On YouTube you're actually publishing two very different things. A Short is a vertical video of up to three minutes that people scroll past in an endless feed. A regular YouTube video is horizontal, runs as long as the topic requires, and gets clicked: someone sees a title and a thumbnail and decides to watch.
That difference in how someone arrives at your video determines almost everything that follows — reach, watch time, what it earns and how many people remember you.
The difference at a glance
| Shorts | Long-form video | |
|---|---|---|
| Format | Vertical, up to 3 minutes | Horizontal, minutes to hours |
| How someone starts watching | Passive: the video appears in the feed | Active: someone clicks the title and thumbnail |
| What it's judged on | Whether people keep watching or swipe away | Click-through rate and average watch time |
| Reach | Grows fast, even without subscribers | Grows more slowly, but more steadily |
| Revenue per 1,000 views | Low | Often tens of times higher |
| Connection with the viewer | Fleeting | Strong, someone gives you real watch time |
| Where it sits in the funnel | Top: introduction | Middle and bottom: consideration and trust |
How distribution works
With Shorts you don't need to convince anyone to click. YouTube shows the video to people who don't know you and watches what happens in the first seconds. If they swipe past, distribution stops; if they keep watching or rewatch it, it continues. As a result, a channel with no subscribers can have a Short watched hundreds of thousands of times. The reverse is also true: those views say little about whether that person now knows you.
With a long-form video, the first hurdle is the click. Title and thumbnail do the work there, and only afterwards does YouTube look at how long people stay. That's a slower process, but one that compounds: videos on the same topic reinforce each other, and a video that does well can keep running for years because people actively search for it. For that type of content, YouTube is just as much a search engine.
What it earns
This is where the biggest difference lies, and it's not a small one. Ad revenue is usually expressed as RPM: revenue per 1,000 views. For long-form video that's roughly a few dollars to twenty dollars or more in 2026, strongly dependent on topic and country — business and financial topics rank high, entertainment low. For Shorts we're talking cents: typically somewhere between $0.02 and one-and-a-half dollars per 1,000 views, with most channels at the lower end of that.
That's because Shorts aren't monetised per video. Ad revenue from the Shorts feed goes into one pool, music rights are deducted first, and what's left is split among all creators based on their share of views. With a long-form video, ads are sold within that specific video, which simply earns much more per viewer.
So don't count on Shorts as a revenue source. A million Shorts views can earn less than ten thousand views on a good long-form video.
And if you don't want to monetise a channel?
Most businesses don't earn anything from YouTube ads and don't want to either. In that case RPM isn't your metric, but the same logic applies in a different form: Shorts earn attention from people who didn't know you yet, long-form videos build trust with people who want to know something about you.
Concretely:
- Shorts work for awareness, a single idea, one insight, a short demo, a clip from something longer.
- Long-form videos work for explanations, comparisons, customer stories, webinars and anything someone bases a decision on. This is also the content people actively search for and can use on their own site.
The combination is usually the answer
Channels that do well use both, but in different roles. Shorts as a net to bring in new people, long-form videos as the foundation to build something on. A few things that help:
- Don't make Shorts out of leftovers. A random clip from a long video rarely works. What works is one complete point with a clear opening.
- Don't expect automatic follow-through. Someone watching your Short won't automatically click through to your long-form video. Say what's in it for them and point to it explicitly.
- Don't judge the two with the same numbers. With Shorts you look at whether people keep watching and whether they rewatch. With long-form video you look at click-through rate and average watch time. Comparing views directly says nothing.
- Let the topic determine the format. If the answer fits in thirty seconds, make a Short. If it needs context, nuance or steps, a short video actually hurts the message.
- Test the opening separately. With Shorts the first two seconds decide, with long-form video it's the thumbnail and title. Those are the spots where variation makes the biggest difference.
How to choose
Ask yourself two questions. Do you want more people to know you exist, or do you want people who already know you to trust you? And: does your topic fit into one point, or not?
If you want awareness and the topic fits into a short clip, Shorts are the fastest route. If you want someone to make a choice — a supplier, an approach, a product — do that with long-form video, and use Shorts to bring those people in.
More on the broader use of video and advertising on the platform is in YouTube marketing in our glossary. If your video mainly works as an ad, social media marketing is the starting point; buying it through advertising runs via Google Ads.
Questions, or just want to spar?
We're happy to think along — call, email or drop by in the heart of Eindhoven.