Insights & Trends - page 3

A YouTube playlist is a sequence of videos that plays automatically one after another — and a well-structured one keeps viewers on your channel instead of leaving after one video. To create a YouTube Playlist, go to YouTube Studio → Content → Playlists → Create → New Playlist. Title it with your primary keyword, set it to Public, add videos, and put your highest average view duration video first. Done in under 3 minutes. What determines whether the playlist builds watch time and session depth is the strategy layer: sequencing, SEO, analytics, thumbnail, official series, and more tactics from this guide. Channels with structured playlists see 15–36% longer session times across the channels in AIR audits.

Most YouTube creators who try memberships earn very little from them because they set them up incorrectly and promote them just once. But the channels we watch earn 30–80% of their total revenue from memberships. What makes it happen is designing perks around what your specific audience wants, mentioning memberships in every video naturally, pricing your tiers around what your superfans are willing to pay, and 12 more tactics. All are in this YouTube Membership guide.

YouTube Shorts pays between $0.02 and $1.48 RPM, depending on your niche, roughly 3–14% of what long-form earns per 1,000 views. These figures come from YouTube Analytics API data across 274 channels, full-year medians.

Online, the question about how much YouTube Shorts pays comes up constantly. We pulled data directly from the YouTube Analytics API across 274 channels that mix in Shorts and saw that YouTube Shorts RPM is 3–14% of long-form RPM in almost every niche, meaning most channels need between 11,000 and 34,000 Shorts views to earn what 1,000 long-form views generate.