Published 27 October 2026 · Figures measured 15 September 2026 · Every figure carries the number of channels behind it
Two creators, the same advice, opposite results
These are both real comments, left within weeks of each other under videos about growing on Shorts:
"I feel like when I broke 1k, I always got thousands of views after that, the more i posted the more views."
"i have fb pages insta, and all that, for years. and still barely anything, even with 'consistency' of daily or weekly posts ... i feel there is nothing i can do."
Same strategy. One person is evangelising it and the other is exhausted by it.
The usual way this gets resolved is to decide one of them did it wrong. We think there is a better explanation, and our data points straight at it.
The biggest number in this field, and we think it is right
If you search how often should I post Shorts, you will quickly meet a widely cited analysis of around 5 million channels finding that channels posting 12 or more times a month grow views roughly 53% faster.
We are not going to argue with it. We have not measured channel-level growth across five million channels and we are in no position to contradict anyone who has.
What we can do is measure a different question, on data that study did not have: what happens to each individual Short.
What we measured instead
We took every channel in our base, worked out how often it posts, and compared that against two separate things. First, the typical Short on that channel. Second, that channel's best Short.
| Posting rate compared against | Correlation | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| The channel's typical Short | -0.236 | no relationship we can defend |
| The channel's best Short | +0.282 | leans positive |
And when we ran the same test inside individual channels, asking whether a creator's busier months beat their quieter ones, it came out 5 of 10 positive and 5 of 10 negative.
A coin flip.
More draws, not better draws
Here is the sentence this whole page exists for.
Posting more does not make your Shorts better. It gives you more tickets.
Look at the two rows in that table again. Posting more showed no defensible relationship with your typical Short, and leaned positive with your best one. That is exactly the pattern you get from buying more lottery tickets. Your average ticket is no better. Your best ticket, out of a bigger pile, tends to be.
Which resolves the two creators at the top of this page. They were not doing different things. One of them drew a winner and the other did not, and after enough draws the first one formed a theory about why.
Our single biggest Short belongs to our busiest creator
We want to be fair to the post-more side, so here is the strongest evidence for it on our own data.
The biggest breakout in our entire customer base is a Short with 34,377 views. It belongs to the creator who published 54 Shorts in 30 days, the heaviest publisher we have.
That is "more draws" working exactly as described. If you want the big outlier, you do need to be buying tickets.
And the two steadiest channels post the least
Now the other side, which is the half nobody mentions.
The two channels with the highest typical Short in our base are the two that post least.
| Channel | Shorts per 30 days | Typical Short |
|---|---|---|
| Channel A | 6.1 | 1,725 views |
| Channel B | 15.8 | 1,154 views |
Two channels is not a finding and we are not presenting it as one. It is here because it is the shape the correlation above describes, and because any page that showed you only the 34,377 view breakout would be selling you something.
The limits, before you use any of this
One limit works against us, and it is the reason we stop at "no effect" rather than "posting more hurts". Channels in our base cover different spans of time. One has 116 Shorts packed into 44 days; another has 189 spread over 176. Posting rate and how long a channel has existed are tangled together, and that tangle could produce the negative number on its own. So the honest claim is the null: we could not detect cadence moving the typical Short. Not that it hurts.
One limit works in our favour. Creators who get a hit tend to post more afterwards, which would manufacture a positive correlation for free. We measured a negative one anyway.
Ten channels is a small base and the within-channel result spans a very wide range. Treat the direction as unestablished, which is precisely what 5 of 10 means.
What this page does not say
- Not "posting more is useless." Our one real breakout belongs to our heaviest publisher, and that is in the page for a reason.
- Not "post less." We have no evidence for that and the two-channel table above is an illustration, not a result.
- No recommended number. We will not tell you to post three a day or four a week. We have no data supporting any figure, and naming one would make this page the thing it is arguing against.
- Nothing about burnout. Creators in our corpus talk about it and we believe them, but we have measured nothing about it and will not dress a wellbeing opinion as research.
- Nothing about what YouTube does with a channel that posts more. We cannot see it.
So what should you actually do with this?
The useful reframe is to stop treating cadence as a quality lever and start treating it as a volume decision, because that is what our data says it is.
If you post more, expect more chances at an outlier. Do not expect your ordinary Short to climb, and do not conclude you are doing it wrong when it does not.
