Accidentally built an 80,000,000 monthly views business with YT Shorts — and why it's a problem

[jpaask]

Hi, I’m José Pascual, a Spanish content creator. Eight months ago, after watching a podcast where a group of teenagers claimed they were making money with YT Shorts, I decided to give it a try.

I had some experience already, since I had previously created a Spanish-language finance and business channel that did fairly well (80k subscribers), but I ended up abandoning it due to work and lack of time.

So I challenged myself to see if what those teenagers were saying was actually true.

I grabbed an old channel I had with 200 subscribers and started uploading Shorts. Things picked up quickly — I hit 10 million views and qualified for monetization in around 25 days.

The RPM for Shorts in Spanish is €0.05.

I did everything myself: finding videos, writing scripts, editing, and uploading 2–3 Shorts per day.

All of this while working my full-time job as a software engineer at a Spanish company.

As the channel grew, I quickly stabilized at 50–70 million views per month, and due to the niche, I found my ceiling there.

Later on, I brought in some help to free up my time, although I still handle research and voiceover myself.

- Scriptwriter: €5/Short
- Main editor: €10/Short

After hitting a ceiling in views and realizing that RPMs were higher in other languages, I decided to invest in 3 more channels and hire translators to create content in English, German, and Portuguese.

- English RPM: €0.20
- German RPM: €0.17
- Portuguese RPM: €0.04

Translator for English, German, and Portuguese: €5/language

So a month and a half ago, I started publishing one Short per day on each channel.

I do the research, narrate the Spanish version, and then the translator uses a voice clone of me to create the translated versions.

It all sounds ideal, but after 9 months I’m now considering selling everything because I need capital for another business. The issue is, I think the YT Shorts market is terrible when it comes to exits — and I have no clue how much I could even ask for.

Here are my stats for June:

80,000,000 total views:
- Spanish: 63,000,000 views publishing 30 Shorts
- English: 9,500,000 views publishing 30 Shorts
- German: 2,000,000 views publishing 30 Shorts
- Portuguese: 5,500,000 views publishing 30 Shorts

The translated channels are still growing slowly each month.

Another problem I have is that the profit margins aren’t enough to let me quit my job, so I’m still spending 2–3 hours a day on this, on top of my full-time job.

I constantly feel like this could all collapse at any moment.

I’m not really sure what to do.

Option A:
Make the financial effort to publish 3 Shorts per day per channel from September to January (360 Shorts/month total) and see how it performs.

Option B:
Sell everything (no idea how much to ask) and use the capital for another business.

Option C:
Try to transition into long-form, more evergreen content.

If anyone’s been through something similar, I’d love to hear how you approached it.

 

[secretagentdad]

I'd be shocked if you can sell it for much of anything.
I think you should focus on not breaking whats working and just keep posting.
Work out your own ways to make money from the videos.
I dunno what your niche is, but merch done in a non half assed way can work if you're working with a consistent audience. Its pretty pointless if you're just running of youtube algorithm traffic for the most part though.

I dunno what the niche is, but for most niches I'd try and leverage what you've got to pick up some traction on other platforms and build up a branded site instead of making the money on youtube directly.

 

[DanielS]

Invest your Shorts earnings into long-form content creation on a different (fresh) channel. Don't even bother trying to upload long-form content to your Shorts channels - viewers do not transfer.

Alternately, scale-up your Shorts operations. Take less profit in the short-term for more profit in the long-term.

 

[jpaask]

Invest your Shorts earnings into long-form content creation on a different (fresh) channel. Don't even bother trying to upload long-form content to your Shorts channels - viewers do not transfer.

Alternately, scale-up your Shorts operations. Take less profit in the short-term for more profit in the long-term.

I have thought about uploading long content on the same channels, I did some test and I have 2 videos that have touched 14-20,000 views in long format.