YouTube Changed… The NEW Way To Beat The Algorithm

The old YouTube growth strategies aren't working the way they used to. Some creators are getting many tens of thousands of views by ranking their videos not in YouTube search, but within AI platforms. Video ideas that used to crush are getting banned left and right. Something gamechanging seems to be happening with YouTube shorts.

Plus, there are seven other trends I want to dive into to give you an advantage in 2026. If we're just meeting, my name is Marcus and I've worked with hundreds of creators. I see behind the scenes of hundreds of channels. I built one of the world's biggest YouTube research tools from scratch.

So, I want to talk about the 2026 YouTube trends I'm noticing that most creators don't seem to be picking up on. And I want to start off by talking about video length. See, a lot of people have been talking about shorts. And we'll get to them later, but I actually did a study of 93,000 videos from the top 100 YouTubers.

And one of the things we looked at is how long their typical videos were year-over-year. Now, this is that graph, and if we start following it, you can see in the early days, videos are around 5 minutes long. Then that length rose gradually until around 2022. And then the line jumped up higher than a Snoop Dogg impersonator.

We can see in just a few years both the median and average video lengths from the top creators almost double. The average video length is around 37 minutes compared to the median which is the red line has jumped up to 21 minutes. Now this is likely because watching YouTube on TV has got a lot more popular. For the first time ever, YouTube CEO announced that TV watch time from viewers has surpassed mobile watch time.

And in conversations I've had with YouTube, they literally told me that viewers watching on TV typically prefer to watch longer videos. So, particularly if you have an entertainment creator and you go into your analytics and you see a lot of people watching your videos on TV, experimenting with longer videos could be worthwhile. In saying that though, this graph breaks down exactly how long the top YouTubers videos tend to be. And while we see there's a range, something you will notice is there is a pretty big drop off after you hit 60 minutes.

Now, the reason for this is probably because as a viewer, clicking on a 1hour long plus video feels like a lot more of a commitment than say a 45 or 50-minute video. Even though they're technically almost the same length, that big left digit in the 1 hour timestamp is confronting. It reminds you of how few friends you really have. So, while I would consider experimenting with longer videos at this stage for most creators, I probably wouldn't recommend going longer than 1 hour.

For this next trend, let's do a complete 180 and talk about short content. See something really interesting. Let's go back in time and take a look at the YouTube homepage. This is roughly what it looked like about a year ago.

You see two rows of five long form videos and then a little row of shorts. Fast forward a couple of months and this is what it started looking like. Two rows of three long form videos and a slightly more noticeable row of shorts. And now if you open up your homepage, YouTube is basically playing a reverse wares Waldo with shorts.

You have one row of long form videos and then this obnoxiously huge row of shorts. So what does this mean for creators? Well, I recently did a study of the 500 plus channels that creators have given me access to, and I looked at where their shorts views are coming from. And here's a graph showing what I found.

And I want to point out these pink and purple lines you see here. Now, these lines essentially show us how many shorts views are coming from the YouTube search page and also the YouTube homepage, not just on desktop, but also mobile and TV. And what you can see is particularly around the start of January 2025, these lines started to go up. They were a bit all over the place for the first part of 2025, but now they've kind of stabilized.

And I particularly want to point out, look at where they've stabilized. Compare where these lines are now to where they were around a year ago. They're so much higher. And what this is telling us is YouTube seems to be promoting YouTube shorts more on the homepage and in search results.

And this graph is a little spiky because of viral outliers and stuff. But if we look at a graph that removes those outliers, you can see the purple is the nonoutliers. We still see a significant bump seemingly confirming that YouTube is pushing more shorts. So, does this mean you should go and create shorts?

Well, to answer that question, I have to go to the next trend where I want to show you another graph. See, not too long ago, my friend Mario, who's an ex strategist from Mr. Beast and a bunch of other big creators, noticed something interesting. He sent me these, and these are essentially graphs that show how old the shorts are performing on some of the channels he works with.

And you can see a pretty distinct drop right about where that yellow line is. What seems to have happened is YouTube's no longer promoting older shorts as much as they used to. Particularly, what I'm seeing at the moment is shorts older than 30 days start getting less views relative to how older shorts used to perform. So, we have two things going on here.

