YOUTUBE CHANNEL REVIEWS + LATEST UPDATES FOR SMALL CHANNELS

And we are live. Hey everybody, this is Roberto Blake. Hope you create something awesome today. Welcome back to the channel. Today we're doing another round of YouTube channel reviews. So the rules for YouTube channel reviews are in the description. We're gonna actually pop up some YouTube channels to review on screen. with super chats, and what I'm gonna do is make sure I give every creator something they're already doing well on their channel, something they should fix and change immediately. And then my most helpful piece of actionable advice, we're gonna try to keep these to about six to eight minutes a piece. We're gonna do five to 10 of these, depending on how many people show up. We're also gonna cover a couple of YouTube channel updates for you in terms of things. that have changed on the platform and any recent news that you might need to know about. There are a couple of policy changes on YouTube. There's also this new YouTube hype feature that we can talk about in the chat. Also wanna remind you guys to check out awesomecreatoracademy.com slash join to join the private membership group that is the Academy Pro group. We meet twice a week in the private Facebook group. We also get together on stream. Live in the private group and we review anybody's feedback that they need on brand deals and their sponsorship monetization Feedback on thumbnails titles etc. So we do that twice a week for the Academy pro group members exclusively So make sure you check that out Also, over on the awesomecreatoracademy.com website, we have a ton of free articles and videos for you. We even have the most up-to-date data on the YouTube channels that have 1 million, 10 million, and 100 million subscribers, 100,000 subscribers as well. Also, we also keep a tally of just roughly... how many YouTube channels there are in the world worldwide, and we are the number one ranked source on Google and your favorite AI tools for that kind of information. So make sure you're checking out awesomecreatoracademy.com, seeing everything we have to offer there, both free and paid, and make sure you're checking out the pro group. Also wanna give a huge shout out to our friends sponsoring the stream over at one of 10. This is actually a really good tool and resource. We've actually demoed this on the channel before in terms of its ability to help you generate ideas, titles, and thumbnails. And so this tool is actually pretty clutch and it works out really well. So make sure you check that out over at oneof10.com. If you use the code Roberto at checkout, they give you 20% off. So this is actually a really good tool. We'll show you what it comes up with for this other faceless channel that I have here in a bit. So we'll circle back to that when the ideas are generated and ready. And you'll get to see that at some point in the stream so you can actually get a taste for how this tool actually works. You can see it with your own eyes and you can try it for yourself. So we've got a lot of interesting things that I wanna talk about tonight. But if you're looking for a channel review or you missed out last week. while I was doing channel reviews from VidFest, where I was speaking on stage, then this is your chance to get in a channel review tonight if that's something you had wanted but you missed out on. Also, shout out to all our mods. We're gonna try and get timestamps for you later after the stream so that you can go back and you can watch the channel reviews. If you were reviewed, then we'll be able to make sure that you can find your review for replay purposes whenever you wanna take a look at it. So that's what we'll be doing. And again, shout out to our good friends over at One of Ten for sponsoring tonight's stream. And they sponsor most of our channel review streams. So that always helps. Let's see what's going on over here in the chat. We got James Kim with a $5 super chat just saying, thanks, have an awesome stream, brother. Appreciate you, man. Thank you so much. That's really nice of you to do. So let's see. We've got a couple of other people in the chat. We've got some channel members here. That's cool. Oh yeah, for the channel members, I did post the first of three of my keynotes for channel members went out this week so that you can watch my keynote from VidFest. So that's something that's available for the members to go ahead and watch that. If you haven't seen the update go out yet for that. So wanted to make sure you guys were getting that and that you realize that, yes, I do keep the members only content flowing. Stanley Archer, good to see you, man. Hope the fishing channel is going well. Feel free to put in for a review if you want. We've got Blueprint here. What's up? Hope you're doing well. I think last time I checked on you, the channel is doing well. So yeah. First thing I wanna cover while we wait for the channel review submissions to come in and for people to get notified over on Facebook, LinkedIn, twitch.com, kick.com, and x.com. We're streaming on six platforms right now. I wanna talk to you guys about some of the updates to YouTube that everybody's been buzzing about. So interestingly, we recently had a update around the AI. the AI age verification. And I did a complete write-up for you guys over on Austin Crater Academy around this. Let's see here. And I think, oh wait, yeah, this is how I want to set it up. So let me just set up my screen here how I want it. Yep, this is good. So I actually did a write-up on the AI-powered age verification for you guys. You can check this article out that I did for free over on Awesome Creator Academy. I'm probably gonna do a video on this fairly soon because it's been a couple of weeks since this rolled out. So this rolled out August 13th, so it's been about roughly two weeks now, we could say. It's been two weeks. And this has not been a huge deal, but people made a huge deal out of it. Now, I would say that this was a nothing burger in terms of the AI verification. But a lot of people made a huge deal about this and blew it up. People were declaring this was going to be the end of YouTube. People were saying that this is going to destroy. youtube gaming channels this was saying i coach a bunch of gamers i'm actually coaching a whole new cohort of gamers uh with amg and supercell right now so i was coaching uh 10 creators when this was dropping and i'm coaching a new set of 10 creators now i have access to all their analytics i have the analytics of over 30 40 gaming channels that i can pull up anytime i want and this new age this AI-powered age verification has not hurt these gaming channels, even the ones that had significant audiences under 18. This has not hurt them. Most people I know who even watch varieties of content are not being impacted by this at all. And so this turned out to be a big nothing burger that everyone made a big deal about. But largely is gonna probably be better overall for the community in terms of filtering out some spam, filtering out some trolls, filtering out some users that just weren't adding any value. And so ultimately, this turned out to be not a big deal. But people were really enraged over it. And so this is what it could look like if this popped up on someone's screen. And the thing is, you would have access to 99% of the content or more on YouTube, even if you didn't do this age verification thing, which has a couple of things. And a lot of people brought up, oh, well, I'm worried about my information getting hacked. YouTube hasn't had a hack and information link for its users in the 20 years the platform has existed since February of 2005. It's like one of the only major platforms to not have that issue. So I don't know where people are like, oh, but it could happen. It's like, eh, if it hasn't happened in 20 years, I think we're probably in the clear. I don't think this is going to be the reason that hackers all of a sudden put in some extra effort, right? If anyone's ever super chatted or done a purchase through Google and YouTube, they already have your information. So they had a credit card, so they wouldn't need to. age verify you so it wouldn't affect you in that instance. You can literally just do a video selfie and it's not a big deal. They usually only keep this stuff two to six months. So, oh my God, my stuff is out here. It's like, really? Really? And then other people were like, well, okay, well the government ID, I'm not comfortable with having that. It's like, okay, cool. What content are you worried about watching that you're worried about being tied to that makes you afraid? to submit an id well no it's just that this is a line in the sand on privacy okay cool don't use the internet at all if you care about privacy because that ship sailed uh back in uh 2004 with facebook where you gave up a government dossier because you wanted to be one of the cool kids in college like so if don't use social media if you believe in privacy that's i'm telling you the truth here don't use social media don't use the majority of the internet if you actually care about your privacy you don't have it you care about your privacy don't use it don't Like, don't use a smartphone. I'm being serious. I think people think that I'm joking or being hyperbolic or prestigious. No, I'm serious. So, this was not a big deal. I did go through the trouble, though. If you want to check out this article, I'll link to it for you. But what I did was I sat here and I put together this article to answer basically any questions. you could have about this policy and its implications, both for creators and viewers. And so I'm dropping the link in the chat for you here so you guys can check that out. But basically, the way it works is YouTube is going to use AI and a variety of signals to determine whether or not you're potentially a viewer under or over 18. If you're worried about, well, YouTube's tracking all my information and all my viewer behavior, it's literally been doing that since the beginning to utilize its algorithm. Let's see. A couple of people are asking, how do I get a channel review? The rules are in the description. So literally just look in the description for the rules. It's not just that you submit a super chat. There are very, very specific rules. So that is in the description of the video if you want to check that out. All right, and I see Stanley got his in, so we'll do that here in a minute. But yeah, so with the age verification, YouTube has been using AI to track your viewer behavior in which you're watching the entire time. That's how the recommendation algorithm works. It's the whole point. So not having AI track you means you just basically don't have a YouTube algorithm. You would just use your subscriber feed. If you wanted to do that, you could have been doing that this whole time. You can disable your watch history. You can disable your watch history anytime you want, but you won't get a YouTube homepage with recommendations, and you won't get YouTube shorts if you disable your watch history. You will only be able to view YouTube videos by going to your subscribe feed and going to your search and searching out specific information and videos. So if you pause your watch history and your search history because you say you don't want YouTube to track you, you don't want Google to track you, you basically don't get to have a YouTube algorithm anymore. That's how it is. It's been that way for a very long time. It's been that way for like 10 years now. So this is nothing new. Now, they also will use your account age. So for a lot of us, our accounts, like you're not supposed to be able to have a YouTube account unless you're at least 13. So basically most of the accounts that are under five or six years are things getting flagged. Those of us who've had accounts for a long time. We will never see this. This is nothing we have to worry about. If you're one of the hundred million people using YouTube Premium, you got nothing to worry about. So again, this was something that affected or seemingly affected a very vocal minority of people. The majority of us here on stream that are adults just don't have to worry about this. In fact, the main vocal thing I said is this is a cultural schism between internet users over 30 and under 30. Weirdly enough, a lot of you may not believe this, but the millennials, we're the majority of internet users. We're the majority of users in the United States. We're the majority of population in the United States. We're the global majority population. For one of the first times ever in history of humanity, there are more people over 30 than under 30. You can take that how you want. I will tell you, if we're not at replacement rate, that means millennials. We're going to hold power. over everything in this world for about 40 or 50 years before any other generation ever catches up to us because we just don't have the numbers. We don't have the replacement numbers. So millennials will rule over this world for the next 30 to 40, sorry, 40 to 50 years, next 40 to 50 years. That's how it is. And if we figure out how to crack that code on immortality, we'll just rule in perpetuity like Emperor Palpatine was like, your feeble skills are no match for the powers of the dark side. So yeah, we'll do that. Like, we'll just build a Sith Empire. But I digress. My point is YouTube is doing this because it is unified with other social media platforms on this, largely because the governments of the world... want this and they can be regulated a lot harsher if they don't do this beforehand. So it makes perfect sense. The majority of you do not have a young audience in terms of viewers of this channel. So yeah, so this is, you know, so this is the key. One second here. Yep. So basically, so again there are three ways to verify government issued id verification selfie or credit card information just for age check and so i wrote up everything you need to know and basically in a q a style for this so any questions you actually have about this are in my article over on awesomecreatoracademy.com again this is a free article that any of you can check out and have access to so again i did the full write-up over on the website if you want to check it out and i believe it's probably one of the more recent articles that i've done so you know just something to check out there and let's see thank you home rapid repair as one of the mods for holding down the chat appreciate you and we're going to pin that message so that everybody uh can see the pinned message there for how the channel reviews work and we're going to go ahead and you do um stanley orchard's channel review here so stanley orchard thank you for the 20 super chat stanley says um oh also we got an error stanley says all right filming a once in a lifetime offshore trip on sunday give it to me Like I only got one shot at this. I want ultra critical. All right, Stanley. We got you. We got you. So let's see. We're going to grab the link to your channel. We're going to throw you up over to our review screen. And then we will do that. Let's see. And so we'll grab your channel for that. And then what we'll do is we will, after we're done with your channel, if we don't have another super chat right away, What we will do is we will, I just want to check on something here. We'll check on the results from our one of 10 tool if that's not finished yet. So let's go ahead and see Stanley Orchard, and we'll pull that up on screen. All right, so this is Stanley Orchard, the family that fillets together. Okay, I like, your banner actually um stanley um the one thing i would change is i might uh use the bold version of the text and in white with a light drop shadow so that's easy to read and stands out but this is pretty cool captures your personality profile pic looking like an absolute chad so uh well done there uh channel layout well let's go to your about section first um welcome to the best family fishing vlogs on the gulf coast join us for okay this is all fine and then your patreon jermaine link excellent um let's see you have this uh featured video here um instead i would actually lead with um this one of these more popular videos in the last two years, like this video that's popular from last two years, I'd probably lead with that as your featured video, if I'm being honest, versus this video that is, I guess, a music video you did that was a fun thing for you that was a passion project. I understand making passion projects, the featured trailer video for the channel. However, the most practical thing to do is a video that was received very well, shows you have credibility and can drive new subscribership. Channel layout in terms of playlist is mostly fine. So, but I would consider doing a curated version of your own popular videos. That way it's not just videos that are like super old and you could feature much more recent popular videos. Cause I'm sure you have some. So there is that. Vlogs in particular, whoops, and there goes my drink, and there goes my keyboard. I have to deal with that here in a second. We'll just try and deal with that after we get this from Stanley, and we'll just kind of go to a commercial break here in a second. But what I would say, Stanley, is if we look at the content here. Overall, this looks like solid content from a quality standpoint and editing standpoint. A lot of passion, a lot of love put into these, you can really tell. However, your big problem like most YouTubers is packaging. All of your packaging should really be as effective as it can be and it can be hit or miss with vlogs. If we go through your most popular stuff, I think the titles did it more than the thumbnails because I'll be honest. I don't think these thumbnails are any better or worse than the thumbnails you're making now, if I'm being honest. But I will say that your titles have to be what matters more and what matters most to the viewer. And so if we're looking at this and with your, by the way, with your number of subs, these views are not bad at all by any stretch of the imagination. They're actually pretty good. And you actually have quite a few over-performing, But you also need to, in my mind, be getting out content a little bit more regularly. And then also, if you're out as often on the ocean as I think you are, you need to do basically a catch and grill stream as often as you possibly can. Because people do like that. I would even consider setting up some kind of DJI action cam 5 or something that can live stream the entire time and mount that to the side of the boat and just run a separate stream for that every time you're out on the water in addition to these streams that you're doing. And then... So I would do stuff more like that because that's interesting. Recently, I had a student of mine set up a GoPro action cam in their chicken coop, and they've got almost 200 people a day watching that or the replays of what's going on with the chickens in the chicken coop. So they're a homesteading and farming channel with about 3,000 subscribers, and they've got about 200 people literally. come to a live stream just to watch the chickens in the chicken coop. So again, I think your bigger issue with a lot of this is packaging and also just inconsistency in the post as well. The quality is not your issue. So anybody, quality content, quality content, quality content. The quality of Stanley's videos is fine for what they are. In some cases, it's excellent for what they are. They're cinematic. They've got great action. They've got the storytelling. They've got, you know, literally, you know, fishing, diving. They've got everything you could want in terms of TV quality production, if I'm being honest at this point, for what it is. For a reality TV standpoint, I mean, you see it for your own eyes. He's not lacking in the quality department, nor is he lacking in the editing, the shots, the authenticity. None of that is his problem. So if um authenticity and quality was what got views stanley would have like a million of them so that's not the problem as per usual topic title thumbnail and timing you need to reverse engineer titles that are based either on your own best performers and or the best performers of your competitors now i think one of your issues with this is again um i think you're going out Making the best thing telling the story and then you're thinking of the packaging I want you even though you're vlogging I want you to intentionally go out with kind of a story or a narrative or a title in your head and I want you to plan your titles and Think about we're gonna do this thing for the shot for the thumbnail and for the shot for the payoff or whatever the most interesting thing I want you to go out there Thinking about what the shot for the thumbnail is going to be And whether it's going to be you holding a big fish, which isn't necessarily getting you the most views, but it does clear you over 10 when you have this big fish in somebody's hands. That does work. That gets you over 10K views. And you know that's what people want to see in the fishing niche. That's the payoff they're looking for. If you don't get the big fish, because sometimes you go out and that doesn't happen, you got to have an alternative idea for what the packaging and the title is. And so that could be packaging and titles where you didn't necessarily get the big fish. So maybe it could be