For the past 5-6 months I have been running my Live games channel on YouTube. These are mostly word & puzzle games, where, when people reply in Live Chat, those messages are sent to the game backend via the YouTube Live Comments API, and show up in the game. Most of the Live streams are between 1-3 hours.
As a conscious design-choice, I have kept the aspect-ratio vertical (9:16).
Turns out, YT pushes traffic from the SHORTS FEED, even for non-Short but VERTICAL LIVE streams.
So pretty soon, we ended up seeing 100-1400 Concurrent viewers/players in some of our streams.
But after a typical MAX traffic day, the next day, the SHORTS-FEED traffic would come down to near-zero!
No explanation.
So I'd read up on forums, chat with the AskTube AI (that's actually pretty awesome!) -- but no tangible answer/direction.
But our core players (30-40) would turn up everyday due to muscle-memory!
Then, slowly the traffic would build up. And in a couple of weeks, the traffic would again MAX out (e.g. 250,000 views!) -- And the next day -- again ZERO traffic from Shorts Feed!
Been through 3 such cycles. The third one coincided with us getting monetized. But, now we're getting zero Shorts Feed traffic for more than a week now. Tried changing the names of the streams, timings, durations, supplementing with actual short videos etc. But nothing's working now. Meanwhile, Live streams with similar content type are getting YT Shorts Feed traffic regularly.
So basically, there's some sort of marker/flag that's been put on my channel, that puts it totally out of the YT Shorts Feeds.
Anyone has any insight on this (apart from the motherhood and apple-pie advise like 'focus on your content', 'first 3 seconds..' etc.).
Thanks in advance!