Colin & Samir's Subscriber Surge

A story about Colin & Samir's YouTube channel growth pattern and how Shorts helped accelerate their success.

"I think it took at least 4 or 5 years to get to 200,000 subscribers. Then we went from 200,000 to 800,000 in just one year. That growth came a lot from Shorts, but Shorts also propelled our other content.

A lot of people had problems with Shorts because you can't monetize them well. But I thought - if someone told you they had a way to get your brand exposure to millions of people with lower effort, wouldn't you take it? We could make a Short in a day, whereas it takes a week to two weeks to make a full long-form YouTube video.

We started trying it and had Shorts that pushed 10, 20, 7, 8 million views. Those people were subscribing, and even though there was concern about whether they'd watch our other content, because the Shorts were directly connected to our longer-form content, we were just aggregating more people who then watched our library of content.

We're now back to around 9-10 million views a month. We're not putting out as many Shorts, but a lot more people are watching our library now. That's what YouTube is - you're building a library of content. For example, our MrBeast interview did 1 million views in the first month, now it's pushing 11 million views. It'll probably have 12-13 million views by its one-year anniversary in September."