about the location because that's also gotten you views in the past is the location. And then I would say also the shots where you're off the bow there with the reels do well also. So just actually doing the casting, the casting of the reel in the shot as the thumbnail also has been things that have allowed to overperform on your channel to get more views than you have subscribers but most of it is the catch of the day shot it's really the catch of the day shot so you have to go out there in my mind thinking about the catch of the day and what that payoff is because that's what people are looking for. The storytelling and people criticize that, Roberto, when will you talk about storytelling? Please talk about storytelling. Please talk about storytelling. Storytelling isn't just the traditional version of the hero's journey. In YouTube, a lot of times it can be problem process payoff. Here's this big problem and a problem isn't just, oh, hey, how to do something or a problem to solve in that way. Problem can be this big disaster or this big thing. that happened and then again we want the payoff so what's the payoff we got to go through a process to get there so problem process payoff um can definitely be a storytelling device in the traditional uh joseph campbell's hero's journey it's the call to adventure the conflict and then the conclusion so famously it's lord of the rings hey Um, we just found the One Ring and that the Dark Lord is coming back. That's a huge problem. That's our call to adventure. Gandalf has decided to summon a fellowship. Okay. The conflict. We lost, uh, Gandalf to the Balrog. The fellowship is broken, um, and the armies of the Dark Lord are on the move. The thrilling conclusion. Will Frodo succumb to temptation, uh, of the Dark Lord Sauron? Or will he cast off temptation and throw the one ring into the fires of Mount Doom from whence it came? That's the thrilling conclusion of the Lord of the Rings. So you have to think either in that framework of the hero's journey or it's problem process payoff. For most YouTubers, you're probably better off with problem process payoff because you're not making some epic thriller in most cases. So. You wanna think about that. From a packaging standpoint, packaging is always topic, title, thumbnail, and timing. So topic, title, thumbnail, and timing. Topics already kind of built in, except for when it's not, because it could be, in this case, the topic is spearfishing, which is different. And so that title pays that off. But here's that payoff shot in there in terms of the thumbnail. Because again, if you're a fisherman or a fisherwoman, What you want to see is you either got to tell me how to do something, show me we're going to a place that I wish I was fishing from today. Oh, I'm going to watch this because I wish I was there. I wish I was, you know, offshore on the oil rigs fishing. I wish I had that opportunity. It's wish fulfillment or, oh, wow, if I go out there, can I get that big catch? Or, hey, you're exploring this place. Oh, I've always wanted to go there. What's it really like? Or, hey, I want to know how to do that thing. Tell me how you did it. So again, you have to reverse engineer what it is that the viewer wants out of the content that they're watching. The content is already entertaining enough. It's interesting enough. The production is there. The editing is there. The quality is there. So your problem isn't quality. You've already succeeded in quality. Even the quality you had six years ago when you weren't as good at this as you are now and five years ago got massive, massive views. So I would recommend that you consider packaging and for most of it it's going to be the payoff it's going to be that big catch of the day so that's my advice to you stanley hopefully this resonates and hopefully you can take advantage of this like i said go out there with a story in your head and work toward paying that off but what did you guys think of stanley orchard's channel i think that for 6 000 subscribers even with his latest videos i think the views are doing good i also think that for a fishing channel these are evergreen views i think the quality and production and editing is good for that made for tv audience for youtube that cuts off of work puts youtube on their television on the big screen i could definitely see watching this on the 70 inch in the living room so i i do think that stanley's got the quality i think it's the packaging issue, and I think it's about positioning and targeting that for the audience. And so I think that that's what would make the most sense. But what do you all think? Do you agree with me? Do you disagree with me? Would you do anything different? Would you give Stanley different advice, or would you add anything that I haven't covered? Let me know in the comment section if you're watching the replay. Let me know in the live chat if you're still watching with us live. Boom, and there you go, Stanley. So that was our first channel review. Also, thanks to the mods for coming in here, Clutch. Real quick, I have to clean off my keyboard and desktop real quick. So I'm going to take a light break. And I think what I'll do in the meantime is we will play my book trailer in the meantime for my book, Create Something Awesome. And you guys can watch that. and chat amongst yourselves and the mods while I go and clean up my desk. I finally did it. I finished my book, Create Something Awesome, How Content Creators Are Profiting From Their Passion in the Creator Economy. The book is available now in paperback and in Kindle where you can read it on any e-reader or device. And I'm really excited about this. The audiobook is coming soon, probably October 2022. Oh my God, it's so great to be able to have this book done. put it up on the bookshelf, and to know that all of you who appreciate it, you want to hear what I have to say about the creator economy, becoming a full-time content creator, and what the experience and lifestyle of being a content creator actually is like. This is the book. I put 20 chapters in here of the most important things I think that content creators could be focusing on today. I talk about the mental health aspect of being a content creator, getting discouraged, imposter syndrome, not charging what you're worth, and mostly actionable advice around monetizing your content properly, but also how to build an audience on your authenticity and what it's really like to start from zero, even today. So if you're interested, make sure you're checking out the book. You can order it on Amazon. You'll also probably order it in a lot of other places like Barnes & Noble, and it will be coming to other bookstores soon. Really excited about it. Thank you for all the support and love around the book and the positive reviews. Now go ahead and pick it up and make sure you go out there and create something awesome today. Take care. All right, and we are back. I've mostly got this all cleaned up, and I believe... I managed to get most of this off my keyboard so my keyboard doesn't end up being sticky later. So that's going to be super helpful, I hope. But in the meantime, I see that Queen's Alchemy sent us a super chat. Home Rapid Repair Larry, one of our mods, was trying to send it. for you when you were having trouble with that so that you could still get a review. But what we'll do is, Larry, you can either tell me who you want to gift your review to since Queen's Alchemy got hers in, or we can review your channel. So it's up to you. It's your choice, my friend, in terms of how you want that to go. But I think I've got the keyboard mostly cleaned up here. So let's get that back over onto the desk. Again, thank you to everybody who has bought the book. If you've bought the book and you enjoyed it, but you haven't left the review on Amazon, I'd really appreciate that. Getting fresh reviews is always helpful. So thank you for that. And let's see, we've got a couple of y'all here in the chat. So in the chat, we're seeing it say, let's pick muscle in the mountains. Okay, yeah, we can do that. And I see we've got more of our mods in. We've got Katie Ukulele. Katie, when you get a chance, if you can help with the form for the channel reviews, would super, super, super appreciate that. Just whenever you get a chance. Oh, actually, I think you've already started, so that's great. Yep. I see that here. So yeah, that's going to be super helpful. Let's see. Queen's Alchemy. Alchemy says, no way alchemy says uh need advice on channel overall and how to keep you watching honestly don't know what request your um don't know what to do uh request your advice would be appreciated okay cool and then um larry from home rapid repair you're saying uh muscle mountain uh for uh for your channel review muscle in the mountains okay cool yep we can do that Yep, if you guys have not gotten the book yet, again, it is available everywhere that books are sold, primarily Amazon. And if you have bought the book before, please make sure you leave a review on Amazon if you haven't already. There are a lot of you who I know. bought the book but haven't reviewed yet stanley i know you did already so thank you for that my friend but yeah if you have read the create something awesome book and you haven't left a review yet would really appreciate that it always helps me out the amazon algorithm is super interesting at some point i might actually do a video about self-publishing how much putting your books on amazon actually pays you what the process is like um you know so i might do a video about that at some point But yeah, I just, I think that'd be super interesting. I don't know if people would be into it, but I find that kind of thing interesting. Similar to how we did a video on how much merchandise pays you when you do print on demand products. I've been thinking that a lot of people might actually care what you get paid for eBooks if you do them and print books and audio books. And I have all my data. I can show all my data on that. So that's actually something I think could be interesting. But let's go ahead and review Queen's Alchemy's channel, and we'll go ahead and knock that out. So here we have Queen's Alchemy's channel. About 1,300 subscribers, 320 videos. And your channel is about... Your journey, reclaiming your health, transferring your life in all aspects, mind, body, and spirit. I would lead with that instead of the peace, love, peace and love, beautiful souls part and literally just go what your channel is about. Then you can add all of that and that's fine. Having your email there for collaborations and things of that nature is fine. So yeah, excuse me. In terms of your banner, your profile pic is fine. In terms of the banner, I think that this could be better. And I think that it should convey more of what the channel's about. And if you have a schedule, I'd put that in the banner. I'd also just kind of put something in the banner that also tells people what the channel is about. So if this is a channel about health, wellness, and mindset, then I would put those things in the channel banner as text. um if this is something graphically that you struggle a bit with uh canva has some really good stuff um so like if you're a photoshop person my youtube starter kit does but um that's the thing so let's see what uh your videos are like um for a small channel these aren't bad it looks like a lot of this is uh food and a lot of this is also mindset a lot of youtubers when they start doing a channel uh end up wanting to talk about youtube and the channel my recommendation is that if you do that do members only content if you're monetized if not just put it on your instagram or something most of your viewers don't want to necessarily watch videos about something other than what your channel is about especially things that apply to other youtubers uh if you still feel like you like well i want to talk to other youtubers i'm hoping just to get some feedback and positivity i recommend you join our free discord server our creator foundations discord server is a place where you can connect and to some degree vent with other youtubers that might be more productive than um whenever you talk about youtube on your own channel because the audience largely doesn't really care about that meta stuff as much as we think they do um overall The topics you're picking around your content pillars seem to mostly be food focused. And I think that that's actually really strong. The other stuff here around mental health tends to do well. And anything that actually specifically can deal with the other aspect of wellness. So there's a couple of things here that I think are interesting. I think... recipes, wellness hacks or health hacks. So recipes and food that is organic and healthy, good food that still tastes good, that's a content pillar for you. And also, you know, basically authentic food. So it looks like you're doing some of these really good recipes, but you're making them vegan. So I would actually look at this and I can't tell for sure. What your background is but like it's possible I think that you might have a Caribbean background, but I'm guessing but if not it's okay, but here's the thing you do have what feels like a lot of these very interesting and I see a couple of things here that like leading toward Potentially Caribbean food. My family is Panamanian Jamaican for example What I would say is if you can think of really popular dishes on YouTube, and you can find very popular dishes and recipes that people want that are on other YouTube channels, I would take those and then do those very things that are popular that month or that week, but vegan. But vegan, right? If you're big on the vegan thing, then I would be like, okay, this is how you do a green chili curry, but vegan. like I would do vegan, you know, like vegan, like it wouldn't be curry goat because you need a vegan alternative. But the way I would have to title the video is vegan curry goat and rice. You know, and then it's like, how do you make vegan curry goat and rice? And then you explain that you're substituting the curry goat for something else. So I would do things like that. You know, so I would do, very popular recipes that are popping on some major food YouTuber's channel, but then do the vegan version of that while it's popping, because maybe you end up in the suggested or recommended algorithm for that YouTuber, or... The people who like that youtuber but want a vegan version for whatever reason will have somewhere to go to So that's why I would consider doing that as one of your content pillars. The other one would be health hacks. So for health hacks, I think that the The stuff that you have here like the detox green juice Could do well That has almost as many views as you have subscribers. That could be an evergreen video. Again, I think the bigger problem here, though, is the packaging. I think this should have just been a widescreen shot photo that could have been really good. And then I think it could have been a really good photo. and then it could have been this text, but it could have been laid out a lot better because this is just a little bit cluttered. This thumbnail is probably a two out of five thumbnail, yet it almost got you a thousand views. If this had been a four out of five or a five out of five thumbnail, it could have gotten 2,000, 3,000, or even 5,000 views because people were interested in it, but the thumbnail just wasn't selling it. You're also, your face in here is covered up by the thumbnail. For the food stuff, you don't need to be in the thumbnail if you're talking about the food stuff. The food stuff will let it sell itself. Same thing for the health hack stuff. It'll sell itself. So there's that aspect of it. If we go through, so that's two content pillars right now. So you've got vegan food and you've got health hacks. And then, let's see. I would say, Yeah, this herbal teas, this is more of the health hacks thing. Same thing with this why I walk every day. It's a health hacks thing that's not related to food. That makes sense for you to be in the thumbnail per se. But honestly, I would have done a closeup potentially of lacing up your running shoes as the thumbnail or lacing up your walking shoes as the thumbnail. And then I think that's could have done better. So there's things like that. Let's see. From a lifestyle standpoint, because you like to share a lot, you could just do some lifestyle vlogs, but you would have to title them on something that could be very interesting to your audience. And so it'd be less about a title that expresses yourself. You can do that on camera. You can express yourself on camera, but a lot of you get vlogging wrong because you should make a title. that is interesting to your audience instead of a title that is about expressing yourself. I'll give you a primary example. A title that balances that, if it were me, for example, if I did a vlog, a vlog you guys would actually probably watch would probably be a vlog where the title is, you know, building my dream YouTube studio in my basement. and then a shot, a wide shot of just how that build out is going or a before and after shot would be the thumbnail. That's something I could entice you guys to watch that makes you feel like you'll get something out of it instead of it's just all about me because that'd be interesting and appeal to a lot of you, right? So for something like this. I would use a factor like your age, and I don't know how old you are and it doesn't say in your videos, but I would say, I would do a vlog and it would be about your life as someone your age or a woman your age and something that you're doing to improve your health or your longevity. That's a vlog that an older, more mature audience would want to watch. A vlog, if you're doing a shopping haul where you're going to Aldi's or to Trader Joe's to buy things to help you with your health or with a health issue is a vlog that people would actually watch. So I also think people love grocery shopping hauls. And then if you're doing the vegan angle of vegan grocery shopping hauls. then that's also something people do on watch. So that could end up easily being a fourth content pillar there. So from a strategy standpoint, these are the different things that I would probably do for your channel. But also a big part of it, huge part of it, is just getting the packaging better. And I would focus on photography-centered stuff. Even this easy vegan burrito, the shots here are a lot better than the thumbnail itself. So again, this thumbnail isn't the worst, but it's like, there's so many things that could have made the thumbnail better. So again, I would have really, for you, I think the biggest issue is focusing on packaging. I think that is for a lot of people, but also organizing your channel and prioritizing what your videos are gonna be about and being consistent with them. So that'd be my thing. And I know everyone keeps saying, um thumbnails and titles but again i also said it's about your content pillars and the strategy of what will attract this audience because the audience for this is largely a women over 40 audience and therefore you have to prioritize that identity in the videos from a title and a thumbnail perspective most of you a lot of your issue is um like identifying with the audience and making who the audience is extremely and abundantly clear in your content. And so I think that's what has to happen here. Incidentally, for 320 videos, I don't think a thousand subscribers is bad. And your shorts are not doing terrible either. And so you should keep doing what you're doing with your shorts for a lot of you. if you want to express yourself shorts is probably the best content for just doing your personality if you're going to do edited videos edited videos should be intentional and if you want to express your personality a lot of you should just do it in youtube shorts and that probably is the best thing you can do for your audience and also vlogging in shorts in terms of hey this is what i'm doing today hey this is what i'm doing hey i'm doing a series like this works um and this kind of vlogging style through short form works on tick tock and youtube as well also instagram reels so i would encourage a lot of you to explore that so those would be my thoughts around queen's alchemy and her youtube channel but what do you guys think do you agree with me do you disagree uh would you do anything different would you give different advice let us know in the comment section if you're watching the replay let me know in the live chat if you're watching us live oh i wanted my air horn not my other one so yeah that is um that's what we've got there Let's see. Katie, we can do... Do we have 10 or did we get past 10? Because if we have 10, I will do 10 tonight. I'll do 10 channel reviews tonight if we have 10 channel reviews tonight. Oh, we have 6 so far? Yeah, 6 is fine. Because we're on to number 3. We started relatively early. I'm good for this. So I think we're fine. Yeah, we're only an hour in and we're on number three. So I'm fine if we're at six of these so far since we went to over five total. So we do have four slots. I saw that we have decks not Dexter in in the chat. So if he wants to get in, we definitely can. I saw we got some other super chats. So we've got four more slots. for people who are looking for them. But Queen's