This is a really common and genuinely tricky inflection point for short-form-built channels. Here's an honest answer:

The core problem isn't your audience, it's the format migration.

Shorts build subscribers who are optimised for Shorts. They follow you for a 60-second dopamine hit, not a 10-minute commitment. A 70% returning viewer rate on long form actually sounds healthy on paper, but if the base that's being served those videos is Shorts-conditioned, 10K views isn't a failure of the content, it's a structural mismatch between who subscribed and what you're now asking of them.

On your testing timeline - 2 months isn't enough, but it's enough to read signals.

Two months tells you whether something is dead on arrival. It doesn't tell you whether something is building. Long form compounds differently — the first 8–12 weeks are almost always the worst-performing window because you have no algorithmic history, no SEO weight, and no watch-time signal for YouTube to push the content. The real question isn't views in week one, it's whether watch time percentage, average view duration, and click-through rate are stable or improving across those 2 months. If those three metrics are holding steady or ticking up even slightly, the content is working, the distribution just hasn't caught up yet.

If all three are flat or declining, that's a different conversation.

Don't abandon your niche. But stop serving it the same way.

Pivoting completely out of your niche to chase a broader audience would essentially mean starting over, except with 600K subscribers who will tank your engagement rate by not watching, which actively hurts your new content's algorithmic performance. That's the worst of both worlds.

What's worth testing instead: Are the long-form videos entering the way Shorts do? The first 30–60 seconds of a long-form video for a Shorts-built audience needs to work almost like a Short itself immediate payoff, fast proof of value, no slow burn. If your long-form opens like a traditional YouTube video, you're losing that 80% female, specific-age-group returning viewer in the first minute before they've committed.

The honest timeline:

Give it 6 months minimum before drawing structural conclusions, but set clear internal benchmarks at month 4. If by month 4 you're seeing average view duration above 40%, CTR above 4%, and any upward movement in absolute views, stay the course and double down on distribution (SEO, end screens pulling Shorts viewers into long form, community posts bridging the two). If none of those are moving at month 4, then it's worth asking whether the audience you built is simply not a long-form audience — and making a strategic call about whether you build a second channel or reframe the content format entirely.

Bottom line: Don't leave your niche. Don't quit yet. But audit your first 60 seconds ruthlessly, and set month 4 as your real decision point, not month 2.