YouTube Announces New, Comprehensive Reach Metrics For Creators

Content creators around the world rely on YouTube to share their stories with the world using the different formats the platform has to offer and musical artists are no different. YouTube announced today its latest comprehensive metrics for artists on the platform to meet the demands for multi-format standards of success.

As of this month, the ‘Analytics for Artists' offering will expand to include Shorts data in the ‘Total Reach’ feature. This includes fan-uploaded Shorts in addition to official content uploaded by the artist and long-form videos uploaded by fans. This new metric shows how many people an artist’s music is reaching across all formats, making it the most comprehensive snapshot of the size of an artist's audience on YouTube. YouTube also created a brand new Songs section in Analytics to help artists see how fans are listening to their music or creating with it, across all video formats, all in one place as YouTube continues to see an increase in reach for multiformat artists on YouTube.

For example, in January 2023, fan-created Shorts increased the average artist's audience of unique viewers by more than 80% globally. Meaning that fans on Shorts are nearly doubling an artist’s total reach, so artists can spend more time doing what they do best: making great music. Moreover, Shorts is helping attract new fans. Artists active on Shorts saw more than 50% of their new channel subscribers coming directly from their Shorts posts on average.

Nigerian artist Rema & American sensation Selena Gomez were able to leverage all the video formats available on YouTube. After they surpassed 60 million unique viewers of their official music videos and Shorts for Calm Down, fans uploaded Shorts featuring their track, taking viewership to another level: adding 350 million unique viewers in January, an increase of over 500%.

American singer Oliver Tree is also taking advantage of all of the video formats on YouTube, leaning into the viral success of Miss You, uploading 20 Shorts and 4 long-form videos tied to it. Ultimately, his channel's monthly viewers increased from 6 million to 75 million in just over 4 months. Oliver’s fans brought in another 1.8 billion views in January by uploading Shorts featuring this track.

While Shorts’ growth has been generating 50 billion daily views as of December 2022, it continues to act as the entry point, leading fans to discover the depth of an artist’s catalog, including music videos, interviews, live performances, lyric videos, and more.  

The announcement came as part of YouTube’s ongoing efforts to support musicians and multiformat creators around the world - whether through long-form videos, live streams, Shorts, and more, helping them diversify the ways they engage with their fans.