Alchemy, hopefully my review made sense for you. Yes, this is available to rewatch later. The replays are always up. We have multiple replays. So yeah, we definitely have that. One of the other things is, again... if anybody's like um does the advice work we have plenty of people that have done channel reviews and um thanks to katie we're tracking it now we have people who've done channel reviews before and they come back weeks later and we actually see the channels are growing um like ask papa ask papa came here with like 3 000 subscribers he's at like what 28 000 30 000 something like that now so um we have that We've seen even growth from DexNotDexter as he's trying to figure out his content. He posts quite often. So we've seen him and others return to the channel before. And so we've seen people taking the advice and getting growth from their channel reviews. and from the advice we've seen it working in real time and so we know that everything we're talking about isn't outdated the other cool thing is i try to focus on evergreen strategies because i don't want you to be dependent or need constant reassurances that's why i tell you things like okay build content pillars focus on who your audience is and what they want the more and the most and build five or six content pillars uh for your format for your uh format of videos long form live stream whatever and then okay now your audience knows what to expect from you you know what to expect from yourself you can plan your videos and your ideas in advance i tell you build a thumbnail system instead of making every single thumbnail completely from scratch build a system start the branding hey use the vibes framework use these five or six fonts um and only lock in on two of those fonts out of those these are good easy to use fonts hey layout you do your layouts we went through and we showed you guys how to do proper thumbnail layouts and why we put the text on the top and why we put the text closer to the left is so we don't hit the youtube time um stamp in the bottom right with the most important stuff we've talked to you guys about split thumbnails um and thumbnails that use a one-third space uh we've talked to you about uh multi-aligned thumbnails so we've actually even done full free thumbnail workshops. There are three hours, four hours right here on stream. We've done multiples of those so that you guys know exactly how to do it. We've shown you how to use ChatGPT live in our title workshops for how to do that. In fact, I actually have a weird idea that I want to pitch you guys. So I have two weird ideas to pitch you guys for potential future workshops. They'll be most likely sponsored by our friends. over at oneoften.com. You want to check them out. Use code Roberto to get 20% off. But the thing that I want to pitch you guys is this. I'm thinking of bringing on, doing a three-week series, technically a four-week series. Three-week series, three creators a week for three weeks, and then a cohort kind of graduation on week four where we will do a title lab. We'll do a YouTube title lab where I will sit down here on the live stream, bring three creators per stream on live, and we will workshop together as a group where I will lead kind of as the professor and we'll workshop as a group and look at their titles and they will sit there and we will craft titles and we will all talk about how to improve their titles one by one until three of these creators have a better system. for their titles and how they're doing their topic selection and how they're formulating their titles that's rock solid they'll be able to get feedback in real time from the chat of oh yeah i'd click on that or oh that makes sense or oh that's pretty clear or oh why did you pick that and we'll workshop their titles so we'll do a title workshop we'll do a title lab we'll do a youtube title lab and we'll workshop their youtube channels um titles specifically and we'll do three of them live three weeks in a row get through nine creators and i'm not pitching this as the next uh workshop per se but it might be it might be close um and we'll do it and then on week four we'll have everybody come back kind of for a graduation so we'll literally have 10 people probably on live stream myself being the 10th and we'll um schedule it and then we'll have everybody go over what they learned how it helped them whether it's already improving the channel uh with what they've put together and we'll be able to see the results from the title lab workshop and basically doing a small micro group cohort for that and you know we'll see in real time how those creators now again i'm going to be very selective of who i pick for that because i'm gonna be selective about who gets to be on my channel live who gets to share my platform with me who gets to share a stage with me also their microphone quality's got to actually be not trash so i'm gonna be very selective of who i pick for that but that's my um plan is to uh pick uh nine total creators three per stream and then have nine of them together on the final stream and uh do it that way and uh you guys will get to see us work together just improving their title formulas and workshopping their titles so that would be you know a plan that I have for that I'm also considering a variation of this with a thumbnail lab where in real time we work on people's YouTube thumbnails or we do a different thumbnail lab and i recreate a thumbnail system for somebody's uh youtube channel with their permission and with some photos and stuff like that here's how i would make their thumbnails and why i would make them this way we might do that um so i've considered doing that um as a potential thumbnail lab where i show you what a thumbnail could be in a creator's niche and how it would be made. So it's either that I work with a creator for that, that one might be a little trickier to do, or I just use a prompt in terms of a cue prompt for me, not an AI prompt, but a prompt of, here's a YouTube channel, how would you make thumbnails if you were a YouTuber in this niche and you guys could literally sit there and watch me from start to finish make thumbnails in... um a couple of different styles for a youtube niche and i'll just sit there and uh work on thumbnails uh 30 to 90 minutes at a time and just make different thumbnails completely from scratch in photoshop for different youtube niches and you would see how i'd approach each of those so that's something i've thought about doing um again at some point a thumbnail lab working with the creators. I have to figure out the logistics of a thumbnail lab working with the creators because them not having the ability to easily share or screen share their software or work on it might be a problem. Then also, I'm not sure how helpful me just recreating their thumbnails for them is as an instruction. Maybe it's a good instruction. Maybe it's not. From a skills perspective, because it'd be me doing the work for them. I don't know if that improves their skills. Seeing what something good could look like and what the technique is, is maybe helpful. But and letting them ask questions or why I did that and get commentary from them on their brand. Maybe it's good instruction for working with a thumbnail designer or a thumbnail artist. Maybe it's good for that. But I'm not sure exactly how the thumbnail lab will work. I know how to do thumbnail workshops for you guys and train you how to make better thumbnails. But your skills and level of ability or software may vary there. But it'd be interesting maybe to see me in collaboration with another creator making a thumbnail that improves upon their channel and their style. Maybe the exercise there is, okay, I'm going to teach you how to properly work with a thumbnail artist. I'm going to act as your thumbnail artist, but I'm also going to be the art director, which means you're not going to be the client pushing me around. I'm going to be the creative director telling you how to get your stuff to not look bad. So that would be the difference. So those are my two pitches for you guys is Title Lab. and thumbnail lab um so i don't know what you guys think about that um let's see we got some more super chats i think we're almost uh out of slots i think we are now at seven super chats now with dex not dexter and i think um we have three slots left so um home rapid repair is giving kids because we did queen's alchemy he's giving his to um um Muscle in the mountains, who's up next. Then we've got Nad Naps, which is mostly a gaming channel. Then we've got Blueprint. And this is a good follow-up since we did his a year ago. And then we've got My First Rodeo. Full-time Van Lifer. Nice, we haven't had a Van Lifer in a while. And then we've got DexNotDexter, who's covering AI news. So, yeah. So, we've got plenty. uh channels here to review uh so we might as well get to it so let's go ahead with muscle in the mountains and then after muscle in the mountains we'll see how our results came back from our friends over at oneof10.com so we got muscle in the mountains i love this banner I cannot stress enough how much I love this banner. And I do actually love this channel icon, even though it's repetitive of the banner. So this is speaking to me. I actually really dig this. So well done. Well done. Classic car and car show videos, Muscle in the Mountains Magazine is the automotive branch of Tap Photography by Andy and Ashley Phillips. Sounds like a husband and wife operation. Ashley and I both live a love of classic muscle cars our entire lives, as our first cars were 96 Chevrolet and a 65 Mustang. Okay, great. So I think this is pretty solid. 34,000 subscribers, 1,300 videos. You're leading with a car photography shoot from... about two years ago my recommendation might be a more popular recent video that is converting probably this best of spring would probably be a better featured video because this one's a little dated and you did i guess you wanted more views on that one but this one already has views so lead guys with a featured video that can turn more viewers into subscribers as your featured video um let's see You could probably put a few of these playlists that are good on the homepage to fill it out a little bit more, but overall this isn't too bad. Let's look at the titles and thumbnails and the overall strategy and see if there's any improvement here. Something I would say is you don't necessarily need, I get where you're going for with the branding, but the branding is obscuring. more of the room that you could be using for the photography if you're leading with text at the top. So I would actually ditch your logo from your thumbnails. You don't need your logo in your thumbnails anymore. What I would say is that the logo in the thumbnails and the banding at the bottom of the thumbnails for this is completely obscuring. the beautiful photography that you have, and we don't need you to do that, and that you'd be able to move down that photography and get more of it into the shot so that when you do these titles across the top, and I'm fine with the titles across the top, I just want you to stick to one font for that. And the font that I think you should probably stick to for that, if I'm being honest, is probably, the right font for you guys is probably either Oswald Bold or Poppins Bold. to be honest and you can put that right across the top put no more text on the bottom and just use this beautiful car photography that you have because you guys have great photography and you're um wasting it and killing it by putting uh too much of a cluster of text um and the bottom and in the corner here and it's going into the time stamp where we can't read it you don't need all of that just put the model of the car or the most important thing at the top and you can even put a heavier drop shadow behind it so it pops off there and that just give us that gorgeous classic car photography in your style with the beautiful contrast saturation uh i'd sharpen it up a little bit too um but yeah um beautiful shots here gorgeous photography but again uh the improper use of fonts and text placement is um overshadowing some of it and it's not helping anything so focus on that gorgeous car photography uh same thing for putting your face in the thumbnails again your placement here isn't bad but it's just not adding enough value uh we're here for the gorgeous cars and you're gonna probably be in the video so um no need to be in the thumbnails as well just show us those beautiful gorgeous classic cars and your amazing photography shots of that because that's your product that you really sell here so um that would be the key um in terms of the titles these titles where you're only putting um the car make name year and model in the title um isn't enough you lost a 5x to 10x of your view potential by not telling a story in that title instead of just saying, oh, this is what the car is. So missed opportunity on some of those. However, these aren't so old that you can't go back and update them. It's not about refreshing it for the algorithm. It's about the fact the algorithm is already still giving you impressions on those videos. You could just start getting more clicks and the clicks are what will redistribute it in the algorithm, not changing the title. It's that anything that gets more of a response, AKA, oh, people are clicking on this more now. is what will have it resurface in the algorithm, not changing the title. So you change the title to get more humans to click. You change the title for the audience. You don't change the title for the algorithm. If the audience responds, the algorithm will follow. That's how it works. So it's not about re-indexing or resurfacing or re-triggering the algorithm. I'm going to talk to someone from YouTube and see if I can interview someone on the algorithm team for YouTube so we can finally put that rumor to bed so that we can just have a video on my channel where someone from YouTube tells you that that's not how it works and here's why. And then we can just put that rumor to bed forever because I've been told personally in private that by people at the company that that's not how it works. I talked to one of the main product engineers about that. So just so you know. um again gorgeous photography for these thumbnails largely being undermined by the placement of the logos and text not always and again some of the views are okay even with that but it's possible they could have gotten 3x 5x or 10x more views without it um your photography you and your wife what you do is amazing this is really good content evidence of that is your most popular videos content and the fact that this content wins in spite of imperfect thumbnails just based on the interest and the fact we could see how good the video and photography is going to be. But imagine this video could have been a hundred thousand view video, probably still could from four months ago and still getting some decent views. Imagine if most of this hot rod video is just us seeing. these gorgeous cars. If you're gonna have this road run logo, put it in the bottom left corner here where it's not hitting the YouTube timestamp and where there's nothing here except for a shadow anyway. You can cover up those shadows with that logo, shrink it up by about 50% if you gotta have it and that's fine. Then you get to just have the for sale up there. You can maybe move the cars down slightly a hair, maybe move it down by about 5%. and then boom you've got this gorgeous shot with all the roofs up and we can actually see it you still have the logo in there and it's covering up the shadows of the people on the uh road which we don't need don't care about so that would um actually uh do better same thing for the best of spring here um we don't care about the road on the in the bottom left corner in terms of um the pavement we don't care about the pavement we do care about everything else take the rod run logo shrink it down 50 put it in the bottom left corner if you got to have it there so um that'd be a massive immediate improvement on those videos that are outliers for you they're still getting views from four months ago so again something to think about um overall i think this is a strong channel with uh potential i think it's a great brand and i think that The main thing is just to show off the gorgeous photography that is your strength that other people do not have here. And I think you'll do well. So yeah. So that would be my overall thought about this channel. Overall, well done. There is room for improvement there, like I said. But what do you guys think of muscle in the mountains? Again, I think that their biggest issue... largely that for what their value proposition is in the packaging that value proposition gets a little bit undermined and a lot more of their videos could be getting three to ten times the views I also think it's worth a B testing different shots different angles of the photography these cars and then seeing if the a B testing gets a better response in terms of which things do better and perform better with the audience in terms of click-through rate there because with photography i know personally that with photography you shoot so much with your camera that it's worth exploring just how different shots might um you know get a different response and that you can a b test things um you know just literally a red car might do better than a yellow car sometimes so just doing the a b test and seeing which one got a significantly higher click set of watch time or click-through rate or whatever would probably be better in terms of looking at that and could probably be very helpful in this case. So what do you guys think? Do you agree with me? Disagree with me? Let me know how you feel about that in the chat if you're still watching live. Let me know in the comment section if you're watching the replay. And that is our review of Muscle in the Mountains. Can you change old thumbnails or just titles? Actually, you can change old thumbnails and you can change old titles um and again um i have a uh background in photography as well as graphic design uh primarily those of you familiar with me would know that um i largely have shot um wildlife i like doing a lot of stuff but outdoors wildlife landscapes but also some portraits as well in fact probably can do this let's see here i actually think i have I'm probably actually share some of it and probably would be pretty easy here now that I think about it to do that I Think that I can show you guys some of my portrait photography on screen real quick. I also think I can share with you some of my Outdoor photography. I'm gonna have to do this really quick because I also think Air dropping for my phone is gonna be limited here a minute Because the battery is dying. Just to show you what I'm talking about. Because, again, I think a lot of people actually, because I'm the kind of person who makes my art stuff more for myself. So a lot of people think that I mostly monetize information and I don't actually ever make anything. It's just that the stuff that I actually make. I kind of am a little more selfish, let's say, about my art. And seeing my art would mean you have to kind of come and visit me if you're allowed to. And then you'll see the photos that I hang up in the house and the paintings I have in the house. People go, where can you buy it? Where can I buy that? Oh, I like that. You can't. I made it. You can't. It's like I'd have to gift you one. So it's that sort of thing. So I'm kind of that kind of person that... um i think a decade ago i was more into sharing my personal photography and art on social media in fact i believe i even did some of my early tutorial content around my own artwork but um you know um especially back then the internet's not always this wonderful nice place and it doesn't matter um how good you are at anything there's like just some people who will never be happy or never um give you an encouraging word so you know you get to a place to where you just don't feel as an artist many of you probably can relate to this there's a point where sometimes you just don't feel like sharing after a while um now in terms of portrait photography i believe that i can show you guys this is like um something i shot um i believe this was with the sony a7r3 at um portraiture and model event so that would be an example of some of my portrait photography I have a wildlife shot here that I can show next let's see I love that stream yard lets me just actually pick individual image files and share those now so that's convenient let's see hmm I could probably I don't know if this will get distorted by stream yard or not but this is one of my favorite um nature shots um i forget what type of bird this is but i like doing birding and this shot is something i'm particularly uh proud of in terms of something um that i shot that i think came out really well um so you have that one yeah i feel like it's a good shot i think like it's representative of what i'm capable of um in terms of photography. And I believe I shot that with my Sony 200 to 600 millimeter lens. If I was going to show you something else representative of my photography, let's see. This is another portrait shot, same model, different portrait shot. So yeah, I think that one is pretty solid. Good detail there. yeah yeah no this model i forget her name this was several years ago um but this