And if your Shorts are stuck, posting more of the same is not a diagnosis. The more useful question is whether a given Short failed for a reason you can actually see, which is a different question entirely.
The one thing we genuinely cannot see
Every serious account of Shorts distribution points at viewed versus swiped away, the share of people who were shown your Short and stayed instead of flicking past.
We do not have it. It is visible to you in YouTube Studio and it is not in the data a creator can authorise us to read, and there is no honest substitute for it. We explain what happened to the people who started. Studio tells you how many never did.
Questions creators ask about this
Taken from public creator forums in October 2026, close to the wording they were asked in.
How often should I post Shorts, and how many a day?
Most pages answering this will tell you one to three a day. We are not going to give you a number, because we have not measured anything that would justify one, and you should be a little suspicious of pages that do.
What our data supports is narrower. Across 10 channels, posting rate showed no defensible relationship with the typical Short (-0.236, and 5 of 10 within channels), and leaned positive with the best Short (+0.282). So cadence is how many chances you take, not how good each one is.
Which turns the question into a different one: not "what is the optimal number", but "how many attempts can I sustain without the attempts getting worse". That second question is about your capacity, and we have no data about your capacity.
Is it true that posting 12 times a month grows you 53% faster?
Possibly, and we are not disputing it. That figure comes from an analysis of roughly 5 million channels and measures channel view growth. We have not measured that and cannot.
What we measured is per-Short outcomes, which is a different question. A channel can grow total views while every individual Short performs the same, simply because there are more of them. Both results can hold at once, and we think they do.
I have been posting daily for months and nothing has changed. Am I doing something wrong?
Not necessarily. On our data, how often a creator posts had no detectable relationship with how their typical Short performed. Doing more of it was never going to move that number on its own.
What does change outcomes is whether the Short clears the bar at all, which is about the Short rather than the schedule. If your Shorts are getting watched and still going nowhere, that is a separate thing we have measured.
Does the algorithm reward consistency?
We cannot see what the algorithm rewards and we will not guess. What we can say is that in our base, the two channels with the strongest typical Short were the two posting least often, and the single biggest breakout belonged to the channel posting most. Whatever is happening, a simple "consistency is rewarded" rule does not fit both of those.
I post once a week and my Shorts do fine. Should I be posting more?
Not on the evidence we have, if what you want is for each Short to do better. The two channels with the strongest typical Short in our base are the two posting least often, at 6.1 and 15.8 Shorts per 30 days.
Posting more would buy you more chances at an outlier, which is a real thing and is how our one 34,377 view Short happened. It would not be expected to lift the Shorts you are already happy with. Those are two different goals and only you know which one you are chasing.
Is it better to post one good Short or three average ones?
Our data cannot settle it, but it does reframe it usefully.
Because posting more did not raise the typical Short, the three average ones do not become better by being three. What they give you is three chances at an outlier instead of one. If your Shorts are already clearing the bar, more attempts is a reasonable bet. If they are not, three attempts at the same unresolved problem is three Shorts that go nowhere, and the useful move is to find the problem first.
Does the algorithm punish you for posting too often?
We found no evidence of it. Within channels, a creator's busier periods beat their quieter ones 5 times out of 10, which is as close to no relationship as a result gets.
Our cross-channel number leans slightly negative (-0.236), and we deliberately do not read that as a penalty: posting rate and how long a channel has existed are tangled together in our base, and that tangle could produce the negative on its own. The honest statement is that we could not detect an effect in either direction.
Does the time of day I post matter?
We have not measured it, so we are not going to tell you either way.
It is worth knowing why we have not. Our first reading of any Short is around day three, so the early window where a posting time could plausibly matter is one we never observe. A tool that has not watched that window cannot have an opinion about it, including us.
Two neighbouring questions this page does not answer. How long a Short keeps accruing views after you post it is about one Short over time, not about how many you post. Why a Short with good numbers still lost is about the Short itself. And whether there is really a ceiling at 1,000 views is about the number, which we also measured.
How this was measured
Why we looked at this at all
We had an open question in our own notes: does cadence buy more draws or better draws? It mattered because the answer changes what we should tell a creator whose Shorts are flat. If cadence improved each Short, the advice is post more. It does not appear to, so the advice is to find out what went wrong with the ones you already posted.