Shorts 'Viewed vs swiped away': test your first frame with Sume

Viewed vs swiped away is a Shorts analytics metric that highlights the percentage of times viewers viewed your Short versus swiped away, and Shown in feed is the number of times your Short showed in the Shorts feed. Both are in YouTube Studio Analytics under the Content tab. To improve the first, work on the opening frame and the first seconds, which you can inspect with Sume's video frames route.

The metric definitions come from Content tab analytics tips for Shorts, read on 2026-10-02. The view-counting change comes from Get started creating YouTube Shorts.

What do the two metrics mean?

YouTube defines Shown in feed as the number of times your Shorts showed in the Shorts feed. Viewed vs swiped away is defined as the percentage of times viewers viewed your Shorts versus swiped away. The same page defines Views as how many times your Shorts were viewed, compared against your typical performance.

YouTube's help also says that starting March 31, 2025, a view counts each time a Short starts to play or replay, with no minimum watch time. So a high view count with a low viewed-versus-swiped share is possible: the view starts on play, and the swipe decision happens in the first moments.

Why does the first frame matter?

A viewer decides on the first frame and the first second, so the opening still is the cheapest thing to test. Our post on first-frame views and autoplay covers how to check it. Sume does not read your YouTube analytics, so you decide by looking at the stills and by comparing the metric across Shorts you publish.

How do you pull candidate opening frames?

POST /v1/video-frames takes a clip on media.sume.com plus at[], one to 24 explicit seconds, and returns durable image artifacts at source size. It is unbilled. Submit is always 202, so poll GET /v1/video-frames/{id} until resource_status is ready. Every value in at must be at least 0 and less than the clip's duration.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-frames \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: opening-frames-001" \
  -d '{
    "video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/short.mp4",
    "at": [0, 0.5, 1, 2],
    "format": "jpeg"
  }'

How do you test a different opening?

If the first second is weak, cut a variant that starts later. Video trim takes a start and either end or duration and returns a new MP4 for $0.02 per job, leaving the source untouched. Publish the variants as separate Shorts and compare Viewed vs swiped away in Studio, keeping everything else the same.

Be honest about the sample: one Short per variant is a weak test. YouTube's own three-cut A/B tool, covered in our post, compares versions on the same video.