LIVE YouTube Channel Reviews and Advice for Small Channels

And we are live. Hey everybody, this is Roberto Blake. We're going to create something awesome today. We'll come back to the channel. Today we're going to be doing some live YouTube channel reviews. I think we're only going to probably try to do maybe five tonight. Maybe even as little as three. We'll see how many of you request channel reviews and show up. We'll also cover some of the new updates to YouTube. There are quite a few of them. I was at the Made on YouTube event last week. And so there was definitely a lot to cover in terms of updates for shorts live streaming and even monetization So there's quite a bit that went down I am making videos about all these a lot of people did make videos about these but they didn't have the fact sheet out to us yet so a lot of people didn't have the release dates on some of these Updates and changes. I actually have the release date information and I can answer quite a few of your questions in the chat about the new updates and features to YouTube modization, live streams, shorts, YouTube studio and AI. So there's a lot that came out. There's even stuff that came out after the made on YouTube event. Doug Hewson in the chat has actually covered quite a bit of it as well, but. Since I have the full fact sheet and a lot of people didn't wait to make their videos like I was, I'll be getting that information out to you guys next week. And also I've had a lot of time to ask some product managers from YouTube about some more details. I've had time to marinate on what strategies look like for taking advantage of a lot of this. So it's something that I'm really interested in talking with you guys about. We also will be getting to a channel review request that came in last week. from the basement dweller show so we're going to take a look at their youtube channel and review that for them uh since they submitted a super chat um not last week i'm sorry uh when they when we were planning to do the um channel reviews before so let's see um And for those of you not familiar with how the channel reviews work, the description has the information. But what we usually will do is I will review a YouTube channel. I will look at something the channel is already doing well, acknowledge and compliment them on that and tell them whether that's something to continue going in that direction with. I will also find a point of something they should change immediately that would actually help their channel. And I will also give my critique and thoughts on their presentation. thumbnails, and overall content strategy so that they get some actionable advice here. So they're basically going to get three things they can do right now that would put their channel in a much better situation going forward. So that's the general idea around the YouTube channel reviews. I believe I've publicly reviewed about 5,000 channels over the last few years from doing this mostly weekly. Usually we do five to 10 of these. We've been doing this for a number of years, going all the way back to oh i want to say 2016. i was one of the first person to start doing uh youtube channel reviews so i think we started doing those in 2015 or 2016. and some people come back for channel reviews and we actually get to see their progress and growth and see what has been going on with them um also for those of you not familiar with me I've been helping YouTube content creators for a number of years. I grew my channel to 100,000 subscribers before I ever made a YouTube help video. And I also am the founder of Austin Creator Academy. And what I will do here in a second is I will show you guys some of the channels that I've worked with that have had some pretty significant milestones. Here in a second some of them you may be familiar with from previous channel reviews So actually I'll bring up a couple of those now here so someone a lot of you may be familiar with from previous channel reviews is Ask Papa so he's been doing a great job and He started coaching us with the Academy a little while ago about a couple of months ago has had some significant progress, is getting brand deals now. I think when he did his first channel review with us, and Doug can probably correct me if I'm wrong, I think he had less than 3,000, 4,000 subscribers a couple of months ago, you know, closer to the beginning of the year. I believe that one of the first times we did a channel review for them was about maybe eight months ago. And so you can see what the channel was like back then. They had a couple of breakout videos, which is great. But they came and they asked for a little bit of advice. They hadn't had a deep amount of videos with their YouTube channel, but this one was the one that was blowing up for them about their tiny home and about what he was doing for his daughter and their grandchildren. And since then, he's had some tremendous success, in my opinion, with the new direction of the channel. and some of the direction with regard to the thumbnails. Even with Breakout Success and a viral for you video, there's no guarantee that all your videos will go viral, but they've had a couple of big hits since. And that's been great to see, and it's been great talking to Kevin in the Academy. We meet twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So again, his channel is going very well. And again, from 3,000 subscribers to... Now, 23,000. So that's a pretty significant leap in less than a year with what they've been doing. So really proud of what Kevin's been able to accomplish so far. Then you guys have Lanell on Poverty Paradise. She had a breakout video that was going viral and she asked for some advice as well. But I believe, and I can't be 100% sure, and I don't know if Doug has this. Katie usually would have this info, but Lanelle I think might have had less than 10 or 20,000 subscribers. She recently celebrated her 100,000 subscriber milestone recently. So definitely proud of her. She managed to accomplish that with 300 videos. Even I have never accomplished that kind of feat. And again, videos can be hit or miss depending on your niche, but she does pretty well for her videos overall. And this has been great. And she's had a couple of videos to actually hit viral success. As you can see here. Specifically, we actually helped her with the concept with the thumbnail for, I think, maybe three or four of these. Might have been a few more than that. And I think some of you actually may remember me critiquing some of these thumbnails in these live channel reviews. in the past and saying update it in this way or that way and so you know Linnell has done a great job with her channel overall and you can see she's had some breakouts here so very cool and she's managed to try to remain consistent with the uploads and I think for a very niche channel especially uh that this stayed 100 000 subscribers i think the views are doing fine again there's some videos you make for yourself in this kind of niche when you are doing travel in her case she lives on cruise ships um you know left the nine to five life um basically retired herself so again she has a great story if you ever want to check her out but very cool then we have um cassandra from becoming a farm girl One of my favorite channels in the awesome creator Academy and As you can see here. She has a lifestyle channel that is around Homesteading and vlog like content You know around different things from the gardening to the pantry and so on so forth some Canning and some other things so again really strong channel here. I think we've been working with her for About two years now. I think she came to us with 20,000 subscribers. So she's been doing really well. So that is some of the channels we've worked with in Awesome Creator Academy for those of you interested. And just so you yourself can see that there are people who have been working hard on their YouTube channel. I always tell people the honest thing is that it takes like usually most people five to seven years. to hit 100k if you're ever going to hit it become a full-time content creator if you have a nine-to-five job you've probably only got 10 to 20 hours a week to work on content so it's actually a lot harder to grow and learn and do a nine-to-five job be constantly drained on your energy that sort of thing can be tremendously difficult and If you aren't working a full-time job and let's say you have something like remote work or freelance where you have flex time, it still is a little exhausting and overwhelming to also work on content with that. I was a full-time freelancer. I would say that's probably why it only took me three years to get 100,000 subscribers and get a silver play button. I've coached clients and I've been collecting their play buttons as well. That's why you see a gold play button over there. That's not for my channel. That is a client that I help. get to a gold play button. I've actually helped at least somewhere between 15, 20 of my clients get gold play buttons. Closer to somewhere between 80 and 100 clients, we've helped get silver play buttons. So, you know, I've been doing this for a long time. Happy to be speaking at VidSummit and seeing a lot of you there in about two weeks. So, you know, that's how the channel reviews work. That's how things work with the coaching and the academy. It's just a heads up so you can see what we're doing, see the results so that actually makes sense to you. And for anybody who can't afford any of that, you can always take our free Creator Foundations course. It's linked in the description. The mods will have that in the chat for you. And that's free. It's a pay what you want, pay what you can course. So a lot of people will throw $5. Most people pay $0. And so... It is free and something you can get and has about roughly, I think somewhere between six and eight hours of training material. It's not my recycled YouTube videos. And it actually includes two workshops that I gave in person at events that people had to pay and fly out to. So we have that for you in the free creator foundations course, including the monetization masterclass, which also has some information on brand deals and sponsorships. Doug has linked that in the chat. Thank you for that, Doug. Appreciate you. I have some of the best mods in the world, I swear to God. So yeah, very cool. Studio Talon says, hey, Roberto, how do you get over burnout? I'm just doing simple art studies to help with that. But related to video creation, what else can I do? If you are experiencing burnout, one, I want you to determine whether you're really experiencing burnout. or whether you're actually depressed because there's a difference a lot of creative people will bundle all of the symptoms of these things under one umbrella so i want you to actually start with figuring out whether you're burnt out or depressed because that actually changes what's going on right if you're genuinely depressed and nothing that you're doing that used to make you happy makes you happy anymore and you feel fatigued for no reason and if you find yourself having extreme bouts of sadness frustration or even a constant pang of pain and um anxiety um negative outlook on things that's not burnout that's depression And if you're experiencing that, one, it's possible that you may need to get a professional of some kind involved. But if you can't afford to do that and you're on a, this is not medical advice, this is not therapy here. But if you're in that situation, and I've been in that situation many times, you have to look at your lifestyle and your habits. And you also have to change how you're looking at yourself in your life. And you have to. discipline yourself into habits that have nothing to do with an emotional response because it means currently your emotional alignment is already dysregulated. If your emotional alignment is dysregulated and you're already, you know, experiencing depression, you have to adjust. Your sleep habits, whether you like it or not, you cannot react to things emotionally. So ironically, what you would do, at least in my experience, and this is just my experience here, again, not clinical diagnosis of any kind, is if you are going through this, you need to fix your sleep habits and you need to commit to good, healthy sleep and make sure you're getting somewhere between seven and nine hours of restful sleep and that you're getting some REM sleep. The other thing you need to do is make sure that you have a proper diet and that you might be addressing some deficiencies you might have. You might want to take some vitamin supplements. As I got older, I found out that I needed more of those things and that also a lot of what I was eating wasn't getting me my full nutritional value. I was getting my calories. I was not starving myself, but I was... starved of nutrients that I needed that were, you know, causing some issues and chemical imbalances, fluctuation and weight gain. And so I had to get back into the gym, get a disciplined workout routine. For me, I basically, I was never in the military, but my dad was a Marine and my training regimen when I was in high school and I was a track athlete, I was a cross country and track athlete, state, state level. cross-country, second team all county, so I was a track star. I was captain of the cross-country team. I did military PT as my workout standard. I think that the military PT fitness standard is a good standard for whatever your age is to determine peak level physical fitness and health. So that was actually really good for me. Gave me more confidence, helped with liking what I see in the mirror. It was very good for me. And it helped balance out some of my mental health issues. The other thing is to make space and room for productive hobbies, not escapism, not doom scrolling, not more screen time. You need to regulate your screen time, eliminate doom scrolling. I blocked over. 500 people on x because I wanted to block almost everything political that I could. I muted 300 words so that I could escape all the doom scrolling and politics and get away from it. Banned myself from access to news and mainstream media. That was extraordinarily helpful with curbing depression and things of that nature. The other thing you want to do is have productive, rewarding, creative outlets that you do that don't have a performance burden. One of the problems with content creation is, from a mental health standpoint, is when you start putting a performance burden on your creativity and you don't have any other creative outlets or work that you've made space for besides content creation that doesn't have the performance burden attached to it, the judgment of strangers on the air net the feelings of rejection when you don't get the response, engagement, or views, or support that you want. You start to internalize that and tie your own self-esteem, self-worth, and self-value to it. And so then it becomes a real problem. So in addition to bad sleep habits, bad health habits, nutrition, and then also access to influences like media and social media that can make you overly negative and depressed and give you a bad outlook or a negative outlook. You also have to control the validation and satisfaction from external stimulus. Which is like when you post on social media, when you're not getting the attention that you want, you have to be able to be disconnected from that. You have to have creative and productive hobbies that don't have a performance burden where actually doing the thing is the reward and is the enjoyment. For me, that's my nature photography. So for me, a lot of you may not be familiar with this, is I do nature photography and I do that just for myself. I don't do it for views and likes on social media. I don't do it for other people's opinion. And in particular, I really like doing birding, right? So I like doing nature photography. This is some of like what I do. And again, I'm sharing this with you guys to be slightly vulnerable here about this subject matter that I go and I do this and I do it for the pure enjoyment. And when I do it, I'm not doing it for likes. applause and for validation from the internet I take these photos I print them out I put them in frames in my house or I do wood archival prints and I put them on my wall and so I do this and I do drawing and I do painting on occasion when I can spring for the extra paints and easels I do that for myself and the only way to usually experience a lot of it is if you're someone who has that intimate access to come visit me at my home on occasion i might share one or two of these on the internet or something um but usually i don't and the reason that it's important is from a mental health standpoint if you're a creative person you still need a creative outlet outside of content creation because you need something you do that you enjoy creatively and artistically in a pure way that doesn't have an external feedback mechanism where you're looking genuinely for validation from other people and when you're doing it purely. from a place of just wanting the experience that comes from creating a thing and engaging in art for the sake of art, let's say. Right? So that's the kind of thing. This is another one of my shots. This is another one from Zoo Atlanta. Hang on. I thought I had it here. And again, this is just another example of the kind of thing I do more for myself. And that is not purely about, oh, what are people on the internet going to say or think or how am I going to be judged today? And so this is one of my favorite shots. And like I said, I do this sort of thing more for myself. In terms of burnout versus depression, you already said that for you, you feel that the issue might be that you're more depressed and that you're actually looking at potentially seeing a psychologist. And again, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a doctor, but from one creative person to another. And for those of you watching, because this might be like one of those more helpful live streams for some of you beyond the channel reviews. is I feel that when you're dealing with this kind of thing, the foundation of it begins with unhealthy habits and