was actually um you know i i feel like uh potentially one of my uh better shots from that particular shoot um let's see probably share one or two more um let's see and then we'll go back to channel reviews i just think it's interesting because again um i think it does um somewhat Help you guys to just kind of know what my previous background was kind of like in terms of Photography. Oh, this one is one of my favorite shots of my youngest sister This was shot with the 100 millimeter G Master STF lens So this one really came out really well in my opinion for what that was. So that was a good one. So another nature shot here that I was thinking of showing you guys. I have some really unique nature shots that are pretty hard to come by. I think showing you guys... Oh, actually, I can show you guys two more. I can show you this ape shot that I did, and then I can show you the turtle. Actually, we'll show you the turtle first. This is one of my favorite shots. So, yeah. So like I said, I have a background in, you know, photography. I have a background in graphic design. I was doing this stuff before YouTube existed, believe it or not. Thankfully, YouTube helped me get better camera gear. But yeah, so from a creative standpoint, I know it's easy to say, oh, you know, do you actually make anything? and those who can't do teach. And again, I'm not trying to be hyper defensive about it. I'm just like, I've been doing this so long that I think a lot of my audience just is not familiar with the fact that I used to actually, once upon a time, I actually used to share this stuff. And then I just got to a place to where it just didn't feel like I was getting anything out of sharing it versus creating it. And I just decided to just create for myself and just help other people who do want to share what they make do that. a lot more so i again i'm more passionate about um the thing i'm passionate about sharing is my knowledge i'm not that passionate about sharing my own art i'm much more selfish and guarded with my art my art is very important to me so i just decided a certain point that i wasn't getting anything about me I decided I wasn't getting anything out of being vulnerable with strangers on the internet when it came to something I deeply, deeply cared about. And that was making me feel discouraged about the thing I deeply, deeply cared about. A lot of people didn't think that my art and photography was any good and were very happy to tell me that they didn't think it was any good. And I, you know, it made me discouraged about even making it. So I decided that it's better to stop sharing it than to stop making it. And I decided that, okay, i'm more sensitive about my art than i am about my work my work work so i just kind of put a boundary in place where i decided that i'm more comfortable to share what my knowledge is and my skill set is and do that than to share personal things that are very very deeply important to me and be vulnerable with strangers on the internet who Sometimes they're just trolls or just mean spirited. And that made it easier to just keep doing art. So for me, you know, I decided to focus on the professional and knowledge angle of my skill set and to share the knowledge base. And in terms of showcasing anything that was important to me personally, I decided to kind of cut that back to the bare minimum that I have to. And that's kind of where I leave it. But once in a while, I'll just kind of like, you know, throw it out there. And this is just like one of those moments where, you know, I kind of felt comfortable to do it. And largely it's because Muscle in the Mountains, I'm really a fan of what they're doing with the channel and their photography. I feel it's like really, really great. And so sometimes I'll see something like that and I'll be encouraged or inspired to share, oh, well, here's what I like shooting. you know, when I have a chance. So it's that sort of thing. But for those of you interested in like, well, why does he say this? Or why does he know that? It's like, I've been doing photography since I was a kid. So I've been doing that. I started developing film in the dark room when I was like eight or 10. I've been coding since I was 13. I'm 41 now. So this is decades now. I've been a Photoshop kid since I was 15. So I've been using Adobe products for over 25 years. So And I did this for work in corporate America as well. So that's where my formal background comes from. It was on the job and I was passionate about it since I was a kid. And I've literally been doing this for like three-fourths of my life. Everything that I'm talking about, I've been doing this stuff for 30 years. Like 25 to 30 years, a lot of it. So, you know, that's where it's coming from. Oh, yeah, I'm nothing if not good at compartmentalizing. Compartmentalizing might as well be my middle name instead of Enrique. So, yeah. Yeah, no, it's cool to see that some of you have been following me for over a decade. So, yeah. Absolutely. Yep. Yeah, a lot of you say that you like the turtle shot. Yep. No, thanks for the compliments. Let's see. We have someone saying, I have a music channel. No one wants to hear positive music, it seems, but if you're interested, check out the music channel. Okay, so that seemed like that was more promo than anything. Yep. Let's see. It looks like we have... According to Katie, we've got three slots left, so I'm going to go ahead and get through the next couple here, and then we'll see if those three slots fill up. But yeah, I thought that that was just kind of like a cool quick detour. We'll get through two more of these, then we'll actually go and pull up what we got from one of ten from our experiment earlier. Let's see. So we have a gaming channel next. We have Nad Naps. So we've got Nad Naps. I actually really like this banner art. The one thing is I don't think it needs the old Twitter logo or the Instagram logo. I'd rather just see something that has the schedule for new videos every week or whatever. But other than that, really funny banner, really funny profile pic. I like that. I love making videos and have passion for gaming. Subscribe for more. All right. Simple, straightforward. And then you have your own website. Appreciate that. So let's see. You got a video from two weeks ago. That is Who is NadNaps? And the thumbnail itself is just really intriguing. So I can see why people would click on it. You've got 3,000 subscribers, 136 videos. I think you said that lately you've been focused on shorts. So... We'll probably end up putting some of our energy into what's going on with your shorts. Let's see. How many videos here? 136 videos. So good amount of subscribers for 136 videos. Let's see. So you've got a bunch of playlists here. Let's go into the videos, and then we'll go into the shorts and just see what you've got. Let's see. Wu Chang, Fallen Feathers, Game... gameplay 4k um what i would probably do is i'll be honest with you um let's play videos are not really working as well right now unless you're already an established creator or you can be early to a game i'm not saying you can't do them i'm saying that for gaming we figured out some things and it doesn't have to be that you make tutorial content with the gaming but you do have to make something that would appeal to the majority of new players to the game and existing players for the game. So it's not that you have to do... It's not that you have to do gaming tutorials or something like that. But I think that if you want to do entertainment gaming videos, that there is an example I can show you. There is an example I can show you. But it might be... a little challenging or intimidating to go this route but it is the absolute thing you should be doing if you want to do a gaming channel that is not a tutorial channel um so i'm going to show you what that channel is and that channel for all you gamers out there if you want to be a successful gaming channel you should study the youtuber onion butter onion butter is my favorite example of how to make a gaming channel that is not a how-to uh channel and if we go and sort by most popular you'll see exactly why how i beat hitman 3 without killing anyone almost 10 million views so what you want to do is you want to do feats in a game that someone who is new or returning to the game or who's never even heard of the game would want to watch And I actually have another example about this that I demonstrated years ago before OnionButter. Another channel called EnterTheUnknown did this and redefined the entire Pokemon gaming niche. Everything that you know in the Pokemon gaming niche was redefined by one creator years ago that found an outlier and combined it with a viral vector. And it was a channel that I discovered when they were at 7,000 subscribers, but were killing it. And it's Enter the Unknown, but spelled without a K. And it's a Pokemon channel. They haven't hit 100,000 subscribers yet, but I think some of that is stubbornness and wanting to make Nuzlocke videos instead of just doing what works. No offense to them, because I really like their content. Sometimes creators are their own worst enemy instead of doubling down on what works. Still very good views for this channel, but they just decided that they didn't want to do the thing that they're known for because the thing that they're known for and the thing that they did that was smart was this, can you beat Pokemon fire using the exact team Ash used for blank? Can you beat this using the exact team that Ash used this format? And then can you beat Pokemon without... um using items can you beat a pokemon only gifted pokemon all that came from this creator a couple of years ago five six years ago uh when they had 7 000 subscribers they redefined the genre of pokemon gaming so why am i showing you these two channels and why are we not over here on your channel it's very simple for games that you want to do the answer especially with you reviving the uh the non-shorts content since you haven't done this in years The answer for gaming and for gamers is actually very simple. You have to create something that new and old players will want to watch and you have to accomplish feats in the game. So that's something like beating the game without using items. Trying to beat a game without using jump. Beating a game, like again, if it was me, it's like, can I beat Mortal Kombat without using jump? can i beat mortal kombat uh only using sweeps so i want to watch that someone will watch me cheese the game um you know um can't um someone uh doom the dark ages only using um the jump smash like things like that right um so even with this um these hitman challenges Can you beat Hitman with only bribery? Brilliant idea for a video. Can I beat Hitman without anyone seeing me? Someone could do this almost exactly with any of the Metal Gear games, for example. Now, I know that your thing is these horror games to some degree, and I'm not as familiar with these games, but I would say if you like horror games... I would challenge yourself to try to beat Five Nights at Freddy's without doing blank. Can I beat Five Nights at Freddy's without doing blank? Can I do this in Five Nights at Freddy's without doing that? Yeah. So it's that sort of thing. Can I... Finding a glitch in the game even or tricking... Oh, tricking Springtrap. into doing blank. There's all kinds of things that could be done. So the thing is, instead of with this Wu Chang Fallen Feathers gameplay thing, instead of, oh, 4K gameplay, you got 46 people to watch that. What I would probably do in a situation like this is I would either make it a feat in the game or I would try to use some method in the game to recreate a scene from the boondocks, and people would really be into that or something like that. And so for, like, even these other games, I would create some kind of interesting angle or create stakes with these games. Like, I showed you how they created stakes in these challenges with these hitmans. Like, you know, can you... you know can you beat it without killing anyone can you do it without being seen can you beat it like you're actually getting away with murder that sort of thing with the hitman stuff and then with the pokemon stuff it was well can i beat it um giving giving myself the original team from the anime or can i beat this uh without using items that sort of thing um So I would just use the strategy of making the game itself interesting to someone who's never even heard of the game or even someone familiar with the game that's coming back to it after years. So that's the kind of approach that I might use. That's the kind of approach that I might use. No, I haven't played the game Seven Days to Die before. So again, my standpoint is... that but let's look at your youtube shorts real quick since you said your primary focus right now is youtube shorts um so cyberpunk was i wrong for helping this okay so if you're gonna play cyberpunk specifically and i would do this for the long form i would actually do this for the long form is i would just create really weird scenarios in um cyberpunk because that's working for you in your short form i would do that in the long form um In the long form, with some of these games, I would use it or I would use meta commentary to make the games their own entertainment or even make them their own cinematic universe that's really funny. And if you want your stuff to be funny or really interesting, or you want people to like your humor, study CJ The Champ. CJ The Champ, spelled CJ and then The Champ, D-A-C-H-A-M-P, CJ The Champ. He is probably someone with the best comedic videos on YouTube in the... Primarily the anime community, I would say. So he's probably the funniest person in the anime community on YouTube. You probably could learn a lot from him in terms of the approach to story. I'll even take it further. Something in a game. If you find a game and you can make it interesting, you can literally do something like the... I think people will literally watch something like the seven most disrespectful moments and then whatever the game is. Or... Or the... seven most savage moments in blank as a game, and people would watch stuff like that. So you have an opportunity here, if you're trying to make something really entertaining and make it unique, I've given you some ideas of how you might accomplish that. But that's my take on this, like I said. It's not that Let's Play videos are entirely dead. They are mostly dead. And a lot of the reason is you can just watch a big YouTuber for a Let's Play channel on any game you can think of because then you have a guarantee of high quality, of it being interesting. Most people, unfortunately, don't take a chance on small channels that do Let's Plays. But they will take a chance on small channels if something looks like it's going to be hilarious or funny or outlandish or if there's an epic feat or an epic challenge. That's a good enough buy-in to take a chance on a small YouTuber that you've never seen before. A Let's Play video is not a good enough reason to take a chance on a small YouTuber you've never seen or heard from before. So just kind of think about that. And I think shorts and streaming. are a good strategy for building community. And I think that that's going to work for you. I am also thinking that your shorts views are actually pretty good for this. But what do you all think? Do you agree with me? Disagree with me? Would you give Nad Naps a different perspective? Or would you give different advice than what I gave? Or do you agree with what I said? Let me know in the comments if you're watching the replay. Let me know in the chat if you're watching live. You said, thank you. Shorts have been building steam lately. Yep, absolutely. Sounds like they need a Miracle Max. Yeah, because I said mostly dead for that is a Princess Bride reference. Thank you for that. For the Let's Play channels. Yeah, I actually coach a lot of gamers. Let's Play channels are mostly dead unless you're doing challenges, community-based collaborations, or unless you're a pro gamer that's ranked or you're doing something like that. But interestingly, Let's Play will work for live streams. Let's Plays work for live streams. but not necessarily for edited videos unless you're a highly skilled player or it's a completely brand new game and people want to find what's going on there. And incorporating Let's Plays, if you can do walkthroughs series-wise of a game through the sections and part of a game to completion of a brand new game early when it's released, then yes, some of that will work. And it depends. And the packaging's gotta be perfect, too. So, I would say that. But mostly, mostly, let's play videos. Largely dead genre on YouTube. Mostly dead genre on YouTube. It would take Miracle Max to resurrect it. So, yep. Have fun storming the castle. Princess Bride is actually one of my favorite films of all time, by the way. Princess Bride. Definitely as an 80s kid, one of my favorite films along with Never Ending Story. If I ever did get a horse, I literally would name my horse Artax. Actually, I probably shouldn't talk about Artax right now because if I talk about Never Ending Story and Artax, I might end up crying because that bloody scene in the Swamp of Sorrows would probably get me going because I get emotional about that particular film and that particular scene. Uh, cause it's a metaphor for depression as well. The swamp of sorrow, uh, God, I shouldn't talk about it. The swamp of sorrow scene in the never ending story, um, is a metaphor for, um, introducing kids into the idea of what depression is. Boy, did they hurt us with that one. So yeah, uh, one of my favorite films, never ending story, lady Hawk, Michelle Pfeiffer, classic Michelle Pfeiffer, lady Hawk and Robin White, right in, um, in the Princess Bride as Buttercup? Absolutely. So yes, those hold a special place in my heart. As hokey as it is, I really also like the 80s version of Masters of the Universe, even though it is completely a hokey film that has very little to do with the actual He-Man story. But yeah, I digress. We've got... What? One, two. We still got three reviews to go. We still got three reviews to go. Maybe one day we'll get together and we'll do some kind of 80s kids watch stream in Discord or something one day. Maybe we'll do that for the holidays. Maybe we'll do that for the holidays or something. That could be interesting. But I digress. We've got Blueprint. up next. And actually, we'll take a quick break while we bring up Blueprints channel. I need to get something to drink real quick. So in the meantime, you're going to learn a little bit more about Awesome Creator Academy. And then we will be right back after this commercial break. Becoming a content creator can be a very lonely process and adventure, but it doesn't have to be. When I first got started going from zero to 100,000 subscribers, I had to do it all by myself. I didn't have a community of like-minded and like-hearted creators to talk to or to ask for advice, and I certainly didn't have a mentor to guide me along the way. I built the Awesome Creator Academy Pro Group because when I was getting started, what would have meant the world to me is not to have to struggle alone when it comes to being a full-time content creator. If I had a community of creators that I could talk to and share information with, I would have avoided a lot of mistakes in my early career. And there would have been opportunities with brand deals where I would have gotten a better understanding of how to negotiate. And I wouldn't have undersold myself. I wouldn't have been taken advantage of in those early situations. So in the Awesome Creator Academy Pro Group, myself and our co-instructor Andy Rivera, we meet twice a week for office hours with our creators and we share information. We talk about how we're building our creator businesses and we offer constructive criticism and critique on the things that we're working on for our projects. You'll be part of a community of usually around 100 like-minded creators who are taking this seriously just like you are. You also have all access. as a pro group member to all of our past present and future courses training templates digital downloads and swipe files you have full access to our creator blueprints where you'll see our systems and the frameworks that we use to execute you know you always fall or rise to the standard of your systems a lot of people really underestimate how important that is we have digital download templates that can help you so you don't have to start with a blank canvas these done for you files are actually incredibly helpful especially for things like your thumbnails your media kits and anything you need for your branding as a content creator to look professional we have email swipe files that help you with reaching out to brands we have great information in helping you price yourself and build your packages appropriately and remember as part of the pro group you have the opportunity to ask questions from myself and all the other creators participating and so this means that if you need to ask questions about negotiation or a brand deal there's something you're not sure about trying to find a better monetization opportunity with merch or affiliates you have people who have done it before who are already making money that you can reach out to for advice as i said