One, YouTube is promoting more shorts, but at the same time, they're not promoting older shorts as much. So, if you just want to get a bunch of views, adjusting your content strategy not just to post shorts, but to post a high volume of shorts, post them frequently so you have lots of new shorts all the time seems to be your best bet. Now, in saying that, shorts views often aren't as valuable as long form views. They're not as sustainable for creators.

They typically don't build a very loyal community on your channel, and they're also way harder to make money from. So, I'm not saying every creator should just drop everything and start posting a ton of shorts. But specifically, if your goal is just to get a bunch of views, you don't care as much about a loyal community or making money, posting a ton of shorts could be the way to go. Now, the next trend is one of the most interesting ones, but before I can share it with you, a quick word from today's sponsor, Opus Clip.

See, most creators have a ton of old footage from previous videos that never gets reused. And that's where Opus Search comes in. Opus Search lets you find specific moments from your back catalog without spending hours scrubbing through old videos. I can literally search for any word, topic, or phrase, and it goes and pulls those moments from my old content.

And the cool thing is it actually looks at what's performing in your niche and tries to pull clips it thinks are most likely to get views if you were to repurpose them. So instead of constantly creating more new content, make sure you're getting the most out of content you've already made. You can hit the link below to check out Opus Search today. All right, on to the next YouTube trend.

Coming back to long form, the next trend I'm noticing is actually one of the most substantial ones in my opinion. See, when it comes to people giving you YouTube advice on how to get views, you kind of have two camps of people. The first camp, the purists, they're all about making quality content, creating eye-catching thumbnails, hooking viewers with your title using psychology. And while this all technically isn't wrong, a lot of people find their advice hard to follow because, okay, make an eye-catching thumbnail.

What does eye-catching mean? How eye-catching is eye-catching enough? How good is good enough? And so, a lot of creators were getting tired of this sort of vague advice, and that gave rise to what felt like a new movement.

I'd call them the growth hackers. They came in and essentially said, "Hey, the old YouTube advice is technically right, but it's not very practical. So, what you should do instead, don't guess whether something is or isn't eye-catching. Just go find a successful video in your niche and copy it because that video is proven to be eye-catching." Now, a lot of people found this strategy controversial, but the facts were it worked until everyone started doing it.

And that's the direction I'm noticing a lot of niches start to go in. Everyone is copying everyone. And copying a successful video doesn't work when there's already 50 other people who've copied that same successful video. And so, I think 2026 might be a year of rebalancing.

Maybe not going all the way back to the YouTube purists and where we used to be. But also, when it comes to modeling successful videos to get views yourself, you're going to have to get a bit more creative. And I'll talk more about that later on. But next, I want to talk about what I think could be one of the biggest YouTube updates in years.

And it relates to how creators make money. Now, a substantial number of creators make the bulk of their cash from sponsorships. You know, Raid, NordVPN, Honey, and well, until one video single-handedly demolished that brand. But the problem with these sponsorships is one, usually they're only good for big creators.

And two, these sponsorships have to be typically burnt in to a video. Like a creator will sign a deal with a sponsor, make a video, record a little sponsored segment, and add it inside their video, and then publish that video and get paid. But the problem is that sponsored segment is now burnt in to that video. It can never be changed. or worse, and this is where small creators come into play, if you posted a video that didn't have a sponsorship and then that video did really well, it's kind of like a well that sucks, bad luck situation.

Now though, YouTube are introducing a feature where you can dynamically insert sponsored segments into old videos you've already posted. And you can even insert them for a certain period of time and then swap them out with another sponsor. And so what this means is you could have this back catalog of a ton of videos that didn't have many views and then you blew up and started getting a bunch of views. And now when a sponsor approaches you, instead of just getting them to sponsor your next video, you'll be able to sell them sponsorships on all of the older videos you've already posted, making it a lot easier for creators of all sizes to make a lot more money with sponsorships.

Unfortunately though, the next trend I'm noticing means more work for creators and probably less money. And that comes to do with something I showed you earlier. Remember YouTube's UI? how it went from showing lots of long form videos to not many long form videos but with big thumbnails. Yeah.