dysregulated emotional connection and that there are a lot of things that could involve that. And if it's not chemical or clinical, then there are just things you can do to improve your life overall that will make you much less depressed. I'm not guaranteeing these things will make you happy, but they do create the conditions where you're not being abusive to yourself and to where you can do things that restore your confidence and your self-esteem. And then from a creator side, when it comes to burnout, you have to look at, like I said, having some external creative hobbies that don't have a performance burden and don't have judgment attached to them. For me, like I said, photography. in nature, painting, and also for me, illustration, drawing, traditional drawing in my sketchbook. Those are private, they're intimate, and I don't have to feel judged by the world about what I want to create and how I want to express that. And I also am not seeking the validation of other people and some external feedback loop there. So it's the... The enjoyment comes from the process instead of the payoff. The work is its own reward. You have to do things like that for your own good. The problem we all now have is that social media puts us into this forever loop of seeking attention and validation and tying our self-worth and our self-esteem to that. So you still need creative, productive outlets that are positive. and let you express yourself, but not for the sake of sharing those things with others, but for the sake of doing them because you actually enjoy the process and you like seeing what you're capable of. So I would put yourself in that position. Another thing with burnout is to not overwork yourself. A lot of you, you're working 40, 50 hours, then you're trying to spend 20, 30 hours on content creation may not be healthy. A lot of you, if you can refine and develop some of your skills. uh with your video editing with your photoshop or canvas skills and reduce how long it takes you to finish a project if you can speed up how long you finish a project if you can put time constraints on a project and say you know what i won't work on this video for more than five to ten hours one you'll be able to be more consistent you'll sharpen your skills faster you'll get more stuff done you'll find that tasks take up the time that you give them and then also Challenging yourself and pushing yourself like that is actually healthy. When you give yourself infinite time to work on things, they drag on and you may never finish them. And then you'll be depressing yourself because you let yourself down or you feel like you let yourself down because you started something and you never got to see the finished product and payoff. The other thing is you have to learn to divorce yourself from the numbers. And feeling validated and feeling like if you get these numbers, you succeeded. And if you got these numbers, you failed. Now, finishing the project is success. Not finishing the project is failure. And if you think of things in an output manner instead of an outcome manner, you will find that you have more emotional regulation, more control, and you're burning out less and you're producing more. and you're happier with it. You have to divorce yourself from the outcome and marry yourself to the outputs. And it's easier said than done, but in my belief, it is necessary in order for you to manage expectations and avoid burnout as a content creator. So hopefully those of you in the chat watching live or in the replay found that helpful. Again, I'm not a therapist. I just play one on television. And again, I'm joking when I say that. Studio Talon says impressive. Must have taken a lot of patience to get closer to that bird. Actually, it does take patience, but the main thing with a shot like this is actually just having the right lens. And I have a 200 to 600 millimeter lens, and I know how to have steady hands, and I know how to shoot at high frame rates. I have the exact right camera for it. I think this was shot on my Sony A9 II, which is perfect for wildlife and sports photography. Like I said, photography is... the thing I do for myself. And I see we've got some super chats in. So we've got three channel reviews lined up. Excuse me. So we will get to those tonight. Again, just trying to get through some of the chats, catch up with you guys, and give you guys a little bit of help and some creator advice here. Let's see. So we have Terry who says, a question, Roberto, everyone talks about thumbnails and titles, but is there a proven formula or cadence that works best for talking head educational videos, best formats and scripts? This is a great question. If you analyze my YouTube channel and you sort by most popular, in fact, we could probably just do that. Probably just do that. YouTube.com slash at Roberto Blake. I can show you, Terry, more or less what works when it comes to that. If we literally just go ahead and we review my YouTube channel. So what you're looking for, Terry, actually is if we go to my channel and we... I need to make thumbnails for the members only videos. I keep forgetting to do that. If we sort by most popular ever, I mean, this, even if we don't sort by most popular ever and we look at regular videos, I need to upload more regular videos. I've been mostly focusing on the live streams, but if we even look at my channel, which is a talking head channel with edited stuff and occasionally green screen videos, what works, and you see that for the most part, I actually do get, fairly decent views on my channel for my subject matter is and uh not every topic will be as popular as others uh and some of it i do rely on youtube search for but as you can see um the views largely are consistently fairly good on my videos when they have enough time to bake that being said If we go to my most popular videos of all time, you're going to notice a recurring pattern with them. The recurring pattern with talking head videos for me over the years. And again, there will be videos here that are not nine years old, I promise you. But the thing that has mattered in terms of the overall approach to talking head videos when it comes to... uh formats and what works if you even look at this video uh from two years ago is people are looking for an outcome that they want whether it's something that's going to save them money or make sure that they buy the right thing in this case product reviews and product features tell them what to expect what's worth their money what's not advice for buying things how to accomplish a goal, like how to get to a thousand YouTube subscribers and explanations in detail, how to design your portfolio. That's a specific goal. That person wants a portfolio. They want clients. They want to pass their job interview. They want hands-on reviews of very expensive products. So that's a proven format of, hey, I have access to something. I have it in the real world. I bought it or tried it so you don't have to. Those are formats that work. Those are titles that work. Listicle videos that tell you 10 different methods, ways to achieve a goal or 10 reasons why you're not achieving something. Those kind of things work. How to achieve a very specific outcome in a very specific software. Those things work. So if you're doing talking head and informational content, Terry, these are proven and established formats that have worked for a very long time and still work today. Um, and I still have videos that are working like this to this day. Uh, but a lot of these also rely on search, so don't expect them to blow up overnight. None of my videos, for the most part, with rare exceptions, where I've gotten access to products, um, like the Microsoft Surface, uh, video that has... 600,000 views got a quarter million of those views in two weeks but that's because I had access to the product because I was at Adobe Max and therefore I got hands-on access to this before any of the big tech youtubers aside from IG Steam got it so I was able to benefit from early access to a product if you guys start doing product reviews and even taking free products with no money and doing reviews features um product settings and so on from brands and and go for free first you can start getting early access to products before they release from companies if you do a good job even if you take no money and then those videos could blow up if you're one of the first people to get access to something either um at or before embargo or if you get access to special events like i did because i was a speaker at adobe max um i was actually a speaker adobe max i think last year as well But this was back eight years ago, which was my first time at Adobe Max. I think I've been three or four times since. It gave me access to products that weren't released to the big YouTubers yet that were completely brand new. So no one had videos out for the most part, or there were less than 10 of them out. I think there was less than five of them out. So I was early. Being early matters, and you can get fast views that way. But most of my videos, this video. Still gets 500 600 views a day because of search when I first released this video a lot of you remember this video did got like a thousand views its first day and it took three months for this to get 10,000 views people were actually Criticizing me and ragging on me for my views versus my subscribers over this video two years ago Now this video has almost 400,000 views, but they're all from search Some videos are like that and they just take longer to gain traction. If you're going to be in the education and information space, you're not an entertainer. You're not a lifestyle channel. Your videos don't get their upfront views from the YouTube homepage. In that case, they get their views from people searching for them. Some videos will resonate with people on the YouTube homepage like this one because it speaks to something they're experiencing. Stop trading time for money. It's a very polarizing headline, but it also makes this very specific claim. And people want to watch the video to find out if I'm full of crap. So that works. Ironically, this how to design your portfolio video still gets views 11 years later. Ironically, because graphic design principles don't change, it actually still is mostly relevant. I could probably do an updated video on six, seven steps for starting a podcast for beginners. Probably still, it might take three years, but probably still get 200,000 views on a video like that since podcasting is hot right now. So if you're looking for what's the standard for education videos and talking head videos, Terry, to answer your question, you can just look at the most viewed videos of all time on my channel. And I've basically accumulated most of the formats for titling videos. in that type of subject matter. And as you guys are seeing here, in terms of popular videos, I have like at least a hundred videos that have a hundred thousand views on them over the years. So, um, it's not as if it's a fluke or anything. There are things that just work better than other things. Um, so again, that's just, um, a little bit of background when it comes to talking head style videos. However, I would tell some of you that you could go more the combination of lifestyle and vlog-like content even for information. That's what Cassandra has been doing. And even in some of my oldest content, I mixed a little bit of that with showing a lot of demonstrations in B-roll. And there will be videos I do in the future where some of it has more cinematic and is not just static talking head. but also includes walk and talk elements and demonstration and process elements to it. So that can be extremely helpful. Some education channels benefit from having a lifestyle angle instead of just being talking head at a desk like me or Graham Stephan. But this format still works. It still gets hundreds of thousands of views for people to this day. You can do it. And so, Terry, I hope that that answers your question in terms of best formats and scripts. A lot of mine, listicle videos that have numbers in them, videos that have specific outcomes in them and have a dollar amount in the titles do extremely well. Bold claims about outcomes work very well. Polarizing titles that challenge assumptions or myths in your industry do very well. Titles that lead with statistics in your industry that are intriguing or not very well known are incredibly powerful and draw people in. So those are the kind of things that tend to work in that situation. Yep. And I see we've got some super chats in for channel reviews. So we're going to make sure we get to those. We're up to four channel reviews in the queue now. So we're definitely going to do all of those tonight. We're probably going to. try to do a minimum of five we can go up to maybe eight or ten tonight um so yeah um cat uh the arts um yeah like um personally my illustration stuff is more for people that i'm just specifically close to i'll share a little bit of my photography but i almost never share my um illustrations i might in the future um post some of my paintings um because i'm getting to a point again where i'm starting to feel very proud of some of that and i don't like showing that stuff up all the time like i said it's usually for people who know me personally um but um i might share and show some of my painting stuff at some point in the future but usually my sketchbook nah that's just for me or for close friends and family studio talent says uh that helped a lot oh you mean the advice around uh depression and burnout. Yeah, I think at some point I'll make some updated videos. I might literally do a series of five specific videos in a row. Probably I think this will be a series I either do at the end of October, closer to November, possibly no later than December. But I'll tell you guys what, I'm gonna make a deal with you guys. If for sure we can hit 645,000 subscribers, which puts me very close to my 650K goal. If we can hit 6,000, sorry, 645,000 subscribers, because we're almost at 640K now, I will absolutely for sure release a five-part series, probably all in the same week, specifically around creator mental health. And I will specifically do the video series and I will cover a dedicated video on burnout, a dedicated video on imposter syndrome, a dedicated video on motivation. And I will do two other mental health topics for creators. You guys can kind of let me know in the chat or the comments what you want me to cover besides burnout, motivation, and imposter syndrome. because those are the three big ones. And the other two videos are kind of up for grabs, but I will do a five-part series on creator mental health. And probably, if that does well, a sixth video, or if I just want to, I might do a sixth video on just creator mindset as a whole. But I will promise you this, that I will do a five part and deliver it. And those will be publicly live videos. They'll sit on the channel forever. We can hit 640, 645K subscribers. I will absolutely do a five part dedicated series all in one week, a Monday through Friday on creator mental health for you guys. And I'll tell you what, I'll even throw in a live stream Q&A. where we'll answer a question specifically around creator health and mindset. How's that? The Determined Garbiner. We use super chats for a channel review. You can do a super sticker if you want. It usually just works better if you do a super chat. And if you make sure we have your at handle for your YouTube channel in your super chat request and anything you want us to know about the channel or anything you want us to focus on, that's super helpful if you have a request for that. Guy who likes edit I've seen channels that blow out well blow up well thumbnails I have two and I've actually tested this on a separate channel during the pandemic we did a test of Could I start a new YouTube channel and will YouTube's algorithm? Be biased against a completely fresh YouTube account, so we did that during the pandemic And it did very well. It got more views than we had subscribers by a lot. Some of the videos even got a thousand plus views or multiple thousands of views. And we did a crazy experiment. We let YouTube pick the thumbnail from a frame in the video and didn't worry about it. We only focused on the title. We didn't do any editing to the existing videos and they were unreleased videos and clips from my speaking engagements, man on the street interviews, creator interviews, things that I didn't release. Some of them the audio wasn't perfect on and we put them out and we just had a abrupt beginning and abrupt ending with no edits in between. It was as it was shot and nothing else and just posted it. I tested things with making the most polarizing or aggressive title I could think of or the literal title of what it is. And we tested that over on the Roberto Blake Highlights channel. We kept them all between one and four minutes. And we did a different experiment for YouTube Shorts. These were all long form. Later, we did an experiment, 50 days of YouTube Shorts to prove another point. And these videos did well. They got hundreds, if not thousands of views. High click-through rates. Almost everything got between a 60% to 80% retention rate on these one to four minute videos with no cuts in them. Proving years ago that there was this demand for unedited, raw, polished content. A lot of it, what worked best was human interaction or when I was on stage. So it was either human interaction or it was the fact that, oh, this is somebody on stage. This is really interesting. what did people who pay money go to here and see what's this um and so the thumbnails had and showed that was on stage with a crowd so we uh we did that um no no edits no thumbnail so the thing is under the right circumstances the title and topic are strong enough on their own and they can be evergreen videos so you can subvert timing and trends with that but a good thumbnail can only help you A good thumbnail can only help you. Trying to win without thumbnails is largely just an admission that it's a skill issue and you can't make them. So when people are like, oh, without thumbnails or