What Hospital YouTube Channels Actually Get Watched: A 64-Channel Study
Data collected on by Gaurav Phogat. Method, scoring rules and dataset are published below.
I looked at 64 official YouTube channels of Indian hospitals across 13 cities and pulled what each one posted and how it was watched. 54 posted at least once in the last 90 days, and Shorts made up 72% of those uploads. Shorts beat long videos on median views at 59 of the 61 channels that publish both. The typical channel gets 94 views per long video against 507 per Short, and not one channel in the sample has a median above 1,000 views on its long videos.
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Last updated: 13 November 2026.
Almost every hospital I speak to has a YouTube channel. Very few can tell me what it is for. Some treat it as a video archive for the website, some as a CME library, some as a place to park TV ads. I wanted to see what the channels actually look like from the outside: how often they post, what they post, and what gets watched. This is the latest study in my series on how Indian hospitals show up online, and like the others, every number here comes from data I collected myself.
Key findings
- 54 of 64 channels (84%) uploaded in the last 90 days. 10 went silent, and 4 of those had not posted anything for a year or more.
- Shorts are now the main output. Of 1,817 uploads in the last 90 days, 1,312 (72%) were Shorts. 41 of 64 channels posted more Shorts than long videos.
- Shorts outperform long videos almost everywhere. At 59 of the 61 channels that publish both, the median Short gets more views than the median long video. The typical gap is about 4 times.
- Long videos struggle. The median channel gets 94 views per long video. 33 of 63 channels with long videos sit below 100, and none reaches a median of 1,000.
- Subscribers are a weak guide to reach. A typical long video is seen by views equal to about 1.5% of the channel’s subscriber count. A typical Short reaches about 7.5%.
- Bigger is not better on Shorts. Multi-site chains have a median of 66,800 subscribers against 4,000 for standalone hospitals and post nearly three times as often, yet their median Short gets 338 views against 518.
- Patient story videos underperform. Against each channel’s own typical video, patient stories score 0.93x on long videos and 0.85x on Shorts. Procedure and surgery videos score 1.14x on long videos.
How I did this
Sample. I searched YouTube for channels using the query “hospital <city>” for 13 cities: Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Pune, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, Kochi, Chandigarh and Indore. From each city’s channel results, in YouTube’s own ranking order, I took the first five channels whose name identified a hospital and which had at least 500 subscribers. I excluded directory and listing channels, individual doctors’ personal channels, and a small number of hospital groups I keep out of all my studies. That gave 64 channels.
What I collected. For each channel, on 13 November 2026, I recorded the subscriber count and total video count shown on the channel, the latest 30 long videos (title, views, length, upload age as shown by YouTube) and the latest 48 Shorts (title and views). To count Shorts posted in the last 90 days, I read the exact publish date of individual Shorts. Live streams were not counted separately.
Scoring. “Uploads in the last 90 days” adds long videos and Shorts. Where a channel posted more than 30 long videos or 48 Shorts in 90 days, I counted the cap, so the busiest channels are undercounted: 6 hit the long video cap and 12 hit the Shorts cap. Median views are per channel, then the median of those medians. I tagged each video’s format from its title with a fixed keyword list (procedure or surgery, doctor explainer, patient story, event or news, podcast or interview, other). The format index compares each video with its own channel’s median, so a big channel does not swamp a small one. I grouped hospitals as standalone private (47), multi-site chains (9) and government, trust or teaching hospitals (8), and separately as single specialty (20) or multispecialty (44).
Limits. Search ranking decides who gets in, so this is a sample of visible channels, not every hospital channel in India. View counts on Shorts are rounded by YouTube. Upload ages for long videos are YouTube’s relative labels (“3 weeks ago”), which are approximate. Title based format tags are rough: a video tagged “other” may be a promo, a TV ad or a talk with no clear keyword. I did not look at paid promotion, so some high view counts may be boosted by ads. Hospital names are left out of the article and the dataset.
Most channels are active, but a quarter barely post
The good news first: most hospital channels are not dead. 54 of the 64 uploaded something in the last 90 days, and the median channel posted 24 times in that period, roughly two uploads a week. 41 channels posted 13 or more times.
The rest are a mixed picture. 10 channels posted nothing at all in 90 days, and 7 more posted only one to three times. Among the silent ones, 4 had not uploaded for at least a year, and one had last posted around five years ago. These channels still show up in YouTube search for their city, so a patient looking for the hospital can land on a page that looks abandoned.
Activity is uneven by hospital type. Multi-site chains posted a median of 58 times in 90 days. Standalone private hospitals posted 20 times, and government, trust and teaching hospitals 18.
Shorts have taken over the upload schedule
Across all 64 channels, I counted 1,312 Shorts and 505 long videos uploaded in the last 90 days. Shorts are 72% of the output, and because of the counting caps, the true share is likely a little higher. 49 channels posted at least one Short in the period, against 44 that posted a long video, and 41 posted more Shorts than long videos.
A common workflow is to cut one long doctor interview into several Shorts, one question each. That is sensible. The question is whether anyone watches the result.
Shorts get watched, long videos mostly do not
The answer is yes, far more than the long videos. At 59 of the 61 channels that publish both, the median Short beats the median long video. For the typical channel, a long video gets 94 views and a Short gets 507. 16 of 62 channels with Shorts have a median above 1,000 views per Short. On long videos, the number of channels above 1,000 is zero.
