The problem with 3-minute YouTube Shorts

A Short being longer doesn’t make it better – it’s all about being concise. There’s a reason for that. 👇

Corrado CoiaApril 12, 2025

You can now make Shorts up to 3 minutes long.

But just because you can doesn’t mean that you should.

In this article, I’m going to explain why 3-minute Shorts might not work and how to create Shorts that do.

What tends to work

A single Short works best when centered on one key takeaway.

Quick, accessible, and easily digestible.

A Short being longer doesn’t make it better – it’s all about being concise. There’s a reason for that. 👇

Appealing to the dopamine rush

Each scroll provides a release of dopamine. That means the viewer wants to scroll.

To get them to watch, the Short needs to promise them more dopamine than a scroll otherwise would.

When the Short hangs, their dopamine drops and the need to continue scrolling takes over.

The correlation between retention and views

For a Short to really succeed, it typically needs to reach an average watch duration of at least 75%.

Here’s data I’ve collected from over 2000 Shorts uploaded in 2024.

Each dot represents a single Short. Along the bottom, we have average watch time to 110%. Along the left side, we have views of each Short up to 6 million.

💡 The data shows that the higher the average view duration, the higher the possible view count. With 75% average view percentage being the starting point of when Shorts start to take off.

While reaching an average of 75% does not guarantee that the Short will be successful, it does give it a better chance.

(For statistic fans, the Pearson correlation coefficient between views and average view duration for this dataset is approximately 0.46. For everyone else, that’s a math way showing a fairly positive correlation.)

Here’s the same data, but showing averages, and grouped up.