this, like, yeah, some people, you know what? If you're the most attractive person in the world, you can win without thumbnails. If you are a good photographer, you can win without thumbnails. If you have an interesting location, you can win without thumbnails. If you, um, are interesting and just physically yoked like Sam Sulek and you're a walking meme, you can win without thumbnails. But outside of that, trying to win without thumbnails is admission of a lack of skill in packaging up videos, which makes you less competitive than people that have that skill. Because if someone else is as good at writing titles as you, picks an interesting subject matter that's competitive to you, and their video... production, presentation, script writing, and quality. Basically, if all other things are equal and then someone packages better and has a better book cover than you, they win. The time when people win without having a good book cover or a good thumbnail is when the subject matter is so interesting or the timing is so good because they're early or first to market or there's no competition in the market. They're able... to win without that extra effort because they have some other outlier advantage if someone does however have more attractive packaging for you and their thing is as good or maybe not even as good but slightly close and you don't have good packaging or your packaging is unattractive or ugly that person is going to beat the bricks off of you in the marketplace and it's not even a question truth is people make value judgments at a glance with their eyeballs and the most attractive person most attractive packaging most attractive most interesting thing almost always wins not quality of content and certainly not quality of character not at the initial at a glance judgment everything is superficial that's the world we live in we have to get over it it's a skill issue i'm not saying that to be mean or to be contrarian i'm just telling people especially people in the chat this is how it is as you're going to see in the channel reviews we're about to get to this is how it is undeniably few exceptions books are judged by their covers and so are youtube videos yeah i don't usually uh participate much in art spaces unless i'm going to compete in a contest i don't usually um do that um i have my reasons it's just years and years of not great experiences with it but um At a local level, it depends. And if I know the people, I'd have to be comfortable with them. But like I said, I move to a place to where the things that I do where I have a performance burden are in the realm of YouTube and social media. And then I corner off for creator mental health, to avoid burnout, to avoid other things or anxiety. I corner off a part of... art where I just keep it much closer, much tighter space to where I don't have to deal with other people and how they feel about whatever I made. And again, I just find that personally helpful. It's no offense to anything. And I know some of you would just like, you know, you like the idea of seeing some more of my personal work. We'll see how much I ever want to share from that, but it will be extremely rare. um and i tend to do it on my instagram especially my instagram stories if i'm gonna do it at all because with instagram stories there's a point where it goes away and i don't have to just have it be there lurking forever like my my artwork uh especially like for things i illustrate um it's much more uh fantasy stuff so um It's dragons or it's abstracts. Some of it sometimes is landscape. So it's nothing out of pocket that I'm worried about. It's just more of like, oh, here's my thing. And my skill level with it is actually pretty decent, in my opinion, personally. But it's just things that's like, oh, I want to do this. Sometimes it will be stuff from Star Wars just, oh, that's a cool concept or, oh, that's a cool what if or whatever. um so it'll be things like that it'll mostly be things um i've read about in books and saying okay um how does how do i interpret this thing uh sometimes i'll draw other things um like uh just creatures from mythology for example um i considered a faceless youtube channel where i'd narrate um you know mythology and monsters creatures from mythology creatures from the bible and stuff like that and i considered oh what if i uh use some of my own illustrations um as the cover art or the thumbnails for that and then um other stuff for the um for the actual uh background or animation or stuff like that so it's something i've considered toying with and then doing that like anonymously as a faceless channel. We'll see if that ever manifests or anything. So it's stuff like that that I do when it comes to my own art and illustrations. But again, for me, it's just more personal work. And, you know, I just don't like putting a performance burden on it or inviting other people to it unless I feel personally very close to them. If I were going to put it out there, again, it would be more anonymously. Unless I'm competing in an art contest for some reason. Because sometimes it's just nice to win things. Studio Talon says, I was wondering, what is your thoughts on a channel niche where you just talk about fictional worlds that you or I created that channels that do have hundreds of thousands of subs? It's possible if the subject matter is interesting. I've actually helped grow some channels around this, but it's usually in the niche of creepypasta and horror stories or cosmic horror. or science fiction and I find that what works really well is when people do it almost like in a storytelling podcast fashion kind of as a radio drama and as far as the fictional world they have to present it not as oh here's my story in series and more of here is this really interesting story in and of itself and they kind of lead with what the most interesting thing is. So yeah. I need to get some mods for Twitch so that when we stream to Twitch, we could get these spam comments out of Twitch. Yeah. Yep. Super. When I was a kid, I used to draw every day, actually. Someone was asking if a degree in graphic design is still worth it. My personal point of view with regard to college and degrees. is that a good reason to go to college is you need to get out of your neighborhood, community, or a bad home situation. And the easiest way for a lot of young people with no resources, very little power agency, is to use college to escape their circumstances and the environment. That's a good reason to go to college. Another reason to go to college is there's no other means of entering into the career field you want without a college degree because it's a heavily regulated industry or it's a high prestige profession. The most notable ones being engineering, anything in STEM, anything in being medical and so on and so forth. That's a good reason to go to college. Another good reason to go to college is there's a resource you need access to that is too expensive. to gain access and experiment with otherwise. So for a lot of people, there may be software or hardware that is just so out of their league and the open source alternatives and budget alternatives are not worthwhile to take seriously and they want to access that. So those are like my three reasons to go to college is you need to get out of your environment. You need, there's no way to enter your career of your choice and live out. that without the degree at all, at all under any circumstances, or you need access to a resource that there's no way for you to afford or get access to under any other circumstances. Those are like the three best reasons to go to college. The worst reason to go to college is the idea that it will somehow magically manifest into a liberal wage or a high income or anything of that nature. considering that the majority of people who graduate now do not go into their career field that they got their degree in. Most people now get into high five figures or low six figures of debt. That becomes a lifelong debt sentence that they're able to not able to pay back and they have nothing to show for it. Again, about only to my knowledge, one out of six people that go to college end up in the practice of their degree field. So for me, that makes it not worth it for the overwhelming of majority people coming from an impoverished background or coming from the working class. So that would be my stance when it comes to college. Having gone to community college, I will tell you that the best version of it under different circumstances is to go to community college or to go to a trade school or to go to a local university in state. part-time and that your best outcome is not the degree, but the skills and being able to build a body of work and a portfolio that puts you in a position to get somewhere because you can demonstrate skill. A degree in my view, as an employer by the way, and as someone who was a manager in corporate America who made hiring decisions, I never made hiring decisions when I was a manager and it was my vote, I never made it based on a degree. And I got my job beating, I got all of my corporate America jobs. in a marketing manager, web and graphic designer, designer at an ad agency. I got my professional jobs without a degree, having gone to community college, on skill in terms of my portfolio, demonstrating my skills when asked to in interviews because sometimes they'll happen. For the ad agency, I had to sit there and show my Photoshop skills in real time to the agency owner right then and there. And I was able to do that confidently without reservation. So I beat people from the most prestigious art and design schools in the New York tri-state area to get that job. And I didn't even put in an application for that job. I was called in on my portfolio and my website for that job. So I would tell you the smart thing to do if you want to enter a creative field, whether it's graphic design or video or art. marketing and so on, social media. If you want to get a job, even in corporate America today, or if you want a job working for an entrepreneur or small business owner today, and a business owner, those business owners today are elder millennials or they're young gen Xers. They are not boomers anymore. They are people who understand the internet, understand social media, understand marketing, and they value skills. And a lot of us, may have actually, oddly enough, a bias against college rather than for it. Boomers and older Gen X have a bias toward college. Young Gen Xers, elder millennials, and millennials in hiring positions actually have a bias against college. And what we have a bias for is your skills and how you present and your ability to have good presentation skills, networking, how you conducted yourself in your personal social media profiles, because we will look you up and we will stalk you on the internet when we're hiring you to make sure you're aligned to our brand, our values, and you're not a liability and you're not somebody who pops their mouth off. We will check into you. And we will want to see a body of work that demonstrates that you can be an asset to our company and our goals and that you can do the kind of work we already pay for. And we're also going to go through the interview to see if you're coachable, teachable, and how independent you are and can you do things and make preparations and anticipate things without being told. We want to see that you come prepared and what your preparation skills are. So we're going to judge you on a lot of soft skills and socialization, which I'll be frank. A lot of graduates, a lot of Gen Z adults in the job market, a lot of young millennials. You don't have the social skills to pass an employer's interview. If that is an elder millennial or a Gen Xer, a lot of you, you don't speak. well and articulate yourself well, you don't prepare and research the industry or the employer or what their needs are or what it looks like to be competitive in that market. A lot of you have a lot of trouble with strong eye contact, being challenged, being asked questions on the fly and being able to either Formulate an answer that shows yourself to be educated or being in a good way able to admit that you don't know and that you are, though, still capable, even though you don't know, of being someone who is capable and will try to deliver value in that situation anyway or will at least recognize where your limitations lie and having some humility. in how you answer that question. So that's extremely important to an employer. I'll tell you as someone who's literally also hired over 100 freelancers and contractors in my time, how little a degree matters compared to someone having proof of their results. I don't care if your professor likes you. I don't care if you show that you can be disciplined enough to show up to a classroom three to five times a week, 80% of the time. It's not particularly of any importance to me. What's more troubling is that a lot of you will get that degree and never autonomously deploy your skills and build a body of work from the moment you leave your college classroom. What is devastating is that you will never cultivate your online presence, personal brand, and social media to demonstrate yourself to be someone who is capable. confident and very invested in their professional image and very excited about making a contribution to the industry and career field that you're pursuing when your social media is nothing but your hobbies or complaining or a negative attitude or politics, that's a red flag to employers. So a lot of people don't realize you're being quietly screened out on these things. So for all of you asking me whether a degree in graphic design, a degree in photography, a degree in a video, a degree in marketing, whether these things matter, the truth is what matters is how you conduct yourself on the publicly available internet and what happens when I Google search your name. What matters... is whether there is a body of work attached when I Google search your name and a portfolio and a website and a dot com where I can see what you've been doing while you're in college, since you left college, and that you took skills that you learned and knowledge that you gained and applied it in the real world without anybody telling you and without anybody paying you. Will you use the skills that you put yourself into debt to get in the first place? And will you do it without being told? And will you do it? understanding that this is your ticket to the big show and without someone having to pay money and take a risk on you first, de-risking yourself by showing that you can produce results and that they're very good results and that they're competitive and that you'd be an asset and we'd be lucky to have you. Do you put yourself in that position? Do you spend most of your social media demonstrating your skills or demonstrating that you're a liability by complaining, being overtly political? and engaging in arguments with people on the internet is that what you're spending 80 of your time online and your online footprint looks like or is your online footprint somebody who's showing that they can create value for others that they're um positive that they're a go-getter that they're ambitious that they're focused those are things that matter a lot more a lot more by the way side note for creators This matters for your brand deals and when they look you up and when they research you as well. This also might matter for people who might want to collaborate with you. This matters for opportunities for you to work with companies and be invited to events. So cultivating your personal brand and your image, showing your body of work, any creative person should always be keeping these things in mind. It's about showing that you're an asset, demonstrating value, and showing your attitude, and what you bring to the table science of success says just know for my channel review i relaunched my channel on september 15th okay we've got you we're locked in for five uh we can do eight tonight doug so we'll cap it at eight uh simply tasia says i didn't include what i wanted reviewed i focus on the importance of mindset and habit and change why g on while on glp1 medication weight loss Uh and maintenance journey. I struggle with tiles and thumbnails. Okay, we're locked in we've got you we've added that into the notes So we've got you covered. Hey, what's up YouTube? Liaison Renee Ritchie. It was good to see you last week. I got the interview footage Probably going to send that and ship that off to music radio creative I still need to download one of the last big 30 gig files from our three camera setup. So For those of you who don't know, I was at the Made in YouTube event. Renee from YouTube has been a good friend for many, many years. Always been super helpful. Great member of the community. Sat down with me and we did an interview about all the YouTube features, the direction of YouTube over the next 20 years. I got to ask them some of your favorite questions about why you might not be growing as a small YouTube channel, how the algorithm works. all kinds of things of that nature so we have an interview coming out i'm going to be sharing some clips from it um in my socials um but i'm shipping that interview out so it can just get turned around a lot faster so hopefully uh that comes out sometime next week thanks for stopping by renee always appreciate you um yeah doug remind me to mod you over in twitch to um hold down the spam over there yeah no i miss those kind of days too um buddy Incentive collection, $20 Super Chat. Good evening, Roberto. Just updated my channel with many of your suggestions. Add a new segment. The segment includes a street game show. Curious to know your thoughts and questions on it. Thanks. Okay, yeah, no problem. Question from Terry. Is it valuable ROI for a non-monetized creator to attend VidSummit or other paid events, or should they wait to achieve a certain channel level? It depends on what your endgame and goal is. If you already actually... are let's say you're a business owner who happens to be on youtube which i think if i remember is your situation if you're a business owner professional and you