So bigger thumbnails means bad quality becomes even more noticeable. Now if you're moist critical that's fine. You can drink your goof juice and cackle at all us plebs. But most of us are probably going to have to step up our thumbnail game.

And YouTube drove this point home even further when they announced they're going to be allowing and recommending creators to upload thumbnails in 4K now. And speaking of fundamental changes to the way you present content, you may remember that study of 93,000 videos I talked about earlier. Well, another thing I looked at in that study was how complicated are the words YouTubers typically use in their videos. Now, measuring how complex is a YouTuber's speech is typically done using what's called the Fleshkin Kaid readability tests.

The FKGL tests were created in 1975 for the US Navy to assess the complexity of their training manuals. Now the exact mathematical equation is on screen but for any 1970s Navy recruits among us here are some examples of how it works. Now this sentence while technically correct is long and hard to read. It has a fleshkincade grade level of 18.5 which is about college graduate reading level.

On the other hand this sentence only scores a 4.1 aka sixth grade reading level very easy to read. And so using the FKGL test, I basically analyze the transcripts from the top 100 YouTubers. And I found something interesting. See, this graph tracks how big complicated word yes the top YouTubers videos were year-over-year.

And we can see that in recent years, it's remained relatively stable. But then take a look at this. We see this drop. Now remember, a drop or going lower tells us readability is getting easier.

And so this graph's essentially telling us top creators seem to have started making their videos easier and easier to understand. Which makes sense. I guess they're trying to appeal to everyone. And if one use such simple word, much people understand.

And so in 2026, if you're not lazy like me, cuz now that I think on it, most of this video is using pretty complex language. Maybe experiment with simplifying the way you speak and the words you use in your videos. But the next trend, funnily enough, is not simple. More and more people are using AI to search for things instead of traditional search engines like Google or YouTube.

According to a McKenzie report, 44% of AI chatbot users, so like Gemini users, ChatGBT users, Claude, etc., consider AI to be the primary way they search for insights. Now, on one hand, that sucks for creators. It means less search traffic for you. But on the other hand, creators are starting to show up directly inside of AI results, more so Gemini, from what I'm seeing.

And so, while that is an extremely nerdy, complicated topic that should probably be left for another video, thinking about getting your videos to show up in Gemini, not just in YouTube search is something I'd suggest in 2026. Speaking of AI, we've seen a huge amount of AI content, and it seems like YouTube's been trying to crack down on some of it. Now, YouTube does not hate AI by any stretch. In fact, they're literally building out features into the platform to make it easier to create AI content, which I personally kind of hate.

But anyway, what YouTube doesn't like is all of these things. Now, I don't want this video to turn into me reading YouTube's terms and conditions for 6 hours, but if you create AI related content, I'll link to some specific resources down below, cuz YouTube does have some rules. Beyond just AI content, though, there's a sense that YouTube has been a bit more heavy-handed recently when it comes to deleting channels. For example, cracking down on channels that make exaggerated claims, particularly in the finance or how to make money space.

Now, I actually think this is a good thing. We're all sick of seeing those rampant. How to make a bajillion dollars a day uploading YouTube shorts with AI videos. But if you are creating content in niches like that, I would be more careful with the types of claims you're making cuz in 2026, I think YouTube strictness is going to continue.

And last but not least, and I found this one pretty interesting actually. See, something I looked at when doing our study was how frequently creators talked about themselves. Use the word I. And if we look at this graph here, how frequently creators talked about themselves.

I call this creator centric language. So how often you say me, my, I, etc. And if we look at this graph, it seems to suggest that talking about yourself is actually becoming more popular. Now, obviously, part of the reason this line's going up is cuz videos are getting longer in general as well.

But I also think this could be a reaction to the wave of AI content we've seen. Maybe viewers are craving more personalized content, and you reminding them of the fact that you are a human just like them by referring to yourself a lot could be having an impact here. But speaking of things working in 2026, early in the video, I mentioned that the trend of copying videos is starting to dial. Definitely not completely, but I'm noticing it's becoming a little bit harder to succeed with straight up copycat content.

And so, if you want to learn one of the strategies I'm using in 2026 that does rely on research, but also isn't about just straight up copying other people, click the video on screen. I'm going to walk you step by step through my research process so you can hopefully take it, apply it to your niche, and get a bunch more views.