Dance creators believe YouTube left them behind amid its Shorts push

Amid this viewership decrease, YouTube Shorts became the dominant format for dance videos on the platform, with 86 percent of dance video views coming from videos under one minute long in 2024, compared to only 47 percent in 2022. (A YouTube representative declined to comment on this story.)

Although dance video creator John “Poppin John” Austin has maintained a consistent upload schedule of two or three videos per month, his revenue and viewership on YouTube have both decreased significantly in recent years. At the moment, the majority of his viewership comes via YouTube Shorts.

“For a couple of years, I was probably making $4,000 a month on YouTube. Now, I’m making a fraction of that; I think I’m down to $400 a month on YouTube,” said Austin, who noted that this decrease was not due to copyright strikes, as he collaborates with independent labels to use their music for monetized videos instead of using music that might get his videos demonetized. “And my analytics — I have 1.1 million subscribers. I posted a video two weeks ago, and it has 2,000 views.”

As YouTube pushes short-form video, there is a clear financial incentive for YouTube dance creators to lean into Shorts. Traditionally, YouTube has demonetized the majority of long-form dance videos for copyright purposes, but in 2023 the platform instituted a music royalties program that allows dance creators to monetize short-form video.

In YouTube’s earlier days, the platform developed a large and loyal audience for dance creators, largely because it was one of the only options to watch dance videos online.

“If you wanted to watch dance content, you kind of had to go to YouTube,” said dance creator Matt Steffanina. “That was sort of the only place that it existed — and then TikTok came around and shook things up. And so now I’m posting on TikTok, along with tons of other dancers, and then we were all posting on Instagram, and now we’re all posting on Snapchat, too.”

Dance creators have been rewarded with higher viewership as they follow their audiences from YouTube to other video platforms. Creator Tim Milgram, for example, has 222,000 followers on Instagram, where his latest post received over 934,000 views. In contrast, the same video posted to YouTube garnered 22,000 views and 43 comments, despite Milgram’s subscriber count of nearly 4 million.

“YouTube has largely ignored our community, and our community seems to be largely ignoring it now,” he said.

Making the pivot

With audiences looking elsewhere for dance videos, dance creators on YouTube have had to pivot into different areas to keep viewers interested. Austin, for example, has begun posting more tutorial videos rather than traditional dance videos, both for the increased ad revenue that comes with 20-minute-plus videos and for the extra work opportunities they can create, such as dance teaching jobs.

Steffanina has pivoted even further. Although he still posts dance videos, he expanded his focus to include videos about mental health in 2024 after noting a general decrease in viewership of dance videos across YouTube.

“I just kind of felt burnt out making content after I’ve been on YouTube for 17 years,” Steffanina said. “So it’s been a long time, and I felt the impact of dance videos was a bit of a diminishing returns kind of thing.”