happen to be on youtube even if you haven't established your channel then it's worth it because one you have an income level that justifies it and it can be a write-off for you on your taxes so that makes sense the other thing is if you already are a career professional or a business owner um you'd benefit from the networking opportunity Uh, can you turn that down? Uh, so you'd benefit from that from just a professional and networking standpoint, um, when it comes to going to VidSummit. So, it wouldn't be a problem there. The other thing is, if you feel like your biggest challenge is clarity around your content, and you can afford it, then it would be worth it, even as a beginner. And I'm not just saying that. It's that sometimes the only catalyst... for doing something is you have something inside of you that's holding you back and where you're lacking confidence uh clarity and it's stopping you from making uh the commitment of time and energy to this if the situation is not money holding you back then yes it is worth it to go to vid summit even as a rookie creator if if you're already a high earning individual and you are in your career and established, or you have a business of some kind, because the connections there will be strong for you no matter what, so that'll justify it. It's a tax write-off, so that'll justify it. And again, you may get the personal, dedicated experience in real life that pushes you over the edge and gives you the confidence and clarity to finally commit to something. So that's what I would say about VidSummit for somebody who... hasn't gotten their channel monetized yet or is just starting. If you're in that position, then it makes sense. Home Rapid Repair, Larry, I better see you at VidSummit. For those of you who don't know, Larry's been a member of the community for a long time. He's been absolutely crushing it, absolutely crushing it. Yeah, in general, for thumbnail standards, look at five successful content creators in your niche. Two of them, Should be content creators who recently started growing, not just the biggest channels in your niche, but channels that are growing and have broken through. So find five channels succeeding on your niche, getting the kind of views you'd like to get. Study their titles and thumbnails. I say pick five creators and pick 20 videos from them that are killing it in real time. 20 videos that are killing it from them this year or in the last 90 days or whatever if they put out content that much. from each that gives you 100 videos and look at what those videos title structure are, what their thumbnails are, what the standards are. Find five successful creators and figure out how to become number six. Yep, absolutely. All right. So I think we've got five channels lined up. I'm going to pop those all into the browser here to make sure we've got them ready and raring to go. And we're going to make sure that we get to all of those tonight. Doug, we'll take up to three more tonight. I think I can manage that. I've got some water here, so I'm going to chug a lug some water, make sure my voice is okay. And that's what we'll do. And we will go ahead and we will start knocking out these five channel reviews. And again, we've got room for up to three more tonight. So if you haven't gotten... a channel review request in we've still got some room available for you we'll take up to three more tonight and that's probably going to be it unless we get through these rather quickly for some reason all right i think i've got all five of these loaded up here one two three four five yep looks like it up we just got in number six the determined gardener thank you appreciate you So we'll make sure we get that in the submission form and then we'll get that loaded up. So it looks like we're actually down to two more spaces tonight for channel reviews. I think I've gotten all of your major questions in the chat. Thank you, Doug, for getting that into the form here. All right, so we've got the determined gardener loaded up here. All right, so let's go ahead and get the channel reviews going. So tonight our first channel review up is the basement dweller show and so this channel is about comedy podcasting and Jokingly anything that keeps them unemployed. So it looks like they have a YouTube show slash podcast here commentary style first compliment is That the branding on this for what it is is on point for a reaction style channel So good job there. And it does look like the thumbnails here are actually pretty strong in terms of the overall branding. Readability on the thumbnails is pretty good overall, I would say. Biggest issue I see with this channel is it hasn't been consistent recently. But getting 1,000 subscribers off of 15 videos, getting videos with thousands of views is really good. Leaning into the reaction meta around things like the comedian Kill Tony and such is very good. So what would I do as far as improvements to this channel? What I would say is with this channel, I would include the multiple formats here, including the ranking videos, because those have actually done good for you in the past. And I would also find a lineup of comedians. that you want to react to and talk about. So your big one has been Kill Tony, but also what and who is adjacent of that? Can you react to things around Matt Reif? Can you react to things around Zach Justice? Can you react to things around Whitney Cummings? Can you react to things around Joe Rogan and the comedians adjacent to that circle. Um, and that they're just these big names. So I would find for that part, um, you know, um, that, and then you talk about some of, uh, Kill Tony's regulars for the show or whatever. Um, I would look at, um, some of those, uh, people and I would say, okay, who is orbiting that? Um, Who's that other guy? Shane Gillis. Shane Gillis. I would look at that. And so when it comes to this, I would expand just the repertoire of the people that you're covering so that this isn't just a Kill Tony reacts channel, so to speak. And so you don't just get a pigeonhole there. I would do ranking videos potentially around guests on Tiger Belly, I would consider doing some reaction videos around flagrant and around God who I'm spacing on his Andrew Schultz. That's Andrew Schultz. So I would expand that and just kind of extend your programming there. So that's the strategy I would use. But for 15 videos, this is a good job. I would also think about how you could structure doing this content more consistently and getting out at least one episode a week, if not two episodes a week. If you're going to go harder on these, which I think your thumbnails for this are more important than anything, but if it requires a little bit of a heavier lift in workload, especially on the editing side, I would say at least once a week, put yourself in a position for once a week. If you could do Two times a week or more considering that 15 videos got you a thousand subscribers You could grow by a thousand subscribers a month if only you were putting out more consistent content once a week You could probably grow by 500 to a thousand subscribers a month very quickly get to 10,000 subscribers build some momentum there if you can manage to incorporate shorts i would tell you to go to a daily strategy for shorts believe it or not with this type of thing and if you could even add a weekly community uh live stream that could probably help you to be very honest uh given the type of audience you have as long as you could set it up and with monetization in place i would not be shocked if you make good money off of YouTube channel donations and memberships if you did a weekly live show with the audience. And you don't have to do that while showing your face if you don't want to. You can just arrange to do it in such a way that you have it all set up in OBS to still be a faceless live stream. So it's something that I would consider doing in your situation and something that I think immediately could improve the overall channel. So like I said, if you're going to do stuff about comedy and podcasting, I would expand just the gamut of the figures that you cover in the way that I suggest and expand the formats a little bit, potentially add the shorts reaction clips and format those accordingly. And I think that could do very well for you. But again, stellar job. at 15 videos and over a thousand subscribers even i didn't achieve that most people don't hell mr beast made 100 videos and didn't get 800 subscribers so um you're doing really great thanks so much for submitting a channel review but what did you all think do you think uh that my review of the basement dweller show uh fits and did you agree with my recommendations would you do anything differently Like I said, I think this is the kind of channel that if it was going on weekly plus had a weekly live show, would be growing by like a thousand subscribers a month considering it has 15 videos and 1,300 subs. In my mind, there's no question. I think expanding the gamut of comedians and podcasters with shows that covers people like Matt Reif, people like Whitney Cummings, people like Joe Rogan, people like Andrew Schultz, I think that that not just killed Tony, I think that that would... do extremely well. That's my opinion. What do you all think in the chat if you're watching live? What do you think in the comment section if you're watching the replay? Boom. One down. And what do we have? Six to go. So, you know, good job to the basement dweller show. Very unique approach and channel there. Don't want to know what you guys think, but I think that that actually is a channel that's set up for some potential success i think the biggest issue is consistency but that could be a workflow issue but there are plenty of ways around that for a commons terry and reaction style uh channel i'm probably gonna have to get another drink here in a minute oh actually i have a ginger ale i can crack open here in a bit but we will get through the water first but yeah i don't know what do you um what do you guys think You agree, you disagree. What do you guys think of the direction for that channel? Yeah, I think it has pretty solid potential for what it is. Um, Roberto, I think it's too many words and they don't pop yellow. Might not be clear. I think the drop shadow on the yellow could be a little stronger and that would eliminate it. And I personally would have mixed red with the yellow to make it pop a little bit more. So if you're watching Basement Dweller, it would be on brand to do a darker drop shadow and potentially use a color break between yellow and red for that. And then I think that that would be stronger. But I actually don't think for the age and demo for what it is that the text was too much. It borders on some of the established guidelines I have of two to three words per line. and no more than two to three lines it borders on that but i don't think in the worst way so i'm not too upset with it and it hasn't hurt the channel for views looking at it um it just seems to be something that is not holding it back and like i said i don't think it goes too far in breaking some of those guidelines that i set out again there are a couple of them but like to be honest i think it works for the audience and for what it is. I think that this thumbnail and this video is absolutely, you know, a flop here, but I think it was just the attempt to try something different or something funny. I think that this one doesn't work. These kind of worked, but they weren't really that good. Again, Some of these other formats clearly perform much better. And again, the yellow one, it's not hurting it. I mean, we're talking about 6,000, 3,000 views on videos with a channel that's only got 15 videos and 1,300 subscribers. So again, I think it's within the parameters it needs to be for what the audience is and what works for this sort of thing. So, you know, that's my thought on it. Oh, we've actually got Basement Dweller Show in the chat now. I was considering getting out of commentary around comedy and podcasting just because it tends to be negative. I definitely tend to over edit and over produce around the character. It doesn't have to be negative if you don't want it to be. You could choose to focus on things that are purely just funny or absurd. I definitely get where you're coming from. It is definitely a niche that's rough on your mental health. So I totally get that. With the character is a video loop in OBS to be clear. Yeah, I figured it was something like that. So again, there are ways to make the workflow for this sort of thing a little easier on yourself, a little less rough. So again, with the commentary and the negativity around that niche, I completely get it. Believe me, the money I've seen come into my clients who do commentary. is so good that it has been tempting from time to time to even figure out what's a faceless version of this that I could do. But the toxicity is always the turnoff, but it doesn't have to be. You could make a choice, specifically since you focus around comedians, to focus more on the absurd, the outlandish, and keep it in good fun and good humor. And maybe that could be something that is a little different, and then it doesn't have to bum you out as much. But if you want to pivot away from that, I could completely understand. And it makes perfect sense. Yeah, I agree with this studio talent. I'm very familiar with the channel Mother's Basement and the anime reviews there. So, yeah, very familiar with that setup. Made by 4NT has a question with their super chat. My question is for impressions. Why do some videos get more than 1K plus impressions in the first 24 hours? Whereas some only get 250 in the first 48 hours. Is it upload time, titles, topic? Here's my belief regarding this. My belief, and I believe that this is backed up by what we see happen in the policy of YouTube itself and the checks is. Before you ever write your title or ever commit to your thumbnail and hit the save button, your YouTube video. based on the transcript of the video is already used in my belief to determine the fate of your video. Here's why I believe that. Do we all agree and understand that before you ever commit to a title or thumbnail and save it, that you could basically have a placeholder or nothing at all for the title, have no thumbnail selected, you could have your video as private as a draft and let it sit there. And we do understand that YouTube could demonetize that video before you commit to a title and thumbnail that impacts that just based on the transcript of your video it could say oh this video is demonetized because of this section of the video or that it could be age gated or that could literally without a title and thumbnail the video could get a community guideline strike it could get a copyright claim or a copyright strike we all accept and understand that before you ever do a title or thumbnail. That's 100% true, right? We all agree that that's what can happen when you upload a video and that the only way that that works is if YouTube is using the transcript of your video and the actual content in the video to identify and classify the video and that that could even happen before the video goes public and while the video is private. We agree that that's true, right? Let me know what you guys are thinking in chat. Let me know what you think in the comments, because this is making a larger point about how YouTube and the algorithm works. And then we'll get back to channel reviews. We got another one that came in. We have another question that came in that we'll get to real quick. But I want to establish this premise here, right? So if without a title and thumbnail, a video can be copyright claimed without a title and thumbnail. A video can be copyright striked without a title and thumbnail. A video can be age gated. or restricted without a title and thumbnail or a video can be community guidelines striked without a title and thumbnail can have a takedown request without a title or thumbnail if that's all true then the fate of the video is already in many cases decided at the time that you upload it before you ever make it public and before you ever commit to a title and thumbnail which means it can only be based on the YouTube transcript and what's in the actual video and identifiable in the video. Do we all agree that that's true based on demonetization, age-restricting, and strikes and takedown notices at time of upload, once it runs the checks, without worrying about the title and thumbnail? Because if we agree that's true, then what we've all observed, with our own eyes. If that's true, then that means what your video is about is classified and observed by YouTube at the time of upload, not based on title and thumbnail selection. It also means the initial group of people that it's going to be served to and who those people are. and based on what their interest is and what their watch history is and what their user behavior is, is already determined if there's someone who's going to be shown your video beforehand. Because we already know it's going to limit who it's showing your video if it has been deemed ineligible for young viewers already at upload before you commit to title and thumbnail. So we know that part. So if that's true, then all these other things are true. So if that's all true. then that means that the reason a video is getting or not getting certain impressions and opportunities for impressions begins with, and I'm not saying title and thumbnail have nothing to do with it, but it means first and foremost is the transcript and content of the video itself because that's determining what the video is actually about, not your title, not your description, not your tags. And that's not decided by a title and thumbnail or your description or your tags. It's mostly decided by what's in your transcripts, what's in the timestamps, and whether that all matches with what YouTube is seeing the video is. and deciding to classify and interpret it of what's it about and who the audience for that is and how many of those people are active on YouTube at that specific time that's trying to serve them videos and what device they are on and what