30 Shorts in 30 Days - YouTube Challenge

What happens when you upload 30 videos in 30 days?

This has become a popular trend among content creators, where the challenge is to stick to one social media platform and be active on it every day. This could include making posts, writing articles, or creating videos. The idea is to immerse yourself in the platform, experiment, and see what comes of it. I always wanted to try this out with creating YouTube Shorts (60 second or less videos) just to see what would happen.

Would I gain more subscribers? Get more views? Receive more comments? Or would this literally be a huge waste of time. It was an experiment that I called 25 videos in 2025. I ended up having so much fun with this though that I decided to do 30 in 30.

I wanted to share with you the results in case if you are thinking about doing a similar challenge. By all means, this kind of challenge transcends just posting on social media. So whatever you are looking to do 30 days of working out, journaling, practicing a new language, this article is for you.

So, let’s start with my game plan.

The idea was to keep this as simple as possible. I already have a million projects going on and there was no way I could dedicate a ton of time, energy, and effort it this. From a time management perspective, I knew batch recording 5-7 videos at a time was going to be my best bet. It took roughly an hour to get these down. Luckily for me, I’ve been keeping notes on topics I wanted to cover in the future and these became my guide. After practicing for a bit and recording each one, I did the simplest form of editing I could think of: uploading the video into Instagram and turning on closed captioning.

You might be asking why closed captioning? For one, everyone can enjoy the videos with subtitles displayed. The other major reason is that Millennials and Gen Z love subtitles. One survey found that 63% said they prefer subtitles. Another article I read mentioned for social media, these generations will not watch a short or reel without subtitles because they tend not to watch these videos with sound. What was shocking was thinking of my own behavior and I fall into this category. The other beautiful thing with YouTube shorts is that you can’t update the thumbnail. Whatever it turned out to be, that’s what I was going to use.

From uploading YouTube content over the last few years, I know that between 8 AM and noon seems to work best for my audience. I know people have debated this, but this is what I could see. What’s interesting is that YouTube said most of my audience was online at noon or 1 PM, but when I intentionally uploaded in this time slot, the videos didn’t perform better. The other part of this equation was that I heavily use LinkedIn. I’ve been on the platform for over 10 years and have built up a really great community there of learning nerds. I knew that the shorts had to be cross posted on LinkedIn in order to drive more traffic. So, each time I posted on YouTube, I would write about it on LinkedIn.

Starting Point

I know that when starting anything new, it’s important to share about it. You need to get your audience invested alongside you. It builds excitement and fuels you when you feel like you are hitting a wall. This is what I did for writing my book and for starting Instructional Design Institute, so I knew I had to spread the word. I gave folks a heads up on both YouTube and LinkedIn that this was coming and the initial reactions told me that I was on to something.

And with all that said, let’s review what happened:

Analytics

From January 1st to January 30th, the YouTube channel garnered 18,515 views. This was almost a 600% increase compared to prior months. Watch time also went significantly up. This category is for how many hours people watched the channel. This amassed 390 hours in total, 169% more compared to the prior month. Not surprisingly, I gained 140 subscribers. Oh, and if you were wondering what does YouTube pay for this kind of engagement? $21.64. I’m not quitting my day job anytime soon.

These are just numbers after all and doesn’t paint the full picture.

Audience

The biggest surprise with the Shorts was the audience. I expected the content to primarily reach mainly Millennials, some of Gen X, and some Gen Z, which it did. However, I also received a few questions that seemed to come from younger Gen Z viewers, particularly those asking about making instructional design their major in college.

Another unexpected finding was the male-to-female ratio of viewers. I never would have guessed that 70% of the audience would be male. My audience has usually been more balanced—long-form videos, for instance, have a 41% female to 58% male split.

One aspect of the audience that wasn’t captured in the numbers but stood out in the comments was how many people were unfamiliar with instructional design. I’m not sure how YouTube’s algorithm decided who to show the Shorts to, but it clearly reached people outside the instructional design field. I base this on comments such as:

What’s instructional design?
How did you know about instructional design before school?
Learning styles have to be real.

Trends

I knew that some videos were going to have more engagement than others. Social media loves controversy. So, when I mentioned about some topics like debunking learning styles, my problem with multiple choice questions, why I think marketing has ruined certain words for us as instructional designers, the cons of instructional design, all of these did well.

There were some videos that I thought were going to perform better because there isn’t as much content available about these topics. I created a few videos specifically for veteran instructional designers about leadership positions, becoming a senior ID, and moving up in management. They didn’t do well, but this was also the point of the experiment.

Was This Successful?

I’d say this was a success because this was an experiment. My goal was to simply complete the challenge of uploading 30 short videos in 30 days. By that metric, I completed the task. The other thing I was obviously hoping for was that my audience would like this different take with shorter content. My content is mainly long-formed content so I was trying to serve my audience in a different way. If they liked it, I was going to stick with this and upload more Shorts in the future. Since this does seem to be the trend, I haven’t stopped since January 1st.

Data doesn’t tell the full story and that makes this tricky too. By all means, I am stoked that my channel received almost 20K views in a month. That’s more than my channel has ever garnered before, but I have zero desire to make this YouTube channel explode into millions of subscribers. I have some connections who went viral through YouTube and they all say how awful it was for their mental health. Opening yourself up to everyone on the internet means that you receive 10x the hate. It’s great to grow from a marketing perspective, but I’d rather be more strategic with how I find new subscribers and grow my community.

Visibility is important, but so is intention. I don’t want to be the loudest voice in the room. I want to be the one people actually came to hear.

What challenge am I going to try next, you ask? I want to do this same thing, but on LinkedIn. I noticed that LinkedIn’s algorithm did not take kindly to the fact that I kept on making people leave the website to go to YouTube. When I did keep the videos on LinkedIn directly, the impressions were almost 5x higher. So, look for my updates on LinkedIn!

It was a wild ride, and I’m looking forward to my next challenge.

What challenge are you thinking about? I’d love to hear more!

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