Two things in this chart surprised me. First, government, trust and teaching hospitals get the highest median views on Shorts, 764, even though they post the least. Second, the chains, with by far the biggest subscriber bases, get the lowest median on Shorts at 338. Posting volume seems to dilute views: when a channel uploads 50 or more Shorts a quarter, most of them land with a small audience.
Subscriber counts do not translate into views either. On the median channel, a long video gets views equal to about 1.5% of its subscribers, and a Short about 7.5%. A hospital with 100,000 subscribers should not expect 100,000 people to see a new video. On long videos, it should expect closer to 1,500.
| Group | Channels | Median subscribers | Median uploads, 90 days | Median views per long video | Median views per Short |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standalone private | 47 | 4,000 | 20 | 91 | 518 |
| Multi-site chain | 9 | 66,800 | 58 | 127 | 338 |
| Government, trust or teaching | 8 | 5,680 | 18 | 109 | 764 |
| All channels | 64 | 6,080 | 24 | 94 | 507 |
Single specialty hospitals, such as eye, urology, fertility or orthopaedic centres, show the same pattern in sharper form. Their median Short gets 556 views, but their median long video gets just 36, against 113 for multispecialty hospitals.
What formats get watched
I expected format to matter a lot. It matters less than I thought, and the medium (Short or long video) matters far more. Within a channel, most formats perform close to that channel’s typical video.
Procedure and surgery videos do best on long form, at 1.14 times the channel median. These are often explainers of what happens during a procedure, and people searching before treatment do look for them. Doctor explainers, the most common format with 544 long videos, sit exactly at the channel median.
Patient stories are the consistent underperformer: 0.93x on long videos and 0.85x on Shorts. That matters for two reasons. Testimonial content takes the most effort to produce, needs consent and careful handling, and under the NMC 2026 advertising guidelines, patient testimonials are an area where doctors and hospitals need to be cautious. If they also earn fewer views, the case for leading with them is weak.
Video length made little difference on long videos. Videos of one to three minutes did slightly better than average (1.07x), and everything else sat at about 1.00x. The median long video in the sample runs 3 minutes 24 seconds.
What this means for hospital marketers
- Treat Shorts as the main channel, and long videos as the library. Shorts bring in the views. Long videos are what a patient finds when they search a procedure or a doctor’s name, so make them searchable rather than chasing views on them.
- Post less, but better. The busiest channels get the lowest views per Short. Two or three strong Shorts a week, each answering one real patient question, will likely beat a daily stream of clips.
- Lead with explainers and procedure walkthroughs. They match or beat the channel’s own average. Keep them factual and non-promotional, avoid “best” and “No.1” claims, and avoid cure or outcome promises, which keeps you on the right side of NMC 2026.
- Do not lean on patient testimonials. They underperform and carry the most compliance risk. If you use patient voices, focus on process and experience, with written consent, and never on outcomes.
- Fix or close silent channels. A channel with no upload in a year still shows up in search. Either post a short, current welcome video and pin it, or point the channel clearly to the active one.
- Report views per video, not subscribers. Subscribers are a weak signal of reach. Track median views per Short and per long video month by month.
If you are planning paid support for your videos, my guide to YouTube ads for hospitals covers targeting and budgets, and the playbook on YouTube Shorts for doctors has scripting ideas. For the compliance side, see my study of doctor Instagram profiles under the NMC 2026 guidelines, and for the wider picture, my guide to medical marketing in India.
Download the data
The full dataset (CSV) has one row per channel in shuffled order: an anonymised reference, hospital type, specialty scope, subscribers, videos listed, long video and Shorts uploads in the last 90 days with cap flags, days since the latest long video and Short, the number of videos sampled, median views for long videos and Shorts, median long video length, the formats of the three most viewed long videos, and the collection date. It contains no hospital names, channel names, doctor names or cities. Collection date: 13 November 2026. The data is licensed under CC BY 4.0: you can reuse it with credit and a link to this page.
How to cite this study
Phogat, G. (2026). What hospital YouTube channels actually get watched: a 64-channel study of Indian hospitals. gauravphogat.com. https://gauravphogat.com/hospital-youtube-channels-study/ Data collected 13 November 2026. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Questions people ask
Sources and further reading
- CC BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org)
Both, for different jobs. In my study of 64 Indian hospital channels on 13 November 2026, Shorts beat long videos on median views at 59 of 61 channels, with 507 views against 94 for the typical channel. Use Shorts for reach and long videos for people searching a procedure or a doctor.
There is no magic number, but more is not automatically better. The median channel I studied posted 24 times in 90 days. The busiest group, multi-site chains, posted 58 times yet got the lowest median views per Short. Two or three strong uploads a week is a sensible target.
Format matters less than the medium. Against each channel’s own typical video, procedure and surgery explainers did best on long videos at 1.14 times the median, and doctor explainers sat at the median. Patient stories came in below it, at 0.93 times on long videos and 0.85 times on Shorts.
No. On the median channel in my sample, a long video got views equal to about 1.5% of subscribers and a Short about 7.5%. A channel with 100,000 subscribers should expect around 1,500 views on a typical long video, so track views per video rather than subscriber growth.
Testimonials and outcome claims are a sensitive area under the NMC 2026 advertising guidelines, so check the current text with your compliance or legal team before publishing. In my data, patient stories also earned fewer views than a channel’s typical video, so they are rarely worth the risk.
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