they like to watch on that device, what time of day it is, what they watch for that time of day, and so on and so forth. And yes, we've done a review, Determined Gardener. I'm saying this premise and I'm giving this information because it's going to inform. when we do the reviews, which we will get to all of them. Don't worry about it. We will get to you, and we've already started that process. But this information about how YouTube system works is going to be useful to all of you because it's going to put the reviews into context because when you understand that your title and thumbnail is not for the algorithm and your title and thumbnail is for the viewer, so that they can decide when the video's in front of them, if they're gonna click on it, that's important. But the video even being in front of them is decided by something other than your title and thumbnail. And that other thing that decides whether your video is even put in front of a viewer is the transcript of your video and how YouTube interprets the video based on the transcript and decides what the topic is for the video, what's it about, and who is watching those topic cluster of those videos. So if that is true, and here's the reason we know that that's true about the YouTube algorithm. The reason we know that is before you save your title or upload your thumbnail, your video is demonetized or given limited monetization or a copyright strike or a copyright claim or a community guideline strike before you ever publish the video. and before you ever commit to a title or a thumbnail. So that means the most important thing, deciding how many impressions your video gets and how many people get in front of it, is not the title and thumbnail. That decides that once it's put in front of them, who is going to click it and if they're going to click it and why they're gonna click it. But them even seeing the video and having that opportunity is decided by what the video is about and that's decided by the transcript and the content of the video. So again, I want you guys to know that because if you're wondering, well, I have a good title, I have a good thumbnail, I have a high click-through rate, I have a high retention rate, I have a good average view duration, why am I not getting impressions? Sometimes, That is decided by how YouTube understands your video and how it understands who the audience is for. If that is not clear by the way the video is scripted, structured, and what the transcript says and how accurate that transcript is, then your video is already had its fate decided before you ever committed to a thumbnail or a title. And you need to know that. And the proof yourself. is the fact that it can be demonetized without a title and thumbnail or that it can be a community or copyright strike without a title or thumbnail and the only reason that happens is because it's how the transcript and content of the video is being interpreted and most people don't know that and that's why we had to go through it and that's why it's important all right so we've got um i believe we've got all eight of our slots for channel reviews locked in um let's see We have one more question here. Roberto, second question. For creators who don't have title and A-B testing yet, how long should we wait before we change the title after publishing a new video? Thanks for everything you do. Listening to you at work. If a video is already doing well or average to above average, never change anything. If within, let's say, 72 hours the video is not performing, to at least the average of where it normally would in 24 48 or 72 hours consider changing either the title or thumbnail if most of the traffic is coming from the youtube home page um then i would obviously probably change the thumbnail first and the title second If most of your traffic is coming from YouTube search, don't worry about underperforming in that time period. Give it more time. And if the thumbnail can be improved, so be it. Or A-B test the thumbnail, so be it. But if you know you made a search-friendly video, don't worry about how it performs in the first week even. Sometimes not even the first 30 days, to be honest with you. Give it more time than that. Most of the traffic, for whatever reason, somehow got picked up by YouTube Search. Sorry, not Search. YouTube Suggested. Thumbnail probably matters more than title in that situation. To increase the click-through rate on Suggested, change the thumbnail, make it more attractive, and make it easy to understand at a glance, usually without text, make it easy to understand. Yep. You can override the automatic transcript if you're worried about accuracy. by doing manual transcripts and my understanding is a manually inserted transcript is given priority and if you can do that immediately at upload you'll want to do that for channel reviews you'll want to look at the rules around channel reviews in the description here on YouTube but also we've locked in the channel reviews we're going to do for tonight I believe we actually have all of that locked in because we have one two three four five six seven i think we have one more spot doug correct me if i'm wrong do we have one more spot or are they all locked in and um again um the rules are in the description around these um but i believe we are locked in for tonight or we have one more slot available i think i think we have one more uh but yeah we're we're locked in here in fact uh because um i normally don't skip ahead but uh determined gardener i know you um asked if we've even done the channel reviews yet so i'm just gonna move you to the front here we normally don't do that but uh you know i'm just gonna go ahead and do that in this particular instance and uh we're gonna do that so we have the determined uh gardener uh 370 videos 5 000 subscribers um Determined Gardener is your one-stop shop for beginner-friendly flower and vegetable gardening on a budget. I would remove the repetition of the channel name from this one, and I would just say your one-stop shop for beginner-friendly flower, vegetable gardening on a budget. So I would do that. If you have a channel schedule, I would try to get that into the channel banner here. Profile pick here is not bad. Usually just a pure headshot is better because when this gets smaller, it gets covered up in or obscured when it gets shrunk down. So it's not as easy to find. Channel layout, good use of playlist there. I also see you do multi-format, so you also do YouTube shorts. In terms of the thumbnails, A lot of these are actually pretty good, and they do communicate what the video is about at a glance. So they're not bad. However, for this type of niche, I suggest you study what Cassandra from Becoming a Farm Girl is doing. You guys are not one-to-one the exact same type of channel, but if you look at her videos and how they perform... you could be getting similar results to these if you take a similar approach to the structure of the thumbnails even without doing the same type of exact content or the same titles of videos you could be getting similar results a primary example is this video is closer to one of cassandra's in terms of a thumbnail strategy and you've got 47 000 views i would argue that the title of this video is also closer. Same thing for this one from a couple of weeks ago that got 12,000 views. So I would focus on more videos like this. And if we look at what's performing for you as a whole, doing more of these videos and building your content pillars around this type of content is going to probably yield the best results. Very smart to do these Dollar Tree videos. But I don't know why you mirrored or reversed the image in this thumbnail one. That just seems kind of off-putting. It didn't kill your views, but I just find that to be a little weird. So I would just kind of make sure we could read that that's Dollar Tree there. So I would reverse the photo, but not the text, obviously. The other thing is when you're not doing a brand like Dollar Tree, the thing that seems to be working is showing... um realistic thumbnails are doing well where people can see that um the number of items this the video could have done better if the text wasn't obscuring more of what is actually in the video and in the thumbnail here so that would have done better for you overall uh your top 20 or so videos are doing very well It looks like you do have some solid content pillars. Let's look at what's going on with shorts. In general for shorts, even though you may not feel like you're getting traction on them, I would keep doing them. And you probably have some outlier shorts that are doing very well. Yep, you got a couple of outlier shorts that are doing well here. Here's the thing. Shorts are not a replacement for individual videos. Shorts are meant to be done in bulk. I would do shorts in bulk. or not at all, to be honest with you. And so what do I mean by that? I believe shorts, at a minimum, is a daily strategy, if not one to three shorts a day. Channels that I coach that are doing a short split strategy are doing three to five shorts a day, if not five to eight shorts a day. And almost every creator I have doing that has been able to get outsized views attract more people to their content again if you care about long form views more than anything those shorts views do not help your long form videos we have an extreme strategy where they could but i'm not going to really talk about that here and it doesn't apply to most of you and most of you are not going to do the extreme strategy for getting shorts to benefit long form anyway um because it just wouldn't fit what you want to do but it does work um What I would say though is one to three shorts a day or three to five shorts a day or five to eight shorts a day is about the right cadence and releasing them 45 minutes to an hour apart is the right cadence, but you have to do it for about 30 to 90 days and then you will see outsized results for that. Those of you follow me on X have seen the case study that I shared from a coaching client who let me show that case study. um he was a gamer doing it and uh other channels we have the outside of gaming have done this and gotten results well but in his particular case jake got um in a month like 20 000 subscribers 10 000 in ad revenue with 9 000 of that being from shorts and um 100 million views in um a month and that was with um uploading five to eight shorts a day was that strategy. He embraced the short splits. He missed a couple of days because he just couldn't handle it after work. But he did the short split strategy of bulk uploads and that worked out. There are other niches this works in besides gaming. It actually works for vlog-like content, IRL content, man on the street content, woman on the street content, commentary, reaction style content. uh believe it or not product reviews in tech and beauty and product reviews in general it works for um storytelling vlog like shorts it works for very similar to a strategy on tick tock oh also jake posted anything that was over a minute long for that on tick tock for the shorts and made another 3 000 in revenue from that uh based on what he told me so um Shorts Blitz works really well for a lot of different niches. But like I keep telling you guys, shorts are not one-to-one with regular videos. 10 YouTube shorts is equivalent to one video. That's why we post them in bulk. That's why my upload cadence for shorts for my creators that I coach is either daily one-to-three or three-to-five or five-to-eight. We don't usually recommend 8 to 12 except for very specific situations, but not for new channels. That's only for channels that are established and trusted by YouTube. So what we've seen is it just increases the number of new people who discover the channel. It increases the views floor. It doesn't have a problem with a quality over quantity drop-off. In fact, all the uploads get more views by doing that. And we also were able to increase the long form views by 30% per upload by doing this. But there's an extreme in the strategy that allowed us to do that. It's a variant that most of you don't want to do anyway. Because it's hard enough to get you to embrace bulk short uploads as it is. So again, my thoughts for your regular long form videos, The Determined Gardener. largely revolve around doing more of the proven video topics on the channel that get outlier results like this, how the mother three turned her front yard into food paradise and the Dollar Tree videos. Find the formats that are obviously repeatable and working the most for your channel. prioritize anything that has thousands of views instead of hundreds of views you don't have to give up on videos you like just because they underperform and maybe some of them are slower to work i think this lows video would have worked better if you had lows in the thumbnail in the same way that you do dollar tree so i wouldn't necessarily give up on that um example is this video where you have lows in there and you're pointing it clearly works so do more of that You could probably also incorporate Home Depot or Walmart for this from a gardening standpoint. And so those things that can work. Videos with this format of this struggles until I started doing this, I think you should embrace that as a content format and that that could do very well for you. So again, overall good job. And like I said, embrace some of the thumbnail strategies and tactics. from Cassandra over here at Becoming a Farm Girl because I think there's a lot you can learn here about the composition of thumbnails and an overall approach to them. Again, not all of your content is similar or the same, but there's still things you can learn from this approach just based on the outsized views. And again, I also think there is potential with a short strategy for you of just doing more uploads. If doing... three to five uploads a day sounds overwhelming consider what it could look like to at least just do one shorts upload a day and then to start to work your way up to that but again across varying niches especially for irl style content we found that it works really well so those are my thoughts for you the determined gardener um but anyway chat what do you think do you agree with me disagree with me Again, I think that getting 5,000 subscribers off of 370 videos, especially with how many of those are shorts videos, is actually really good. She doesn't have as many outlier shorts yet, but I also think it takes, ironically, to some degree, unless you have a viral video, longer to warm up shorts because they're meant to be a bulk upload strategy. I think the consistency of uploads on this channel is actually really good. I think it's one of its strongest points so far. And again, I just think there are some things in the approach to the topics, the thumbnails that could use a little bit of work to continue to get the views. But I don't think the views are bad on this. I think almost every video on this is evergreen. So it still has potential to accumulate views over time. And I think the channel has strong fundamentals. But that's my perspective on it. What do you think? Would you do anything differently than what I'm recommending? What are your thoughts? If you're watching live, let me know in the chat. If you're watching the replay, let me know in the comment section. All right, so Determined Gardener, hopefully you're still up and still with us. And there is your channel review for the evening. So appreciate you. Yeah, the subscribers to videos rate is extremely impressive. If anything, I don't believe in viewer to subscriber ratio, but when I see a channel have a substantial amount of subscribers and they haven't even done that many regular video uploads, at least as far as long form, I'm usually actually very impressed by that, especially for newer content creators. I'm also impressed by consistency of uploads and upload frequency in a situation like that. So again, I focus on outputs. quite a bit because again i i don't think you can get outcomes without outputs anyway so i tend to focus in that direction when i'm evaluating these things so i don't look at things like view to subscriber ratio nearly as much as other people i don't believe in it especially with shorts now view to subscriber ratio is irrelevant now that we have youtube shorts um so again i i think um that this was very impressive from the determined gardener i think that for a small channel that this is actually doing overwhelmingly well. You know, like 88 to 90% of videos for long form never get a thousand views anyway. So seeing so many of her videos actually perform really well, that's something that I think is actually a really solid foundation for the channel already. So, yep. John Christopher says, crazy question. I'm a freelancer with 10 years of experience in customer support and sales. I live in Suriname. Any advice concerning a topic niche for the creation of my first no face YouTube channel? If you're a freelancer, it depends on what you want to do and what your goal is. It depends on if you're trying to demonstrate your skills for the purposes of getting more clients. The faceless side of that could hurt you in terms of credibility, believe it or not. because people want to trust and know the face of the person they're working with in many cases. So that could actually be detrimental there. To be honest with you, I would consider a niche not related to your business, not using your real name. If you want to be a faceless YouTube channel, I would go into some kind of niche. that is easy to make content in that has a decent earning potential in terms of a profitable niche, that has decent earning potential that doesn't rely on personal credibility or building a personal brand. I would use a name other than your real name and I would go into a niche that can make money and I would choose probably not something in lifestyle, probably not something in... education just because that relies on personal credibility and a connection and relationship with the audience. So I would pick something more media focused that has the ability to win with low lift content and that can make a lot of money on ad