when i was starting out and i was flying solo this is the thing that i wish i'd had the opportunity to be a part of and would have made all the difference in the world in helping me be an even more successful content creator If you have questions, you can always reach out via support. We're happy to help you figure out if the pro group is right for you. Also, we do have the opportunity to become a VIP member if you also would like quarterly one-on-one coaching with me directly. Now go out there and create something awesome today and hopefully we'll see you in the pro group. Take care. Oh, we're back. Hopefully I wasn't sitting here in limbo too long. I was just bringing up our next couple of channels. Yeah, we have next up Blueprint. So let's go ahead and bring up his channel. Then we've got My First Rodeo. And then we have DexNotDexter. And then if we don't have any more, we'll be able to answer some last questions. And then we'll call it a night. So let's go ahead and bring up Blue Lion's channel. Sorry, Blueprint. So we have Blueprint. i actually love this banner this is actually pretty dope um so i really like that this looks like this is a motorsports channel um you already have time flies when you drive in the banner so i would actually just uh delete that and then get right to this uh you know i would get past the my name is anthony part and go um what your goal is uh to give you the most in-depth car reviews um day in the life vlogs camaro content and talk about anything in automotive i would just lead with that because that's the value for the viewer uh you could um bring up to the top your seasons and these playlists you bring those up more to the top and you'd move these featured channels down to the bottom people care a lot less about that good lead in with some of your most popular videos so solid there Let's take a look at what you got going on. So you got 5,000 subscribers, 400 videos. Nice, nice. Similar to what we talked about in a previous channel review, you actually have really good photography here. So I do like that. Here is the problem. I think it's the titles, if I'm being honest with you. I do think the titles are not doing... the photography here uh justice the storytelling in this no one is safe thumbnail um is doing a lot of work however i would shrink up the text so it doesn't hit the time stamp in uh this video in the bottom right hand corner because it is covering up most of that word um so for getting uh that many views in a day that's actually pretty good um Your most popular videos, let's see what's happening with your most popular videos. The Camaro content is really what's doing it. Now, again, in some cases you are undermining this great photography with the text placement, but you still performed regardless. But the Camaro content is actually the thing the viewers are absolutely the most interested in, and it's not even close. Your Camaro content gets more views than you have subscribers by a significant margin. And even two years ago, it was still performing. And so I think, and I assume that you yourself are a Camaro owner. Here's what my belief is. I know that you like making a lot of the different content that you're putting on the channel, obviously. I think that the channel... needs to have the following content buckets. I think it needs to be, um, I think it needs to be Camaro content, performance car reviews, Camaro mods, Camaro tips and tricks and how to's. Um, and I think that also for the audience, Because, yep, even this one is a how to remove the 6th gen Camaro front seat. Yep. So I think you have to become a destination channel and a much more narrow niche channel for Camaro enthusiasts specifically. And then compare other performance cars to Camaros. And so I think that's what this channel has to be. And I think it has to be Camaro vlogs as well. So I don't think regular vlogs are going to cut it. I think it needs to be Camaro vlogs. And I think it needs to be Camaro content every time. And I think it's not even close in terms of what most of the audience cares about and what built up the channel is the Camaro content. So I think it has to be Camaro breakdown videos, Camaro enthusiast videos, Camaro mod videos, Camaro how-to tips and tricks videos. I think it has to be comparing other cars to Camaros. I think the only other car content can be performance content. I also think modding Camaros and helping other people mod Camaros and going and getting parts from the pick and pull is going to be something that people would care about. So I think that this has to almost be... a car club channel for Camaro enthusiasts, because the views here don't lie in terms of what the audience cares about. Yes, there are things you could do that absolutely would improve your thumbnails, but that's not even what's hurting you here in any way, shape, or form. It's that you really, really just have an audience that is built around being Camaro enthusiasts, and that's the content they want. More than anything in the world, that's what they want, and they will reward you with... five and 10x more views than you have subscribers if that's all you give them um so i think that that's what this channel has to be and if you have other interest i think you have to do another channel for them if i'm being honest um so i think that this channel has to niche down to being a camaro enthusiast channel let's take a look at the shorts i think the shorts can be more vlog like content and can be um videos around uh repair a little bit and going and getting camaro parts from the pick and pull at the junkyard um let's see camaro collector edition chevys camaro as so yeah it needs to be i'm telling you it has to be camaro content straight up um no matter what that is what the audience is here for more than anything it's not even close and so um Yep, this is what's getting the views. I think you could put together, here's how you'd get more content. You put together a Camaro owner's car club in your local community. And then I think you'd be able to get more content and more footage for sure. You put together another channel specifically, a separate channel, the Blue Circuit for that. Okay, great. So yeah, so you're already same page for that. Excellent. So, whoops, I ended up opening his YouTube short in my other window. I also think if you throw your own local Camaro car club that you could get live streams of that with like your GoPro, your DJI Osmo Action Cam 5, or the Osmo Pocket 3 would be really good. And you could get good audio with that using the Mic 2, Mic Mini, or Mic 3. And so that would work out really well for you. And so then you could basically do weekly live streams from your Camaro car club locally with people's permission. And then you could film stuff that you could use to put together in your videos for your regular videos and get more Camaros in the shots and more footage and stuff like that. I also think vlogs and going and finding Camaro parts at the junkyard from the pick and pull. would be really cool to show people what they can do and then also looking at and reviewing letting your audience even send you here's i got one for you letting your audience send you camaro footage and come and footage of their own camaro mods and then rating or reviewing their camaros or their camaro mods would be dope content and your community would absolutely turn in for that so that'd be cool i also think covering um Camaro and Corvette stuff like this, like the ZR1 here, like that could work. Like stuff like that once in a while could work. But yeah, I think that that's, I mean, I don't want to sound too repetitive, but that's what the audience really wants and what they'd be looking for. And again, I think the unique idea is this idea of having them send you in the, and yeah, some of you are saying that's a great concept. Yeah. So like, I think having them send you that in and then you being able to rate, rank, review, their uh camaros and their camaro mods is great i think the vlog series with the pick and pull is great because then that actually um helps people affordably mod or build out their camaros so that would work too and then that gives you some vlog-like content um and so yeah but those are my thoughts and i again i think that uh blueprint you got some really good stuff here um i think that this is actually a really dope channel and I do think that you still got potential here and that you can grow it. I just think that some of these concepts will give you a more dynamic channel if you implement them. But we'll see what everyone thinks. If you guys have something different that you would pitch Blueprint on, let us know in the live chat if you're watching live. Let us know in the comments section if you're watching the replay. What do you think? Do you agree with me? Do you disagree with me? Would you do it any differently? Let us know. A lot of great feedback in the chat. That's a good concept. Didn't think of that. Yep, a lot of people wouldn't. Fire concept. Audience is very committed. Camaro. Yeah, a lot of people are saying you really need to move on that idea. I'd agree. Again, it was my idea, but I would agree with that. And I do think that that would help you a lot. And I think it'd be something different that your audience would really appreciate and would show up for. All right, so next we have my first rodeo. So here we have my first rodeo. Gorgeous banner here. Good profile pic. Very clever idea with the pun on words, my first rodeo. Van Lifer obsessed with following God. New video every week. So I love, once again, having a banner that tells you what to expect and that videos are coming every week. I think this is very well visually put together right off the bat. 40 videos, 2,000 subscribers. So let's see what else we've got here. US-based YouTuber, a decade sharing my journey of determination to live life on the road. OK, really good lead in there. Let's see. Living in my van, E150. I would actually move this to the top instead of the I Survived series. And then the I Survived series is good. But I would change it from I survived to surviving, and then it's just more impactful. Instead of saying I survived a Walmart, I survived the Walmart van life disaster episode three, I would go surviving X amount of time in a Walmart parking lot. Van life disaster episode three would probably be better. I survived. one month in, uh, in van life. It's like, um, stop and hear this. It's like, no, I'd go, um, probably I'd go surviving my first month living in a van. That would probably be a better title, if I'm being honest. Um, for I survived living in a broken down van, laundry, like, what does it say? Laundry. Jim and Trusting God, Faith Chronicles, Episode 5. Nah, I changed this title to... And people don't care that it's part of the Faith Chronicles, honestly. I changed this one to... Surviving... Surviving 20 Days Living in a Broken-Down Van. Everything went wrong. People would be more likely to click on that. So, um... And then if it's a broken down van, instead of your face in there, I would have, I'd make, even if you have to recreate the thumbnail, I would have something, I'll tell you, you know, like honestly, I'd do a really weird thumbnail where I would have like a breakfast platter or a skillet. I'd actually, actually, I know what I'd do. I'd have a skillet. I'd have an open hood. I'd have an open hood. the van even if you have to recreate this thumbnail now just to go back and replace it for the thumbnail I'd have the an open shot of a trunk of a van and a close-up shot of a popped-up hood with the engine of the van and I'd have a skillet with an egg frying on the engine in a skillet and a glass of OJ sitting on the battery and I'm not joking Because someone's gonna click on that thumbnail if it says surviving living in a broken-down van for 20 days. Someone's gonna click that video with that thumbnail with that title. So that's a thought there. I'd have popular videos before members-only videos, and I'd probably put one more playlist in there. You can get all of that in a thumbnail shot clearly, by the way, if you shoot a wide-angle shot enough and you position it as a top-down shot. If you position it as a top-down shot, and again, I probably, if I need to show what that thumbnail looks like, I wonder if I can generate something like that in mid-journey and somebody, let's see. A wide angle shot of the engine of a, I'm going to, I know some of you hate AI, but I'm literally just gonna try and see if we can create this. A wide angle shot of the engine of a van with details have a skillet. with a fried egg warming over the engine and a glass of orange juice sitting on the battery. Detailed shot. Photo realistic. Shot as if on a Sony A- Seven and two camera. ISO 800. F4. One over 2000. Reduced noise. Yeah, that should be about enough detail, I think. All right, we'll see what mid-journey does with that. And we'll come back to it just to give you a sense of... um ai creating that detail but you'll notice that my prompts are like mad specific and i probably could have written another paragraph for that if i'm being honest um but yeah let's look over um these in the meantime let's see your most popular videos and see what people are looking for from you so your most popular videos have significantly more uh views um let's see Yep, finally scored my dream van 24 days till van life. Okay. I think the key here is that you need more storytelling thumbnails. These thumbnails are more about vlogging than van life. I think from people's perspective, they want to see the things that you did the best for you. Your two best videos, you know what your two best videos have in common? We see the van very clearly and the van is very prominent in the... thumbnails uh let's see if that uh is done yet so this is what it came up with oh you know what i forgot to tell it that it should have done this in um i forgot to tell this that the parameters is that it should have been landscape um let's see and i need it to be 16 by 19. so it's gonna work on that now And we'll come back to it. But yeah, the van is very prominently featured in the thumbnails that performed the best, and it's not even close. The van is in this one, but Walmart is more prominent than the van, but I do get that it was part of a story series here. The videos that perform the best for you feature the van prominently in the thumbnails. And so you say you're focused on long form? Yep. then let's see if that thumbnail is done yeah i'm not telling you to make an ai generated version of this thumbnail i'm just making a point of like how um interesting of an idea this theoretically could be i could probably tell it to um change the angle here um and that would probably make a difference but conceptually this is kind of right this is kind of right in terms of oh that's interesting Oh, we're trying to get to, that's the thing 1 of 10 generated for me for my other thing. But we actually need to get back to your, this mock-up for your thumbnail here. But I digress. But actually, this is kind of close, except for the, it's not the skillet. But this is actually close in a way. But again, this, if this was like a bigger skillet, would have been a pretty close in terms of concept actually this is probably the closest in concept to what i'm going for uh i've changed the angle i would change the angle but this is kind of close because um that is just a very clickable idea but i digress um so again doing these van life videos the van should feature extremely prominently in the thumbnail this one is actually pretty good. The van life doesn't like me. And I'm sad because van life turned against me. This, that's actually a really good thumbnail because it looks interesting. It looks mysterious. Same thing for scary encounter that changed everything. Again, the van being prominently featured in the thumbnail makes all the difference for your videos. The other thing is I would, vlogs can be challenging because you are doing you're living your life. But here's what I would say is study story time YouTubers in terms of your content pillars. One of your content pillars should be story time. And if you're gonna do story time, do it from with inside your van and sit down and like they can see you. In fact, the story time could start with vlogging and literally getting into your van and setting up. the camera and doing the story time and then you could do a story time where you tell them about something that happened or if you and if you have footage of something that happened that's an interesting story that you're telling you could incorporate that and you could put that into the um you could put that into the uh vlog while you're telling the story so i would say um that's one you could do is a story time pillar. Another one could be a pillar where you explain how you do something in terms of a day in the life video that explains what van life is really life. That might be van life diaries or van life confessions. So, you know, explaining how you cook your meals, how you... take a shower, how you do this, how you make any money while you're doing van life. So that'd be more of a how to van life series of some kind. So that is somewhat educational and informative, but it can be shot in a vlog-like manner. So that gives you two of your content pillars right there. Then I think also the surviving series in terms of van life could be interesting. If you look at challenge videos, but those in my mind have to be surviving 24 hours, surviving 72 hours, surviving a week, surviving 20 days or 30 days. And then in whatever this scenario. So it could be interesting with regard to that because then those are big curiosity pillar videos. So that would be a very practical one. You're getting some really good ideas live right now in the chat in terms of videos people definitely be interested in watching so I would also Consider doing some videos about how you modded your van and how you decorate your van and how so I would actually do some You know some videos that are actually about the Modding the decor. I didn't see a video from you doing a tour or even showing us the inside or doing a tour of your uh dream van we see that you have a van you um have videos about converting it into a camper um but you haven't given us a tour or a build or process type uh video or series about that so um i would do that by the way these videos in terms of sharing my story or sharing my raw story you're not giving us anything your story we don't know why it's raw we don't know why it's interesting we don't know what made you do this you need something in the title that tells us something more give us something more because it's not interesting enough aspiring van lifer i'm sharing my raw story it's like it's more interesting to say um like A more compelling title would be why I started living in my van is even a more compelling title than that. Why I started living in my van, the unfiltered truth about my life is that's a more compelling title. Someone in the chat suggesting van life, why people choose it. I would say van life, why people choose. to live off the grid that's a compelling title van life why people choose to leave society behind super compelling but it's about yeah and i know you've you say you've told the story but the title and packaging of that story books are judged by their cover and that includes being judged by their title so the thing is i'm not saying your story isn't good or valid or interesting i'm saying that the title the title is everything and also again a tour of the build so far because again you don't have to always wait till something's finished um it can be a work in progress video people love seeing that um or it's like um you know so um even videos on what you need to know before starting van life would be something that people would want to watch So again, in terms of looking for content pillars, those would be some of my content pillars for you in terms of being able to be very intentional and thoughtful about this content. The other thing you can do is a title where you use ordinary mundane events, but then the end of the title is while living in a van, while living in a van. So, you know, how I do my laundry. while living in a van truth about van life so literally things that everyday people take for granted showing how difficult it is to do those things while living in a van would be intriguing and interesting to the random person scrolling on youtube surviving surviving living in a walmart parking lot for 25 days Truth About Van Life. That title is a way to take the footage from individual days and compile a narrative interesting story where you can do a story time video and use the footage and then talk about it and then have like edits where it has like, you know, day three, day 16, day that, you know, so it's like, so that becomes a much more interesting thing narratively. I would also clearly, obviously, study some of the approach of other van life creators, even if you feel you're very different than them. But this is also a strong start overall. So you shouldn't feel discouraged from a creator standpoint. Getting to 2,000 subs like this with just 40 videos is actually pretty good. Some of the biggest YouTubers never accomplished that. So yeah, you should feel really good about this. And so overall, that would be what my thoughts are, my first rodeo for a lot of