalists initially struggled. Their instincts—developed for 2-3 minute packages—didn’t translate. Pacing was too slow. The hook took too long. Visual storytelling was underutilized.

They eventually developed new approaches:

Hook within 1 second. Start with the most compelling image or statement. No setup, no context, just immediate engagement.

Vertical thinking. Framing for vertical video is different than horizontal. They had to learn to compose shots differently.

Audio as optional. Many viewers watch without sound. On-screen text for key information became essential.

Single idea per Short. Trying to cover multiple angles in 60 seconds doesn’t work. One idea, delivered well.

The Sustainability Question

Here’s the challenge: Shorts require significant production effort for content that doesn’t monetize well and doesn’t drive traffic.

The team found that creating good Shorts took almost as long as traditional video packages. The filming was faster, but the editing—cutting to exact length, adding text, optimizing hooks—was time-intensive.

And the business value was unclear. Views are nice, but they don’t pay salaries. Subscriber growth helps, but YouTube revenue at their scale wasn’t meaningful.

By month five, the team was questioning the investment. Views were good, but the return wasn’t obvious.

The Audience Insight

What became clear: YouTube Shorts reaches a different audience than traditional news consumers.

Viewership skewed younger—much younger than the outlet’s typical audience. And these viewers weren’t converting to subscribers, website visitors, or engaged community members.

They were consuming content and moving on.

This isn’t inherently bad. Reaching younger audiences matters for long-term brand building. But expecting short-form viewers to become engaged subscribers may be unrealistic.

Platform Comparison

During the experiment, the team also posted to TikTok and Instagram Reels for comparison.

TikTok consistently outperformed YouTube Shorts on raw views but had even less conversion to meaningful engagement.

Instagram Reels performed more modestly but with somewhat better audience quality—viewers who were more likely to follow and engage.

YouTube Shorts sat in the middle—decent reach with modest engagement potential.

The team concluded that if you’re only going to invest in one short-form platform, Instagram Reels offers the best balance for news publishers. But if you can manage multiple, YouTube has advantages for discoverability.

Technical Considerations

The team invested in technical infrastructure to support Shorts production:

• Mobile editing workflows for speed
• Templates for consistent branding
• A library of music and sound effects cleared for use
• Analytics dashboards to track performance

Some of this was built internally; for more sophisticated integration with their CMS and workflow systems, they brought in business AI solutions experts to help.

Without this infrastructure, Shorts production would have been unsustainably labor-intensive.

What I’d Recommend

For news outlets considering YouTube Shorts, my recommendations based on this experiment:

Start small and test. Don’t commit to high volume immediately. Test what works for your content and audience.

Invest in format-native skills. Repurposing doesn’t work. You need people who understand short-form video specifically.

Set realistic expectations. Views won’t convert to website traffic or subscriptions at meaningful rates. The value is brand building and audience development, not direct revenue.

Build efficient production workflows. Without process optimization, the cost per Short will be too high to sustain.

Consider your goals carefully. If you need immediate revenue return, Shorts may not be the right investment. If you’re building for long-term audience development, it’s worth exploring.

The Broader Lesson

Short-form video is important. The audience is there. Publishers ignoring it are leaving attention on the table.

But it’s not a replacement for sustainable journalism models. It’s a distribution channel—one that reaches new audiences but doesn’t easily convert them to the relationships that fund journalism.

The publishers who succeed with Shorts will be those who integrate it thoughtfully—understanding its role, managing costs, and not expecting it to solve business model problems.

Working with Team 400 on our analytics integration helped surface these insights. Without good data, we would have kept investing based on view counts alone, missing the conversion story entirely.

Short-form video is part of the future. But only part. Don’t let the view counts distract from the harder questions about sustainability and value.

---

Have you experimented with short-form video for news? I’d love to hear about what worked and what didn’t.