revenue, sponsorships. and potentially donations from people who are purely content consumers and don't need a personal connection with the creator. So that'd be my advice to you, John. King Explicit says, we appreciate what you do, bro. You, my OG, for sure. Appreciate you. Thanks so much. All right. So let's see. Next up, we have the Science of Success. Actually going to need my ginger ale now. Late Apex Garage says, Question number, does the channel need to be a minimum size to pull off certain content, like riffing on Trahan's 50 States or maybe 50 baseball games in 50 days? Because a small channel make that work. In most cases, the answer generally tends to be no, but there are exceptions to this. If you're exceptionally good at packaging, and that means thumbnails and titles, if you were a 5 out of 5 at writing headline titles, and you have some unique, interesting angle for pulling that off, and you're five out of five at making thumbnails, then yes. As a small channel, if you have outsized talent for the packaging, strong presentation and video editing skills, and are highly entertaining, if you're a five out of five on thumbnails, five out of five on title headline writing, five out of five in performing and writing hooks that keep people engaged past the first 30 seconds of a video, let alone the first 90 seconds of a video. If you are a four out of five to a five out of five at scripting and structure of your videos, and if you are a five out of five at the performance of delivery and cadence and keeping people engaged with content, and you can pull off a 50 to 70% retention rate, not lose even 20% of viewers in the first 30 seconds of the hook once you get the click-through rate, if you can meet those requirements and you feel that you are talented enough to meet those requirements, then you could pull that off as a small YouTube channel. The truth is most new and small YouTubers do not have the skill level for that type of thing because they don't have experience. Wouldn't hurt to be above average attractive either. Wouldn't hurt. It's not a guarantee that it helps a thousand percent, but it will never hurt you to be above average attractive. I promise you that. So in that situation, if you met the qualifications to be able to have outsized above average talent then being a new youtuber or small youtuber doesn't matter if you can over perform on talent right up front right out the gate if you don't have the skill level or experience to do that then you just don't qualify to pull off that type of content and be accepted received and for people to commit to that content having not seen your channel before, not knowing who you are, not having any status or social proof. It'd be different for some topics like, for example, a completely new YouTuber can do something if they are a doctor or lawyer and literally put doctor or lawyer reacts in a title and do something and get clicks because they have status and social proof to overcome everything else, right? But a nobody, who cares? So, respectfully. So that's the issue around this kind of premise. A small channel with five out of five talent can win and doesn't need anything else. Or if a small channel has a creator that has status and social proof, lawyer reacts, doctor reacts. engineer reacts, real nurse reacts, real architect reacts, professional blank reacts, then it works. So that's my thought on this. All right. So next channel review is the science of success. So we have the science of success. What I do like about this channel banner is the schedule for the videos. in the banner here most of you do not need to put a subscribe and notification bell in your banner for the most part it doesn't usually add anything in particular to have that for most of you at this point this is an overall clean banner but some of the information is just too repetitive or it's too much. So what I would say here is I would clean this up, not repeat the name of the channel here. And then also for the profile pic, I would actually lead with your face because if you're gonna be on camera and your face is gonna be in the thumbnails. Putting in the profile pic is better because we trust people. We don't really trust or care about logos in many cases. If you're a faceless channel, it's different. But since you're leading with a human face on camera for the videos, it makes sense for it to be the profile pic. So I would change that. This... Video is for busy hands-on parents who value education and want the best for their children while balancing work and family. Okay. I would try to incorporate some aspect of the family-centric theme or parent-centric theme in the banner somehow as well so that people understand who this content is for. Let's see. Channel layout, I would not lead with the YouTube shorts in the channel layout. I would go into the customization. You have 35 videos, so you should have enough playlists to try to round out this homepage. For the actual videos, these thumbnails are actually fairly strong, but they do have some weaknesses. I don't think you need your logo in the corner of these thumbnails. at all and I think you can eliminate that element I think for the text that you're putting in the thumbnails you'd be better served just putting that text across the top of the thumbnails with a stronger drop shadow and then moving the actual thumbnails slightly down or even putting a black background behind the text at the top and moving this down would be better than your current approach to the thumbnails the imagery of the thumbnails themselves is not a problem the text placement is and since you're using very little text in the first place you're better off just putting it at the top you also benefit from not necessarily repeating the title with those uh text in the thumbnails so um What I would consider doing is I would probably change that into thumbnails and just responding to your question here. And what I would also look at doing is I think the titles don't specifically create enough urgency or speak to exactly. what the viewer wants. So I would not necessarily use negative titles, but I would infer urgency with the titles and your titles assume that people are looking for solutions instead of that people are trying to address problems. So I would actually try to reverse that and I wouldn't go hyper negative or in instill fear fear but i would lead with the problems that people are experiencing and acknowledge their problems acknowledge their struggles in the titles but you could have positive framing with the imagery to offset that your current question is you suggest um not leading with shorts how do i change that uh you go into the customization settings in youtube on your youtube studio on the desktop you cannot do this in your mobile device you have to do this on desktop too many of you over rely on the studio app in your phone you need to you'd be a power user get on desktop you can change the customization settings of your youtube home page layout there um so yeah so i would um walk backwards from what are problems that parents are having that acknowledges their struggles and their anxiety around their children's development. And I would lead with titles around that because, again, the assumption that people are looking for solutions instead of things that acknowledge their problems, I think, is an incorrect assumption. So I would, again, primary example would be I would lead with things like five signs that this particular bad thing is happening. Five signs your child is struggling with emotional intelligence. Five signs your child is struggling with performance anxiety. Five signs your child has low self-esteem and a lack of confidence. Five signs screen addiction is hurting your child. Five signs your child is struggling in school and how to fix them. Five ways to understand your child's learning type and why they might be struggling in school. Those are things that walk backwards from the pain that someone's experiencing and offers them a solution. An example of this within the context of YouTube in a different category is a longtime friend of the channel, a member of the community, not a coaching client, but someone that I've definitely given some advice to. Actually, I think he was an early channel review now that I think about it, is Dr. Sten Eckberg, another content creator right here out of Georgia. With his wife, Pam. I hate that I keep forgetting that I need to set mute tab when I open these things. But yeah, Dr. Sten Eckberg would be an example for you to reverse engineer for your channel. Both in terms of potential of thumbnails, but also the way that he does his titles. Like, kidney damage sneaks up on you without warning. that's a really good lead in with oh my god this is what i'm worried about so um 10 signs of high uh cortisol okay 10 signs of low self-esteem in children um that's something that if a parent sees that they're like oh my god not my baby uh let me click on that right um so again using um things from dr stenn as part of title formulas could be very good for a channel like yours. Wait a minute, where did we go? Okay, yeah, sorry, that was another channel review we have coming up. So yeah, so I would say that. As for your YouTube Shorts, let's see what your most popular YouTube Shorts are looking like. For YouTube Shorts, it looks like you haven't necessarily found your rhythm yet with these. And it doesn't look like the majority of... um the channel's views and subscribers are specifically coming from the youtube shorts i would look at what channels that focus on this subject matter are doing with youtube shorts and then try to identify um that i would also consider for your youtube shorts considering a youtube shorts search strategy where you reverse engineer questions that people commonly ask and turn those into youtube shorts So those would be my thoughts for the YouTube channel, The Science of Success. I think that this is actually a very important type of YouTube channel. I think that, like I said, if you look at what's been successful in a different way, you're dealing with health, neuroscience, child development, you can borrow from successful people and professionals like doctors in the health niche in general. and reverse engineer that for this. And that could actually work in terms of knowing what's the standard of thumbnails, what's the standard of layouts, what's the standard of titles that you could use. And then just kind of walk backwards and reverse engineer that for your type of channel. But those are my thoughts on it and what I would tell Janice to do in her situation. But what do you guys think? Do you agree with that? Disagree with that? Would you do anything differently? Again, I think this is a needed type of content. But I think for it to be the most effective it can be, that there's just a lot in terms of the packaging and positioning that can be done a bit differently. I think at 35 videos, it's still early days. I think for a channel like this to get traction... For long form, it's going to take a couple of hundred videos, believe it or not, around education content. That's just how it is, particularly with education. You don't play by the rules that entertainment channels and lifestyle channels like vloggers play with when you're doing this type of YouTube content. YouTube education-based content creators, authority thought leaders, especially professionals, you have to position very differently than a standard YouTube channel. Most of YouTube's trends, rules, patterns and best practices like more than 90 of it is built around entertainers and lifestyle content so reaction channels gamers vloggers movie reviewers um things like that you're dealing with a serious subject matter it's very different it's the minority of content so you have to approach it very differently but that's the sort of thing that i think matters here what do you guys think let me know in the chat if you're watching live let me know in the comment section if you're watching the replay all right so we knocked out another one whoops there we go sorry about that so um three i think we're almost halfway there once we get to the next town channel which is uh simply uh tasia uh interesting uh channel named tasia i think that's how you pronounce it uh if it is tasia that's actually the name of one of my um cousins on uh my dad's side that is uh the name of i believe my third cousin uh third cousin Yeah, so that's on my father's side from the Welsh side of the family. Let's see. Science of Success says, thanks for your feedback. Yep, no problem. Sheena Bless says, is there a color we should put in our thumbnails to make it stand out more? Depends on what you're trying to do. There's not a hard and fast rule from that. But being a graphic designer, I can give you a couple of hints there. Think about this. What do road signs and highway signs use as colors and why? I want everyone in the chat to chime in and think about this. I've given this lecture before, but having been a graphic designer, having been someone who designed billboards and out of home and trade show graphics and signage, I want you guys to think about this. What colors? are all of our road signs and then what colors are signs that we see on the highway what colors do they use all right so we got some answers in the chat correct correct correct okay so most of them red which is your stop signs your highway signs are green to contrast the blue of the sky most of the time your signs of the highway that are up there really high are green so they stand out in contrast against the sky during the daytime that's going to be gray blue potentially even very light gray bordering on white or straight up white and black at night so green pairs very well with that and what text do we put on those green highway signs we put white and it stands out we also use um a very medium green not something too dark not something too light something highly visible high contrast and again it has to contrast with the sky in the daytime and at night and why do they do that for accessibility reasons so even if you're color blind you'd still be able to read it if you're color blind so it has to pass the contrast test on the side of the highway white background black text again has to contrast usually what's going on in the background there on the road which is mostly going to be the foliage or buildings forest and then you still need to be able to read it and it needs to stand out at night when you're driving down the road 55 to 75 miles per hour plus 10 miles extra for most of us so that's readability okay what are your hazard and construction signs Yellow field, black text, high contrast there. Also stands out, also will stand out against most of the backgrounds you experience if you're colorblind. So it's contrast and accessibility for that. Red and white for your stop signs on the street for the same exact reason. So these are the reasons for those colors. The order for the stoplights is you have your green. yellow and red these are all high contrast values that we can immediately recognize with our eyes we can separate them from each other and recognize them even if we're colorblind so those are strong colors to utilize that we're trained in every way and that we naturally evolve to see first and prioritize them So those are your color combinations that probably make the most sense and can be prioritized in a visual hierarchy and will have the most contrast against light and dark scenarios and backgrounds because they have to contrast with dark backgrounds that we experience in real life and that we have to be able to read at night when we're driving on the road and that we can still see when we are colorblind. So that's why... My answer to this is it's not any one particular color. It's also the combination of colors and what works for readable text and iconography. And so that's why we would, in my opinion, mostly prioritize those type of colors and those type of backgrounds or at least similar ones. But more importantly than the color itself, it's also the contrast values. So that's your lesson in graphic design and accessibility. driving at 75 miles per hour you have to read those things and that's why it works for billboard signage most billboards you see will never almost never use more than three words in a single line of text and try to not use two to three more than two to three lines of text total so you can scan and read especially when you're driving at 55 to 75 miles per hour down a road that's another lesson you can apply to your YouTube thumbnails when people are scrolling in their phone. So it's my background in graphic design and knowing accessibility standards and human behavior, visual acuity. These are things that you're formally taught and trained if you have a design and marketing background, which I do. And you can apply that in the context of your YouTube videos. And it's very important when it comes to the standard and more people should be thinking about the accessibility of their content and how it works and that works at a glance for the uh youtube videos the covers of packaging and uh books we judge books by their cover so packaging this is my book by the way link in the description uh mods in the chat also you can throw a link to the book for them um available in amazon barnes noble target and anywhere books are sold please leave a review if you've already bought it thank you so much But yeah, it's things like that. And so this is why having at least a preliminary understanding of color theory is very important for graphic designers, visual designers, photographers. But YouTubers often overlook all of these things and just pick what they like when it comes to their thumbnails. And it doesn't even take accessibility standards, color blindness, visual acuity, scannability, legibility, readability of text into consideration. When it comes to fonts for your YouTube videos, like I said, the text, two to three words per line, two to three lines at most. Those are not absolutes, but they're hard and fast rules or guidelines that make it easier. on your audience to be able to read things. The other thing is we read from left to right and