your content. Again, I think a lot of this is visuals and packaging, but I think the titles also can do some work. But we gave you some content pillars to begin to work with that can be a little bit more effective and help guide the direction of what you're making. So those would be my thoughts. But what do you all think? I know a lot of you actually had some really good ideas for video ideas and concepts, titles. um even changes to the thumbnails and what you did like about this channel um we have a lot of that response in the chat so if you have more ideas keep dropping them and keep them coming in the chat from my first rodeo if you have ideas on this or you disagree with me on anything let us know in the comment section or again what would you do differently what would your suggestions be we'd love to hear from you so let us know in the comment section yeah no problem i think there's a lot of good feedback here and from the chat i think that there's a lot here that is um happening that's very good and i think the views are actually really good for a small channel like this especially a very niche channel so i do think that the foundations of your channel are very good but also i recognize that what you're doing is really stressful and that you also might be having a little bit of a difficult time right now um so you know mostly just keep your chin up but the the key is you're getting a lot of great feedback here the bones of the channel are solid but there are some things that can elevate it and take it to that level that you want to get to most people never get a thousand subscribers you've already done that 90 of people never get a thousand subscribers but 97 of people never get 10 000 subscribers you're one fifth of the way there our hope is that if you make some improvements and you're consistent that you'll be able to get the rest of the way there and get at least the 10,000 subscribers. You're already over 2,000. So you're a fifth of the way there. You've already beaten 90% of people who've ever done YouTube because 90% of them never get 1,000 subscribers. So again, don't take any of this as harsh criticism or downing anything you're doing. It's that we actually think you can do more and we'd like to see that happen for you. And you get a lot of positive feedback here in the chat. Yeah, van life is still a hot topic. Absolutely. All right, and so we've got our final channel review. Wow, we might actually finish a review session before midnight again for a change. So we've got our old friend DexNotDexter for AI news and such. So let's go to that. So here we got DexNotDexter, 355 videos and counting, 780 subscribers. Some really good outliers here, like your most recent video from two days ago. Nano Banana is huge when it comes to AI right now. I'm even playing with it, so it's kind of a big deal. I know that this tutorial thing, and this is not a bad video on the consistent characters thing, but that title might have been able to be stronger, and this is interesting. that you did the ai agents videos i don't think that that's bad views considering your channel size at all on this one and this one might be evergreen so from a tutorial standpoint that one might be pretty good um i think instead of the 11 labs music um uh one here which again it wasn't a bad mistake to make this because this is actually really a good idea to talk about but people just aren't feeling or vibing this as much what people might have cared about is an update on this suno ai lawsuit so i would actually in general encourage you to cover news around ai lawsuits that are happening right now and around lawyers who have um ai hallucinations in their um filings that are getting called out because i think that could be really good um you so it's more that your topics are hit or miss uh you slowed down recently a little bit um you know for reasons Um, covering the Elon Musk, um, Grok 4 with, um, the AI companions was a really good idea. Very smart. That was, uh, 1,000 views for you. Well done, sir. Well done. Um, let's see. I'm not surprised this one got maybe potentially suppressed. So again, since the last time we saw your channel, in general, you've grown. In general, you've gotten much more consistent views and you've had some outliers. Let's see if we can narrow in on what is working more and most. So let's see. When you get to be early to brand new releases and you position things using recognizable people. like uh elon musk or sundar prachai or sam altman and you're early to something really new it's been helping you you have less than a thousand subscribers but you actually have a significant amount of videos it may not feel like it for how much you've done but you have a significant amount of videos that have over a thousand subscribers and we're getting sorry over a thousand views and we're getting more views than you have subscribers i mean if you look at this um completely you have what almost 50 videos with a thousand or more views that's actually really good it may not feel like it but that's really good considering 90 of videos don't get a thousand views like 88 of videos don't get a thousand views as far as long form so um that's actually really good and it feels like news topics is something you do have to expect that things can be hit or miss even the biggest youtubers who do reactions and news and commentary There's a wild swing in the stories that get views. Asmongold's a great example. He does so much content and the view floor and view ceiling swings wildly for Asmongold's content. I think right now the topics that are hot are everything surrounding, and if we look at this and we look at your channel, what's probably good for you right now is if you actually give practical uh tips and information about ai agents i'd also look at whether you can get away with doing ranking videos comparing uh different uh models and things like that or different llms um i think covering the e the ongoing battles between elon musk and sam altman would be something people care about and right now i think people really are interested in gpt5 and are interested in Google Veo 3. So let's see. The last time we saw DexNotDexter, you previously had 666 subs. Wait, is this right, Katie? Did you delete some videos? I think you must have deleted some videos. And that's where the views changed. The views changed because he deleted some videos, probably due to some stuff with YouTube and Google. There's probably some videos that he needed to delete for whatever reason. And so I'm fine with that. Probably something with a potential copyright claim or something. But the overall sub still dramatically increased. I think it was a 17% sub increase. Yep. That's a significant increase in any amount of time, to be honest. And we are tracking the changes on the channels. Let's see. From a practical standpoint, if you wanted to, Dex, I mean, normally I say let stuff ride. But if you wanted to, you could... private or hide any of the videos you want that are under a hundred views and your channel actually looks really strong. But again, I think it's fine to experiment and your channel is small enough to where there's some videos that on some topics that some people won't respond to and it's okay. Like this video, there's like not something significantly wrong with this video, if I'm being honest, for what it is. Like I'm not gonna play the video's audio here for reasons and I'm going to try to skip through it. to avoid any potential with copyright or anything like that. But there's like this video seems like it was well put together and that explores the topic and does it justice. So again, I think the bigger issue is just a lot of people did not resonate with this for whatever reason. And I think you could try repackaging the title and thumbnail. It's only four days old. If you repackage the title and thumbnail, YouTube's still promoting this video. people could respond to it differently um so it's worth exploring that and maybe it can get a couple hundred views if you do that um let's see i think also ai wars in terms of comparing um things like claude and then quen and other things are interesting to people it also seems like most of your videos that perform well are the shorter overall videos if we sort by most popular. And by shorter, I mean less than 10 minutes. There's an exception here. But other than that, most of them that perform well for you are like right under the 12-minute mark. So under the 12-minute mark, do well. Videos seem to do well for you if they're between 5 and 12 minutes. So that seems to be your sweet spot. You're actually really close to monetization, so you definitely want to keep pushing. That's for sure. And again, you're finding your rhythm. You know, Mr. Beast had to make 460 videos to get his first 10,000 subscribers. So there's nothing wrong with making a lot of videos, especially this early in your career, to figure out what is working for you and what you want to make and what people respond to. And I know I've said that before, but again, This is your grind phase. This is just a pushing through. I also think you're still figuring out what content you enjoy making. So I don't have a problem with that either. What I am really interested in is the fact that it does feel like in general, you are getting better at topic selection. It's slow improvement, but it is improvement. And I do think that you're getting better. at your overall ability to make effective thumbnails. I just haven't seen something lock in consistently that consistently works for you. But this niche is also really dynamic. I'm also curious about where you are sourcing your AI news because it feels like being the timing for you also makes a huge difference. And I think that just basically hitting up the new releases of anything with these AI tools, similar to what I used to do when software would happen or when Apple would make an announcement. If Apple made an announcement, I was trying to get a video out in under two hours of Apple making that announcement. I think that if you, I think you need to find a way to get early to any and all announcements decks with... I think you need to get as early as you can to any and all announcements on these things with AI or look at whether there's a calendar or release schedule or announcement schedule and be able to try to get a video out within three to five hours of the announcement. I think that that could put you over the top with views and clear a thousand views that first day if you can be within hours of an announcement or hours of something being deployed or going live. Now, again, how you would go about accomplishing that. It's not as easy because these AI companies are not doing things like how Apple schedules their big keynote and WDC and all that stuff. I wish they did. It'd make things easier for people like you or anyone who wants to cover this stuff. But the earlier you can get to here is when something was announced, here is when something was released, and released within hours of that, not the next day, but same day release. It'd make the hugest difference in the world for your videos and your channel. I know this because back in the old days, even though I was not specifically an Apple channel, if I covered anything for Apple and even put the creator spin on it, if I covered anything for Apple the same day that it was announced, I would get thousands upon thousands of views that week per video. Like every video would clear like 10,000 views that week. And I was a smaller channel back then. I know how much of a difference that can make. And again, I don't think you're doing bad. I just think that you're still figuring it out, and I think that you're allowed to do that. And again, more of your videos are succeeding than failing on average now. You're getting better. You're getting closer to getting to outlier videos faster because the consistency in videos that hit versus flop is doing much better for you. And it's not even close. Your oldest videos used to struggle when you first started showing up these channel reviews. Like you used to struggle to clear 20 views on a video a lot of the time. And since you've been doing the work and coming to these channel reviews, you know, you've been doing a lot better and clearing 100 views has not been as difficult for you. If we look at some of your oldest content, if we look at some of your oldest content, even with a year, I'm not trying to call you out or embarrass you, but even with a year, a lot of your videos, most of your videos couldn't clear 50 to 100 views. Now you're clearing that fairly regularly, and it's more rare for you to have a video struggle to get 100 views. And so I think you should acknowledge that progress and that it's worth you continuing to push this and pursue this. We'll be here when you want some help and some advice and some encouragement. But I would also start thinking about is for the AI models you're covering, definitely start organizing a playlist on these topics and think about the idea of like, huh, have I covered Gemini this week? Have I covered Claude this week? Have I covered Grok this week? Have I covered GPT this week? Have I covered OpenAI this week? Hey, what's going on with Elon Musk, Sam Altman? Pay attention to these podcasts that Sam Altman's been going on. Hey. Did this AI company develop something new? Hey, also again, like I said, keep track of the AI lawsuits. Have a whole playlist for the ongoing saga of the AI lawsuits. So again, I think that those are things that would definitely help you in particular. But I also think you're getting better at this significantly. And I think that just looking at the history of the channel, that you are struggling less than when you started asking for feedback and advice. I also would say AB test thumbnails. And if they've given you access to AB test titles, then start AB testing titles and AB testing thumbnails. That is something you might have access to in terms of what they've been rolling out. for YouTube for creators. I'm not sure every creator has it yet, but I know they're getting to every creator they can. Hopefully every creator will have it for the end of the year. But I even got access to the AB title testing in addition to the thumbnail testing. So I would encourage you to look into that. But also on the latest video with this nano banana, great job. Consider following up on this and making more videos about this and also demo videos around what this can do. And use cases for this. That way you can at least get a five video series out of Nano Banana. And a lot of people are going to be looking for videos on it in their feed. So definitely do that. And definitely continue to use, I think, images of Sundar Pichai in those thumbnails about Nano Banana. For sure. But those are my thoughts for DexNotDexter. Again, I think 17% growth in subscribers since the last time we did a channel review is excellent progress. I do think the fact that he's seeing less of his videos flop and get less than 100 views on a 700 plus subscriber channel is significant. I think that's progress. The fact that a video of his recently in two days got 500 views, that is a great job on a 700 subscriber channel. I wanna keep encouraging that kind of momentum. And I think, again, the key to something like this is finding the rhythm, finding what people respond to and making more stuff. I don't think this is one of those situations because it's a news channel. A news channel can't pull the quality over quantity game. A news channel has to try to keep up with the news. I think the most important thing for a news channel is finding a system to keep up with the news and to get in there and to be early to the story or at least on time and never late to the story. But those are my thoughts for Dex Not Dexter. I think a big deal. is also just the way you're sourcing these things. I also think maybe some videos that pull segments and clips from Sam Altman interviews and things that might have been really wild sound bites and drilling more into that could definitely. And again, you're getting a ton of great comments, feedback, and support in the chat. You even picked up a couple of people saying they want to subscribe. So those are my thoughts on Dex, not Dexter. What do you guys think? Let me know in the live chat if you're still watching when it's live. Let me know in the replay and send that to the comment section if you're watching the replay. Yeah, so Dex, hopefully you got to see your channel review. Like I said, I think you just gotta keep pushing and I think it'd be interesting. to have a better understanding of how you're sourcing your news information and then also what the turnaround on is hey when did this news break and are you getting a video out within two to three hours of the news coming out around this thing um because i do think that timing matters in a news niche significantly more than anything else i also think maybe a weekly show that um this week in ai news or something like that and a roundup and covering like um Five to seven stories in AI news for the week as a roundup on Fridays would also probably be very good. So, yep. So those would be my current thoughts. We can chat for just a little while. I do think I'm going to go ahead and call it a night here soon. I do think this channel, absolutely, I agree that the channel has a lot of potential. Yep, absolutely. Studio Talon says, hey, Roberto, what are your thoughts on having spooky crows have idle animation the background why narrate horror stories uh could be super interesting people do things like that it just depends on how well you execute it more than anything but yeah i think i'm gonna call it a night here in a second um we'll take uh maybe a couple of quick questions in the chat and then we'll close out and we'll call it a night uh because we're rolling up on close to 11 p.m here and That means that it's more or less Roberta's bedtime. At least for a Friday. I'd usually be in bed much earlier than this. So, yeah. You guys in the chat, you're wild. Let's see. Yep, absolutely. Yeah, no, thanks to everybody who came through tonight. Thanks to all of the channel members. Remember, if you happen to be a channel member, I did upload one of my keynotes from VidFest from last weekend. And you will get to see the other keynotes over the next couple of weeks or days. I'll be releasing those as well. I'm also going to be experimenting with some vlog-like content on the members-only side. And then eventually we'll do a public video on how to edit vlogs because I'm going to experiment with some of that. um and so we'll see what i end up doing i don't think the vlogs are going to be public but the edits of them when we want to do editing tutorials about how to edit a vlog start to finish those will be public but the vlogs are going to be like members only stuff um that i feel like sharing only with uh the channel members um because a lot of it will be experimentation and a lot of it also just be more personal so um i think that'll be interesting uh what else is going on uh the speaking engagement stuff that's gonna uh release to the channel members Clips of it will end up in my Instagram in vertical, so that'll be cool. So we got a lot of footage from that, because I did three keynotes at VidFest. We've got a keynote that I have coming up for VidSummit in October. What else is going on? I may publish a vlog from the YouTube Made event if I get to do anything with... uh meeting uh again because i've met him before but um it'd be interesting if i could have um neil mohan the youtube ceo say something interesting in uh my vlog if that happens um you know i think that'll be uh interesting uh we have a quick question here um rashad mccory says school or kajabi um i love kajabi and i've been using it for about seven years but i'm incredibly biased and yes they did put my face on a billboard as a user, so of course I'm gonna be biased. He said as he's wearing his Kajabi Hero hoodie. So right now, they're not sponsoring main channel videos. They are gonna be potentially working with me on something at VidSummit, and I'm doing something else for them that's not paid, but that I'm doing as a thank you. Here's the thing. I have a lot of friends who use school and I have a lot of clients who use school. I have some clients who use Kajabi. I have some clients who use Teachable. Here's what I'll say about it. It depends on what you're doing. If you're a YouTuber, first and foremost, and you have a product or you're trying to do a membership community, school can be interesting because it's popular right now and because Hermosi is connected to it. So if you're trying to ride off the coattails of that, then you want to use school if you're trying to build an actual full-on education business you want to use kajabi if you're building an agency and you're doing a client services agency you probably want to use honey book so first i was building like a client services agency let's say i was doing managing other people's youtube channels we'd probably be using honey book if i was managing other people's youtube channels if i was um like a men's lifestyle channel and then i wanted to have some membership community i probably would end up riding hermosi's coattails especially if it's like fitness related and i'd use school but if i wanted to build a robust education business and offer coaching