‘The YouTube algorithm actually changed, for the worse,’ says MrBeast’s Retention Director

Mario Joos, Retention Director for several ultra-popular YouTube channels, like MrBeast, Stokes Twins, and Alan’s Universe, claims that YouTube has changed the short-form content algorithm for the worse. This alleged change mainly hurts the creators who specialize in YouTube Shorts, but it’s supposed to be noticeable for every YouTuber who uploads Shorts at least semi-regularly.

Joos works with channels that routinely hit anywhere from 100 million to over a billion monthly views, and he says the pattern appeared on every channel he looked at. After weeks of trying to explain a broad dip in performance, he and several clients finally isolated what they believe is the key variable: Shorts older than roughly 28–30 days are receiving far fewer views than they did before.

This wasn’t immediately noticeable when he examined the channel-wide analytics, because newer content masked this decline. Only after filtering for Shorts posted before a month-old cutoff did the picture become clear for him. He posted this graph that details the drop-off for seven of the biggest Shorts channels on YouTube, though he’s unable to reveal their names for sensitivity reasons.

Every chart in this picture shows the same moment when, right around September, older Shorts’ view counts drop sharply and then stay far lower than before. According to Joos, this change happened across both entertainment and educational content, and is channel-size agnostic.

Joos also mentions that some standout videos still perform well regardless of their age. For him, this suggests the shift in prioritization rather than any kind of suppression of content, but the change is big and visible enough that he decided to raise the issue publicly.

Joos is careful in his assumptions and does not accuse YouTube of anything dramatic, stressing that this is a carefully constructed working theory and not a confirmed fact. His belief is that YouTube is pushing hard for recency and novelty, which may be the company’s conscious push against TikTok. He says he understands this approach from the corporate standpoint, but his main concern is that it disproportionately affects those creators who mainly depend on their Shorts income.

He does not make any calls to action; instead, he asks content creators and viewers to share their thoughts and experiences on this issue. Some people corroborate his findings in the comments, but others note that nothing of the sort has happened on their channels.

Some commenters note that this could actually be a decent springboard for new content creators, as viewership isn’t leaving the platform, it simply gets redirected. Joos agrees with this, noting that it’s a good time to “take advantage of this change while it’s here.”

While this could be a deliberate change made by YouTube, viewership and perceived algorithm changes could notably be the result of some other factors as well. A couple of months ago, an MMO-focused content creator and a streamer, Josh Strife Hayes, investigated the changes in the viewership numbers for the long-form content. He found out that around the date of Aug. 10th, views from specifically computers showed a sharp decline, but the revenue remained unchanged. This led him to believe there was a change in how the views from the browsers that use the ad-blocking software are reported.

The frustrating part in both situations is how little communication there is from YouTube, even when it concerns their biggest content creators. If Joos is correct in his findings, many Shorts-first content creators will likely have to pivot their strategy and cater to “here and now” content rather than produce something evergreen.