we read from top to bottom. So that's also very important. In terms of fonts, stop using decorative fonts and handwritten fonts if you're not a graphic designer who doesn't know what they're doing. Try to use easy to read accessible sans serif fonts similar to the sans serif fonts. that appear on road and highway signs the reason that road and highway signs and billboards don't use fancy decorative fonts is because they're hard to read and understand for most people at a glance very quickly to be able to interpret them we use sans serif fonts which means they're fonts that don't have any of the end curves or decorative elements and so the useful fonts that basically universally work for youtube we always bring this up and post it in the chat for you and put it on screen, are bold versions of Bevis New, Poppins, Oswald, Compacta, Open Sans, and Futura. And these fonts are mostly free, if not all free, and you can go to Google Fonts and you can find these fonts, download them, and use them in your thumbnails and design and graphics for your YouTube videos. The other thing you want to avoid is usually putting text at the bottom if you don't know what you're doing. because it will usually run into the timestamp and the bottom right of your YouTube thumbnails. If you're going to use text, usually you want to flush it left to right where it's never going to run into that timestamp, top to bottom in most cases. Like I said, two to three words per line, two to three lines, and that's it. Again, using some of these fonts or put the text across the top. centered or flushed or left or right across the top. That is your best bet for most of you. Are there exceptions to YouTube thumbnails that break or bend some of these rules and still succeed and get massive views? Yes, but those people have something else going for them and most of you don't. So you're better off at least at the start. Following these guidelines, if you don't know what you're doing, or you're not a bigger channel, or you don't have social proof, or you're not established, or you haven't had videos go viral in the past, or you're not a destination channel yet that's proven themselves, you want to stick to these rules and guidelines, especially if you don't have any experience as a graphic designer. Question, if you can only focus on developing one aspect of video creation at a time, would it be thumbnails first, audio second, or content first? It would probably be ideation and the ability to come up with a good idea around a video that will be in demand that people will care about. And therefore, I would say it has to be video idea and title, probably thumbnail, because all of that is going to decide how many views I get right then and there. And then for retention. it's going to be audio because I wasted my time if I got all those skills and then the audio is absolute garbage trash because then people are going to click on my video. I'm going to have a 20% click through rate and I'm going to have the worst abandonment rate of all time because my audio is trash. So there's no point in making a great video with great packaging and great thumbnails and trash audio to get all those clicks and then have people abandon the video or curse you out in the comments. So I'm sorry, but it's very hard to say, oh, just focus on one thing at a time because Yeah, but it's almost not worth posting a video until you at least can guarantee that you're gonna at least have good audio, but you're never gonna get views for people to even see if you have good audio if you don't get titles and thumbnails right, and if you can't pick topics that people care about. So it's rough, and I understand that feels overwhelming, but you literally have to get at least those things right. Or it's almost not worth bothering. So like it's just the way that it is. And it feels overwhelming. It feels unfair to a beginner. But there are too many good options. It's not that YouTube is saturated. But there are enough good options where you have a guarantee of a good quality video to not give a small YouTuber a chance if they don't put in maximum effort. And that's what a lot of you are up against. And I'm one of the only people that I think will be very upfront and real and direct with you about that. I know it can sound discouraging. I know it can be intimidating, but we've also done workshops on this channel to give you those skills as early as possible and to have solid information where you can learn about all of these skills in just one place and know what you need to focus on, what you need to do and to learn how to do it and to get the tools you need and the training you need very quickly. We've done like so many videos on this channel. We've done so many live streams where you keep the replays up, where we've done three hour workshops on thumbnails. We've done workshops on titles, including showing you how to do them in chat GPT. We've done videos around the optimization and settings for YouTube channels. We even did a 12 step beginner workshop of one to three hour videos. We have the playlist on the homepage. Any beginner can watch that, and it's basically a free masterclass on YouTube with about 20 hours of content that you can go through, and it's mostly almost all you would ever need to have a firm foundation for your content creation. We did the free Creator Foundations course to also back you up and support that, answer a bunch of your questions. We even have the free Creator Foundations Discord server so that you guys can have an open study hall, share. titles and thumbnails with each other, get feedback from other creators that are trying. If you can't afford to join the Austin Crater Academy Pro Group, you can join the Crater Foundation's Discord server. Like, we've tried to do everything to set you up for success and basically be community college and trade school for content creators. Almost no stone unturned there. So this is just one of those things where I have to be real with you. and just tell you how the truth is and that viewers are not taking into consideration that you're a small youtuber or a working class content creator or that you're new they're just going to move on to a video that they feel serves them um and you have to position yourself to make a great first impression because very rarely will you get a second chance um so it's better to do as much as possible to the best of your ability to be in that situation and i'm not saying it has to be perfect but i'm saying um there's a certain threshold of effort that viewers are looking for when they decide to prioritize the content they're going to watch so again i try to keep it real we do these channel reviews so that um you can learn from either um having your own channel reviewed or watching what i say about other uh creators And that's why we try to do five or ten of these a week if we can. Maybe in the future we'll do more to try to have some more recent reviews for you. But, yeah, we try to do what we can to just be straightforward and to give you the reality of being a content creator. I think it's good to hear information so we can focus on what to improve. Yeah, that's my main goal for you guys. Right now across our six live stream platforms, there are 342 of you watching. Really appreciate it. I'm not sure how many people are watching on YouTube. It's probably at least 50 of you watching on YouTube. Doug, you probably can see how many people are watching on YouTube. I don't know. Fun fact for a lot of you, 90% of live streamers can never cross 10 concurrent. or peak viewers on their live stream. So if you ever accomplish that, you're beating 90% of people in live streaming on YouTube and Twitch either way. And if you have over 50 concurrent or peak viewers, you're in the top 1% of all streamers. The people you see getting hundreds and thousands of people watching a live stream concurrently, those are in the 0.1% category of streamers. it's so ridiculously top heavy even youtube's top heavy for the views and the subscribers like i said like 90 of creators can't get a thousand subscribers 97 of creators can't get 10 000 subscribers less than one percent of creators have a hundred thousand subscribers and a silver play button um it's fractions of a percent it's like point i think it's like point zero three percent for people who have a gold play button and a million subscribers like that's my client's goal play button i i rack up silver and gold play buttons for my clients i'll join the club when i get around to it um i'm gonna have to make at least another uh i think somewhere between um 300 to 500 long form videos on top of what i already have that's what would push me to a million subscribers at this point is it's somewhere between 300 to 600 long form videos, and then I'd have my gold play button for myself. I have to figure out when I'm going to decide to upload 150 to 250 videos a year. When I do that, then it's a countdown to, okay, I'll get a million subscribers then. So again, right now, I think we have 55 people concurrent watching on YouTube. We probably have had... 75-80% peak on YouTube. Believe it or not, for YouTube and or Twitch, that's the top 1%. 99% of people never get 50 concurrent or peak viewers on YouTube or Twitch. 90% of people never get 10 peak or concurrent viewers. I'm not saying that to brag. I'm saying that to point out to all of you that if you can just get that far, you're doing better than you think. If you can just get 1,000 subscribers, you beat 90% of people on YouTube. If you can get to 10,000 subscribers, you beat 97% of people on YouTube. 88% of individual video uploads that are long form never even get 1,000 views on YouTube. If you get 1,000 views on YouTube, you've beat almost 90% of all the videos that ever existed on YouTube. If you somehow managed to get to 10,000, you've dramatically beat most of the individual video views on YouTube. So you don't need to go viral in order. to uh be accomplished or be successful there are levels of success to youtube and it's important uh for you to know that that is um the case um so i want you to understand that and to not be um as uh critical of how you might be performing And it's not to gas you up or to overly cheerlead. It's to be, oddly enough, it's to be more realistic about what success actually looks like. And that you can be accomplished. at a bunch of different levels. In fact, I'm working on a video. This is a thumbnail. I've got to finish one more thing here. It's probably going to be a silhouette and then have like a question mark here. But there are seven levels of success for YouTube. I could probably make that a little darker so that it's easier to read. But yeah, this is a video that I'm currently working on. I think I'll adjust this to be a little darker. Yep. Speaking of readability, we'll just do that. But yeah, this is a thumbnail I'm working on. You've probably seen the trend of doing something like this with levels or whatever. But this is an example of what could be a five out of five thumbnail when I'm done. I have to make a silhouetted figure for level one. um so i have to uh create that with a stock photo or generate it and then put a question mark in there and that will basically complete this thumbnail but it illustrates the idea i think very strongly that there are just different levels to youtube success and it helps you frame expectations um and i can tell you what you get for each of those levels and what it takes to achieve each of those levels and just the different standards and requirements. So, you know, it's just something to think about. So anyway, let's move on to our next channel review here, which is Simpli-Tasia. And I think I'm pronouncing that right. GLP One Mindset and Habit Change weekly live video on Monday, 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Love that you tell it what it is and what the schedule is. Great profile pic here of who we're going to see, what we're going to interact with. 4,000 subscribers off of 400 videos, including shorts. Great. You've already got channel members, so you're monetized. You have some success here. Really strong on your popular videos. So you already have successful outliers. Very good, clean thumbnails for this and demonstrating transformation. Good use of playlist and continuity and success documenting your journey. And we can see progression in these thumbnails. Smart. Very good. Very good move here. Clear, readable thumbnails for the most part. Simple and clean. We like that. Strong playlist here. One thought we'll get to with regard to some of the thumbnails is consider picking up a little bit more of the basics of photo retouching so that you can try to create consistency in the thumbnails and adjusting the photography thumbnails and the photo color correction for accurate skin tones. Also, don't be afraid to bump the sharpness. You're doing pretty good with the sharpness in some of these thumbnails. But one thing I would say is the sharpness and retouching is good in these thumbnails. Don't be afraid to tweak that on previous thumbnails in the past. But again, very good. Gold star. And the other thing that I would say here is increase... the diversity of the photos in these photo shoots. Also, when you're using your darker background setup, you want to increase the lighting on your face here, similar to what I do for my headshot stuff at my desk, my talking head videos at my desk. Consider potentially using Elgato key lights. There's a lot you can do with that. Even if you got one Elgato key light, because I'm going to show you guys an example. I'm going to turn off my lights here just for demonstration purposes. And now all I have is my accent light and back lights. Now I'm going to turn on one Elgato key light and turn it way up. This isn't bad. And this is dramatic. And it still lets me have that dark background. But I've kind of turned one directional Elgato key light all the way up. I'm all the way up. And look at how. dramatically that changes the look of this video for a talking head video. So Simplitasia, you could even just get one $50 Elgato key light, mount it strategically at a side angle for your desk, and it would increase the video quality and dramatic lighting of the talking head at your desk podcast style videos and be powerful without you having to afford expensive um elgato key lights uh you just get the key light mini for i think 50 60 and just one of these on a mini tripod would dramatically do that if you're using if you have two elgato key lights for your desk start using them you could consider bouncing them or using them at their lowest setting if you feel it's overpowered or again just depending the other thing you'll want to do Is it just their color temperature? Because what I'm doing is I don't have them all the way up. I think I have them at about 70%, 66%, something like that. So at 66%, the key to it for those of us with darker skin tones is the warmness of the color temperature. So the thing is I turned the color temperature on mine to balance out my skin tones here just for what my environment is. to about roughly 6,300 to 6,500 Kelvin for mine at 60%. You just need to play with and fiddle with the settings of what works for you. But I digress. I just say that because it's something I noticed when you're in this darker background how harsh that is and that it's not necessarily accurate to your skin tones. So you can improve that. And I just wanted to show you all the big difference that lighting makes and that there's a lot of ways you can address it. And it can be affordable. Now, for the thumbnails, like I said, diversifying the poses is important so that even for a podcast style episode, it doesn't look super repetitive. You've seen that what I've done is I will take a bunch of different headshots and poses and then I will adjust that. If you're going to also do a podcast style thumbnail. Still consider leading with a topic in the thumbnail itself as well. And if you want, you can put the episode number at the end of the titles to try to encourage people to watch the rest of the episodes and to check out the back catalog versus just your standalone videos. Something I will compliment you on is the consistency has been very strong for you. So we definitely like that. Also, consider prioritization and focus on these transformation videos because these have been your strongest videos so far. And people really look at that. And these are very relatable. So I would say that that is also a benefit. Looking at your YouTube Shorts. These are doing good. And you have some outliers here, especially. Consider daily YouTube shorts, like I said, one to three a day. Shorts are good in bulk. They're good in plenty, as they say. So again, definitely an opportunity there. Increases the likelihood of outliers. Again. um don't worry about do shorts impact long form it's not worth thinking about for the most part there is an extreme strategy um that some point in my short strategy um playbook i'll get to but um don't worry about it for now just focus on building shorts for a shorts audience uh with regard to your live streams again consider making individual um live stream thumbnails and utilizing poses you've seen how i do that for my live streams um and make sure that they don't feel too repetitive with regard to the thumbnails and that you make unique titles and thumbnails don't treat live streams as disposable treat them as evergreen videos with replay value that's what's worked for us in the past um aside from the channel reviews um so um just think about that Overall, very strong channel. Congratulations and keep up the good work here. And we will watch what you have going on in the future with great interest. And like I said, giving you a little bit of advice on the lighting there, I think it's super helpful. But what do you all think? Do you agree or disagree with me on simply Tasia's channel review? Again, I think a channel like this around a weight loss journey and also good information on the actual results, of glp1 is um really important uh information to get out there i think this qualifies as a combination of an education slash lifestyle channel and that