courses a paid private community cohorts digital download products yeah it's kajabi and it's not even close the other thing is with school you're not building a big time seo thing with blogs and customization that can look the way you want me my website awesome creator academy it looks how i want it to look like i was able to design it to make it what i want it to be and that was incredibly important to me i was able to use it to rank seo and get to the first page of google for the things i wanted to rank for like right now if you went and you go and you ask google or even ask an ai Like how many YouTubers have 10 million subscribers in 2025? The answer is going to be sourced from Awesome Creator Academy, and we're going to rank in the first page if we're not the first result. Same thing for how many YouTubers have a million subscribers in 2025. How many YouTubers, how many YouTube channels are there? in 2025 uh will the answer will come from awesome creator academy it'll be cited and sourced from there and have a link to there like i wanted the seo juice and i was able to do that um because i'm smart and because i use kajabi if i use school i'm not gonna be able to do that so that's the other trade-off it's about what you want you may not care about seo which i do i want to be the primary source If you want to do the email list stuff and landing pages. So school is useful if you're most, first and foremost, if you're a YouTuber, school could be useful and there is the buzz from Hermosi and it has some of that traffic. But I would say that it's just kind of a level up from Patreon. It's a significant level up from Patreon. But it's not full-on customization. It's not full-on like, oh, this is my thing, and this is on brand, and it looks the way I want it to look. It looks how school wants it to look. Kajabi looks how I want it to look. If I didn't tell you guys I was using Kajabi, you'd never know. That's not a completely custom website without using Kajabi as the back end. You'd never know. That's what I like about Kajabi. I like having a website that is completely mine and customizable without the headaches of WordPress. WordPress is a god-bloody nightmare. You say you have both. I'd consider consolidating unless you have two different brands. If you have two different brands, having both could make sense. If you have two different businesses, having both can make sense. If you have two different business models, it can make sense. So yeah. So yeah, I mean, I will tell all of you what my biases are when I recommend something. And the thing is, my worst bias is never going to ever be whether I have a paid relationship with a brand. My biggest bias is going to be how I felt about, because by the way, I've worked with Kajabi, but I still spend money on Kajabi every month. My biggest bias will always be for how do I feel about what I spent money on? My biggest bias will always be how did this brand treat me when I reached out to them as a creator, whether I worked with them or before I worked with them. I will always care about how a brand treated me personally. Part of me is incredibly petty. So I always care about how a brand treated me. I'll always care about the customer service that a brand provides and how easy they are to reach. Also, whether they're scared to be on X or not matters to me, but I'm incredibly biased there. So one of my biggest biases is what's the customer service like? How easy are they to contact? How do they treat me? And are they too scared to be on X? that matters to me and it's maybe some of you it should sound like sound like um that shouldn't matter but me that's extremely important for me and i'm incredibly biased about it and it's one of my uh big uh red or green flags when it comes to brands I want brands to be out there and accessible to their audience in a public domain. And I want them to not be scared. And I want them to never be cowards and never run away from a public domain where they can be criticized. And that's X. So for me, that's a big one. So the fact that Adobe's there, that's another reason that I'm like, yep, absolutely. So for me, there's that. I'm also loyal. When I use a brand and I lock in, I kind of stick with it. have spent my own money and i have like 25 dji products over my lifetime and i didn't buy those all at once or whatever that's over the course of 10 years over the course of like 10 12 years i bought like 25 different dji products that are registered in my app um i'm a big apple person i have god knows how many apple computers i bought at this point it's got to be like 10 at this point but again that's over the course of 12 years it's over the course of 12 years um I like Rode. I've had ups and downs with Rode, but I like Rode. But for microphones, DJI and Shure and Sennheiser, but I love the Rodecaster interfaces. Not gonna lie. Elgato, been using them. You've seen me set up three different desks plus my mobile setup using Elgato products. Love them. Love them to death. So my bias is largely to what works. What will I spend my own money on? What have I spent my own money on? How did they treat me whenever I had to reach out for support? And do they have a presence on X where they don't run away or shy away from criticism or people reaching out to them with a problem? So black magic design, I'm big on that because I have three ATEM mini switchers. I have them on all of my streaming desk. I have three streaming desks. I have one up here. I have two streaming desks in the basement. Me and my brother use those. And so I have three ATEM minis. I have multiple stream decks, multiple, multiple stream decks between me and my brother. And yeah, so they're just, for me, I've used almost every brand you can think of at some point in the creator economy. I've used almost every brand you can think of. And I've tested everything. i've been sent things for free paid for things out of pocket software hardware all of it what i will tell you is that money that people pay me or working with me doesn't influence the narrative of my content or my bias one i'm too much of a nerd for that one and then i'm incredibly um stubborn in particular and i'm incredibly petty and so for me how brands handle uh criticism and whether they're willing to shy away for it or not shy away from it so for me being on x is a big deal and the other thing is how much money have i personally spent on these brands probably will affect my bias more than anything because if i'm spending money on it then i've bought in quite literally bought in and for me it means that i'm going to if i bought like five products sent ten products from a company I'm probably always going to be more or less ride or die for that company unless something massively disruptive happens where there's a much, much better version of the product. I'll give you a primary example. I had to have certain experiences to move over from the Rode microphones. The Shure SM7B and SM7DB and the Rodecaster, were great. Like, I'm sorry, the Shure microphones moved me over from Rode microphones. It was the Shure microphones and it was the Sennheiser microphones. But the Sennheisers felt like they were very expensive, high quality, but lacking in features. So there are certain things the Sennheisers are really good for. But from a practical standpoint, I was like, it's got to be the Shure microphones for this. So for a primary example, for the desktop microphones, I use Shure microphones. That's just how it is. For in-person interviews, the handheld mics, they're Shure microphones. I don't use the other microphones. I've tried the Rode microphones. I've done this. So it's the Shure microphones. For wireless, I've used Sennheiser. I've used Rode. Now it's DJI. um i've used deity i think the idea is a really good or was a really good budget option but now the option comparably for the wireless system for the mic mini um from a price standpoint the dji mic mini blew it out of the water so um i was like okay this is just too good to ignore at this point so for me that made a huge difference so what um you know what what i see often is i'm Much more beholden to my experience as a consumer and also what I spent my own money on and how the experience was than anything else. What the customer service was like, how the brand operates on social media is a big thing for me. So again, I don't have negative things to say about school. I just don't see features. I'm a big customization guy. I want customization and I want security. I like customization. but i didn't like the security the maintenance and the hassle with wordpress and frankly the customer service was non-existent so like wordpress was you're on your own and i'm like oh god this is just a nightmare so even as a coder i moved on from wordpress um i think wix is a good company i think squarespace is a good company but they just didn't have the ecosystem that i need for offering you guys a robust amount of products and a good product experience and a good learning experience because they're not education companies uh i tried teachable uh the customization for me just wasn't um there and i had massive dns issues with it too for years so i was like okay that's out um i love jack conti and i love patreon but again very limited in terms of its features um even compared to youtube channel memberships um love youtube but youtube channel memberships man that 30 hurts man that 30 hurts and it's extremely limited for what you get for that 30 so for me it was like okay kajabi it is and i haven't regretted that decision and they've only gotten better over the last seven years so for me it's about features are a big one frustration or lack of frustration is a big one customer service is an absolute huge one for me and again how's the brand move on social media and are they accessible to me again for me a big part of that is x so there's that when it comes to hardware hardware price is one thing value is another they're not the same the ease of out of box execution Using it right out of the box is a big deal for me. The warranty and the warranty terms is a big deal for me. Ecosystem. Ecosystem and expansion is a big deal for me when it comes to hardware. Sony, great on ecosystem, great on expansion. Good warranties. Hate the registration process for the website. Wish it was like Apple or DJI. Best ecosystem for products. Apple and DJI, and it's not even close. The registration process, tracking your warranty, in-app support, ticket request, phenomenal. Love them both. I wish everyone did it their way. I wish everyone did it their way. Gold standard. DJI products all have a QR code. You take a picture of it. You do that. You open the app. It registers your product instantly. My God, it's beautiful. So between that and Apple, I wish everybody did it that way. If all my Sony cameras did that, I'd be so happy. If all of my, if all my Sony products and all my Elgato products did that, I'd be happy beyond belief. So for me, those things seem petty or small, but for me, they're a big deal, especially since I buy a lot of this stuff. So that's huge for me. Best expansion for you if you own a Mac. is to get a CalDigit Hub. It's expensive, but you will never regret buying a CalDigit Hub in your life for the expansion for your Mac, whether you have a Mac Mini, Mac Mini M4, one of the best purchases of my lifetime. Mac Mini M1, Mac Mini M4, two of the best purchases I've never regretted in my life. Buy CalDigit Hub for any of them. I have a CalDigit Hub. For this desk, I have a CalDigit hub for my writing desk. I have a CalDigit hub for my other streaming desk. The third streaming desk is a PC, so I don't need a CalDigit hub for that one. Oh, yeah. Never regretted that. So, yeah, I have preferences with my brands that I like. I'm incredibly biased about the brands I like, but I think my biases are informed by my preferences of what is a green or red flag for me. And I think they're valid. I think that caring about the warranty, the customer service, how they move on social media, how accessible they are, out of box, how easy it is to immediately get to work right out of the box. I think I'm being a little petty on the registration process, but the registration process kind of does matter for your warranties. um you want to get insurance aside from that anyway but you still want to have the registration you still want to have the serial number and all that stuff um so if that process can be just less painful then great um i've had to file an insurance claim for up to ten thousand dollars worth of gear before so haven't gone through that it's like it's very nice to make that process convenient for people um i've bought in the last uh 10 12 years i've bought eight DJI drones, believe it or not. Me and my brother are big drone people. It sounds more expensive than it is, though, to have done that. A lot of them, they made a lot of fairly affordable drones and they got the prices down over the years, so it's not as bad as you think. And it's not reflective of the footage on the main channel, but... We're working on something to where actually there will be a channel that is literally a faceless channel that's nothing but drone footage. We're even probably going to work out something where it's Creative Commons and people can just use our drone footage from the different locations from when I travel. Next year, I want to take a small trip to Hawaii, and I want to fly the drones quite a bit. So, yeah. What else? I do love my Mavic Air 3S. It's extremely good. Yeah, the content for the drones is a private faceless channel that I'm not going to disclose that me and my brother are doing for a different project. And we're also trying to make a very large library of Creative Commons drone footage. So it's a off book project that we're doing. So that's the plan around that. As far as the footage, as far as the footage, we will be doing drone reviews on a channel that I'm bringing back called Creator Gear Guide. We'll be doing drone reviews. We'll be reviewing the new DJI Mic 3. We'll be comparing it to the DJI Mic 2 and the Mic Mini. We'll be doing the reviews of all of my Sony G Master lenses. We'll be reviewing all of my Sony camera bodies. We'll be reviewing and giving guides, practical guides for using the DJI Osmo 3, the Osmo 7P gimbal, the DJI Ronin Mini 4 that we have, and some of our other DJI gimbals. We'll be doing a light. lighting budget like here the best lights under this price point we'll be doing that we'll be doing some videos on why you need certain lenses like why you need a macro lens why you need a 35 millimeter why you need a 55 millimeter sorry fit not 55 million 50 millimeter 85 millimeter 135 so on so forth so we'll be making some really really good content for creator gear guide that'll be largely a one-stop shop for creators who are looking for what they should upgrade to what they should have in their arsenal. Um, so it'll be a fun channel that we're working on together. And then there's some other projects. Um, we are looking at some kind of tech channel in the future. Um, I don't know how long it'll take, but eventually we want to, um, do a general tech channel that just answers, uh, quick questions, kind of like a help desk, uh, channel for a tech, and uh we built a we've tried to get everything we could that we could find that they have the best buy geek squad uh tech bench and build our own tech bench to uh work on any of our uh gear and maintain or repair it uh right here at the house and to restore our computers and do all that stuff so um that's been a lot of fun to work on him with that so yeah Anyway, I'm done yapping. We've gone live for three hours now. I want to thank you guys for tuning in. Oh, last thing. There's a last thing for those of you who've been patient. We can check in real quick, and we can just see before we go what the idea generator did for my music channel. So for my music channel, which is a lo-fi channel, I think that actually, straight up, if I'm being honest, one of ten actually did a really good job with some potential ideas and thumbnails for my lo-fi channel so i'm not mad at this oh this is actually a really good idea slow lo-fi beats that melt away stress peaceful lo-fi music to reset your mood that that's actually not bad rainy day lo-fi beats for deep focus that's actually not the worst idea And the funny thing is, I could literally take the frame from this, and I could actually go into Google Veo with Google, um, Banana, um, like, uh, 3, with Nano Banana, sorry, Nano Banana in, uh, Nano Banana in, uh, Veo 3, and I could literally take this frame from what, um, 1 of 10 gave me, and I could actually just animate the whole bloody video. uh based on that and put my lo-fi uh mixtape tracks behind it and the video would actually be done i i hadn't realized how good of an idea that would be uh same thing even for this one would absolutely work uh for the channel so i could actually pull that off so actually um one of ten did a really good job of generating perfect thumbnails for a lo-fi channel Perfect titles for a lo-fi channel. And the thumbnails are so good that I could take the still from them into Google Veo 3, use Nano Banana, and actually generate a fully animated music video with the thumbnail being the basis of it. That's how good it is. And again, I know that use case may not be for everybody, but that's a good one. We'll do some other use cases. Another time with one of ten, but I just wanted to close out with that because we had started doing that project that Generation at the beginning of the stream. So ending with it actually makes sense, but that is wild Just how good that was that they came out with so shout out to our friends over at one attend comm if you use code Roberto at checkout They will give you 20% off for life. So we got that discount for you So make sure you're checking out 1of10.com. Use discount code Roberto at checkout. Yeah, that's it for tonight. I think it was a great stream. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. You guys are all awesome. And we will catch you next time. We'll be doing this again next week. So stay tuned and stay awesome. Bye. Becoming a content creator can be a very lonely process and adventure, but it doesn't have to be. When I first got started going from zero to 100,000 subscribers, I had to do it all by myself. I didn't have a community of like-minded and like-hearted creators to talk to or to ask for advice, and I certainly didn't have a mentor to guide me along the way. I built the Awesome Creator Academy Pro Group because when I was getting started, what would have meant the world to me is not to have to struggle alone when it comes to being a full-time content creator. If I had had a community of creators that I could talk to and share information with, I would have avoided a lot of mistakes in my early career. And there would have been opportunities with brand deals where I would have gotten a better understanding of how to negotiate. And I wouldn't have undersold myself. I wouldn't have been taken advantage of in those early situations. So in the Awesome Creator Academy Pro Group, myself and our co-instructor Andy Rivera we meet twice a week for office hours with our creators and we share information we talk about how we're building our creator businesses and we offer constructive criticism and critique on the things that we're working on for our projects to be part of a community of usually around a hundred like-minded creators who are taking this seriously just like you are you also have all access as a pro group member to all of our past present and future courses training templates digital downloads and swipe files you have full access to our creator blueprints where you'll see our systems and the frameworks that we use to execute you know you always fall or rise to the standard of your systems a lot of people really underestimate how important that is we have digital download templates that can help you so you don't have to start with a blank canvas these done for you files are actually incredibly helpful especially for things like your thumbnails your media kits and anything you need for your branding as a content creator to look professional we have email swipe files that help you with reaching out to brands we have great information in helping you price yourself and build your packages appropriately and remember as part of the pro group you have the opportunity to ask questions from myself and all the other creators participating and so this means that if you need to ask questions about negotiation or a brand deal there's something you're not sure about trying to find a better monetization opportunity with merch or affiliates you have people who have done it before who are already making money that you can reach out to for advice as i said when i was starting out and i was flying solo this is the thing that i wish i'd had the opportunity to be a part of and it would have made all the difference in the world in helping me be an even more successful content creator If you have questions, you can always reach out via support. We're happy to help you figure out if the pro group is right for you. Also, we do have the opportunity to become a VIP member if you also would like quarterly one-on-one coaching with me directly. Now go out there and create something awesome today and hopefully we'll see you in the pro group.

YouTube Channel Reviews via Super Chat (rules in description)

We will do up to 10 Channel Reviews for Super Chats of $20+ 
Review will address titles, thumbnails, one criticism and one compliment, and one piece of ACTIONABLE ADVICE.

Any Super Chats after the 10 Channel Limit will be placed in a queue for next session (usually weekends.

#SPONSORED BY 1OF10
https://geni.us/get1of10com

Use Discount Code Roberto for 20% OFF


🚀 Join My FREE Creator Foundations Course with 900+ Serious Creators 
https://www.awesomecreatoracademy.com/creator-foundations-free-course

📚 Learn More from My Best Selling Book - https://amzn.to/3kVdZa9 

📩  Get MY FREE 12 Week Creator Playbook - https://robertoblake.com/ytplaybook

⚡️ Youtube Starter Kit - 100+ YouTube Templates and Download Assets to Help You Grow Your Channel
https://www.awesomecreatoracademy.com/starterkit
$20 DISCOUNT CODE: 20OFF

🤑  Brand Deals Starter Kit - Join 600+ Creators Getting Better Paid Sponsorships and Media Kits - https://www.awesomecreatoracademy.com/brandstarterkit
$20 DISCOUNT CODE: 20OFF

🚀 JOIN THE AWESOME CREATOR ACADEMY PRO GROUP with 100+ Serious Creators - Get 2x Weekly Group Coaching Calls and Access to All of Our Digital Products and Online Courses 
https://www.awesomecreatoracademy.com/group

REQUEST A 30-MINUTE YOUTUBE CHANNEL REVIEW 
⚡️  https://www.awesomecreatoracademy.com/channel-review

REQUEST A 90-MINUTE STRATEGY SESSION
⚡️  https://www.awesomecreatoracademy.com/coaching

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - YOUTUBE CHANNEL REVIEWS + LATEST UPDATES FOR SMALL CHANNELS
02:07 - 1 of 10 Idea Generator
05:18 - Recent YouTube Updates
17:09 - CHANNEL REVIEW - Stanley Orchard
37:06 - CHANNEL REVIEW - Queens Alchemy
01:01:41 - CHANNEL REVIEW: Muscle in the Mountains
01:25:52 - CHANNEL REVIEW: NadNapz
01:47:08 - CHANNEL REVIEW: BLUPRINT_1LE
01:58:09 - CHANNEL REVIEW: My First Rodeo
02:21:08 - CHANNEL REVIEW: DexNotDexter
02:40:15 - Chat Q&A
03:05:21 - 1 of 10 Idea Generator Results


Want to create live streams like this? Check out StreamYard: https://streamyard.com/pal/d/5653080527863808