you have to look at from that perspective and not look at as an entertainment or entertainment lifestyle hybrid um you know there there are hundreds of niches in youtube but there are really only seven types of channels there's education channels There's entertainment channels and there are lifestyle channels. And then there are four hybrid channels. There are tribrids that have a combination strongly of a balance of entertainment, education, and lifestyle. Those are extremely rare. I would say an example of that you could argue is Casey Neistat's YouTube channel. And that would be an extremely rare example. Then you have education, lifestyle creators. And I would say that looks like Vanessa Lau and Ali Abdaal. entertainment lifestyle channels and I would say that someone like some pie for example I think she is an entertainment lifestyle channel that you could look at for that for sure as an example as that kind of hybrid and then you have so that's an entertainment and lifestyle hybrid we already talked about for an education and lifestyle hybrid that'd be like Vanessa Lau and Ali Abdaal There, for example. So again, you have these different combinations. And I would say for an edutainment channel, that's education and entertainment. That's like my friend Ed from Film Booth. And I would also say another example of edutainment would be Magnates Media. I would say James Johnny. I would say Coffeezilla is edutainment. So those would be examples of that other hybrid there. So you have four hybrids and then three pure categories for types of creators. So there's really only seven main types of creators, but there are then hundreds of niches within YouTube. There are mostly, in my opinion, 12 primary styles of videos. in terms of visual stylescapes of ways to make videos, in terms of how these videos are going to stylistically present and look. There's like 12 main ways to make videos. You learn part of that if you ever did anything regarding filmmaking and that sort of thing. You learn about that. And YouTube is largely derivative of that in terms of mainstream media. That's how you'd start to think about a lot of these things. So those are some of the things we teach in Awesome Creator Academy and in workshops. And yes, Ed Lawrence has moved on from Film Booth. I'm just historically using his channel as an example of edutainment. And that was also how he positioned himself differently in the market for edutainment. So I would say that that is why I bring it up. With the Ed Lawrence channel, he's primarily education now. However, I wouldn't be surprised if one day he becomes an education lifestyle hybrid, similar to Ali Abdel or Vanessa Lau. I'm purely an education channel. I think long term, you'll even see me pivot or make another channel, probably my tech channel, around camera gear. That becomes education and lifestyle hybrid. And I think that, excuse me, that for the sake of longevity and relatability and not burning out, that you'll see a lot of pure education channels over their lifespan, especially people who end up starting families. You'll see them pivot to a combination of education and lifestyle. Probably 80-20. 80% education, 20% lifestyle. And that makes sense. Simplytages, thank you so much for the feedback. You've reviewed my channel before and I made the recommended changes. Great. Excited to, I remember that actually. Excited to utilize these strategies. Really appreciate you. Yep, absolutely. Another channel, is the recommendation correct? It depends. There are some channels that can slightly pivot and have it work. And there are some that don't. It depends on audience affinity for the new direction and whether there's an overlap in the audience avatar and their persona profile, which is basically like a personality test for who your viewers are. So as long as a significant amount of your audience avatar, that cohort of audience, would be highly susceptible to the direction of the pivot, there are ways for that to make sense. Most creators... It would be recommended to start a new channel, but there are exceptions to that rule. It depends largely on audience, personality profile, maturity and age of audience. If you have an over 30 audience, in a lot of cases, there are specific circumstances where it's actually easier to do certain things. Young audiences are the most particular, most fickle. So there's just differences and variations there. So, um, you'd be surprised, ironically, how inflexible the younger audience is compared to the older, more mature audience, but it depends on a lot of things like the direction. Um, when you have a younger audience, obviously for views, most people go into entertainment, but the trajectory for longevity... because they're going to age out of that audience because what happens is if you go into entertainment most people watching are five to ten years younger than you or more if you're an entertainer and they're kind of looking up to you but they can easily turn on you age out and decide oh i'm not into that anymore i grew up i'm beyond that i'm too mature for that now i've outgrown that But meanwhile, that creator gets stuck with Peter Pan syndrome because they grew off of the young audience and they don't know anything else. So they kind of locked into whatever maturity they have. Now, the exception and difference there is if somebody naturally matures and like starts a family. I'll give you a primary example. Roman Atwood started as an entertainment channel doing pranks. He evolved when he got married, started having children into a vlogging channel and lifestyle. and doing um you know roman atwood and family and he became a christian lifestyle vlogger uh with his wife and kids makes total sense because he outgrew the cohort of young audience they grew up with him they often themselves grew up got married had kids started a family so it makes sense for the transformation and pivot because the audience was experiencing the same life milestones at least for the most part that roman atwood woods or they would like to so they could relate to the change and shift in direction because he had an evolution as a human being in terms of outgrowing those things and then also so did that audience it wouldn't make sense for him pushing 40 to still be doing the same kind of content appealing to teenagers and it could also cause problems to do that It makes sense also to be able to still appeal to a young audience cohort if they're watching your family and you become kind of their family sitcom because they're also relating to the younger children in the family and growing up with them as well. So that's how that works in terms of sometimes where the pivot from entertainment to lifestyle actually makes sense. pivot to podcasting and that kind of lets them then depending on the subject matter pivot into edutainment as a hybrid with entertainment in this case being 80 of the value and 20 of it being education if they become a podcaster So then they take the fact that they're a dynamic personality and they leverage their cult of personality, but then they also leverage the access of guests and their expertise brings the education component and learning things through the guest to the table if they're an entertainer. So that would be like Logan Paul going from entertainment. to entertainment and then lifestyle because he was an entertainer purely on vine then with the vlogs even though the vlog slash pranks it went from vlog slash pranks which still entertainment but started pivoting into vlogging and lifestyle and irl content so logan paul went from entertainment to um entertainment lifestyle hybrid then he went from that to a pivot in his brand where he also splintered into entertainment education with the podcast, with the impulsive podcast, because it's not purely entertainment. There is deep topics. There are guests. There are experts. There are interviews. So it becomes 80%, 80-20. It becomes edutainment. So he has a splinter in his brand where he has the vlogs as entertainment and lifestyle and the podcast as entertainment education. And so he has a holistic overall brand. And an evolution. But it all started with the foundation of entertainment first. So that would be an example of Mr. Logan Paul. But he doesn't have. But it's an 80-20 on the value propositions there. So he doesn't have any pure or primarily education plays. And his lifestyle and vlogs is either 80-20 entertainment, 20% lifestyle. Or at best 50-50. So you'd look at it from that perspective on the balance. And this, again, just is examples to show you the concept of progression, evolution of brands, pivots, and the understanding of hybrids, and also audience overlaps, and then who the audience is and what they will value more and what they will value most. And this is why it's something that, again, is the more intermediate to advanced level. of what we teach in Awesome Creator Academy, that is not the beginner level, which focuses a lot more on things like your titles, your thumbnails, ideation. Those things have to be at the beginner level, but this concept of deeper understanding of audience profile, psychology, video types, hybrid models, and so on and so forth is more the intermediate to advanced topics. So again, progression. But it's at least good to introduce you to those ideas and to know that that sort of thing exists and to understand what you're seeing when you see other content creators. But I digress. We've still got a couple of channel reviews to get through here. After this one, we've got three more. So let's move on to Secret Strolls and review their channel. So Secret Strolls, escape your everyday. I love this, and the only thing I would change about the... The other thing I would change about the channel banner here is I would add some kind of drop shadow that makes this text really pop off of that background. And I might fade the background a little bit if I'm being honest. And then in terms of the, if New York and walking tours of New York where Trist of enjoy a twist of enjoy your life i would eliminate this logo and i would replace um it with the skyline of new york city and make new york city itself the host of the channel that's the twist that i would add here is i would eliminate just from a graph design standpoint the profile pic logo is atrocious just i just have to bring that up Um, but I would just replace this with the New York City skyline, the iconic New York City skyline as the profile pic and make New York City itself the host of the channel. So that's one of the first things I would do. Um, I would push down in the, um, layout. I would push shorts down a little bit in the layout. And, um, I love, um, just the variety of playlist here. So I think that's strong. I would make the featured video one of your outlier videos because you have videos with crazy outsized views. And so I'd make it one of the more recent outlier videos. And something relatable. And I think for most people, the video that would be most interesting, relatable. um for completely new viewers is this 2025 um u.s marine corps silent drill in times square uh this is a really great iconic uh photo and uh thumbnail here so i would make that the featured video on the channel for new people to see um these outliers are great uh keep doing them obviously um I think that most of your videos prove that they are stronger without text in the thumbnail. And to be honest, text and graphic design is not your strong suit. Focus on photography then and lead with that for your thumbnails and just focus on really strong photography and work to develop and improve your eye. for photography, for clickable thumbnails rather than text because text and text placement is not your strong suit. Just to be direct about it. For the short form, let's see what the outliers look like here. Outliers are really good for short form. Honestly, this is exactly the type of channel that should be posting five to eight shorts every single day without fail. to be honest with you, for exactly for what your video is, for everyday walks and enjoyment and a perspective of New York City. Film and shoot enough high quality content to justify three to five, if not five to eight uploads of shorts every single day for this channel. And this channel could explode. And like I said, change the profile pic here to... the skyline of New York City itself and make you New York City the host of the channel. For the latest videos, more of things like this. This NYC Mexican Day Parade, give it a little bit more time to cook. This thumbnail is not terrible. But also, this video just may not be something that people are like... clicking on for some reason because your point of view for you know the San Gennaro festival I think that honestly the ones that get the most views focus on people consider changing the thumbnail to take out this car because I think the first clip I'm even seeing in here with people dancing I think that this first clip has more interesting shots in it than The, I think this first one has better shots in it than the thumbnail itself, if I'm being honest. And the text placement here isn't terrible, but again, it might work better if you show people dancing in the street, because that's more interesting. Because I get where you're going with the, having the classic muscle car in there and all of that. The people here are too small in the thumbnail versus the first shot is just so much better here and so much more interesting and attractive. That would go with that. And again, it is possible for you to get outsized views. I mean, look at this one. It has 1.4K. Excuse me. So you also probably shoot enough footage to justify posting more frequently. And you can get the outliers a lot faster. and i think you need to do multiple uploads of individual events sometimes and then people can watch more of it um so i would probably take that approach this type of thing and like i said if nothing else for the shorts um three to five videos a day if not um five to eight videos a day on the shorts because of these outsized views uh you'll increase the view floor and view ceiling really quickly uh with this sort of thing And there's no end of footage that could be captured in New York around a lot of these things that would result in high views. So I would absolutely be doing that. Yeah, Secret Strolls. Hopefully you got something out of that. And like I said, I told you why I would change the featured video to in this case. So again, very well done. Very cool channel overall. I see a lot of potential for this. I've seen similar channels. that cover um like japan do extremely well i think this could do really well with new york honestly if i were still living in new york i would end up probably doing a faceless channel like this on the side and i would primarily probably be doing shorts i would capture some events but i'd probably primarily be doing shorts i'd probably upload uh three to five if not five to eight shorts every single day And I know that if I did that long enough, I'd get to 100,000 views on a channel like this. If I ever do move back to New York, I'm literally going to start a faceless channel, probably with little or no narration, and literally just showcased experiences in the streets of New York in YouTube shorts with three to five or five to... eight uploads a day i promise you i would actually do that because i know it would work and i could get to 100 000 subscribers rapidly doing that so those are my suggestions for you again what do you guys think if you're watching in the live let me know in the chat if you're watching the replay let me know in the comment section would you do anything differently do you have the same take that i do on the approach to rebranding this using the profile pic um as new york city skyline basically making new york the host of the channel let me know what you guys think and there we go so yeah i think that was a little different i really think that that is a channel that has crazy potential to grow and to get outsized views i know a lot of people like the idea of their uh long form being uh the primary thing but i'll tell you i've been um having a lot of success with the creators that i've worked with specifically around a short split strategy for short form they're uploading three to five videos every single day or five to eight videos i even helped a roblox channel uh over the last um you know started over the last three months or so i think they only started uploading though in the last um month and a half to two months uh one short a day on this roblox uh gameplay channel one short a day almost no long form 10 million views in under two months with one short a day 40 000 subscribers um only just got into the partner program on shorts because they had no long form so they haven't started earning from it yet so we don't have um earnings numbers on that one but even without earning any money 40 000 subscribers on that 10 million views uh one short a day in roblox i know it's gaming but even for that people oh gaming's a saturated niche roblox is everything like nope you still grow in it if you do it right uh when that channel goes to two to three uploads a day which is what's next for that we know 100 000 uh subscribers before the end of the year gonna be one of the fastest channels we've ever helped grow because it'll get to a hundred thousand under six months um jake with uh the clash royale channel is going to massively do the same thing in under six months of coaching 100k subscribers because he's already halfway there in one month of coaching um so shorts can grow channels and then in terms everyone says oh but the ad revenue oh but the ad revenue not with the bulk uploads blitz strategy when you're uploading three to five shorts five to eight shorts every single day and some of them uh get outsized views or even go viral and you're able to get tens of millions of views, you're not going to complain about the ad revenue and the RPMs when you're getting tens of millions of views. When you're getting tens of millions of views, 20 cent RPMs are fine. So like, that's the key here. And again, I could see a channel that covers a city like New York, Italy, like Rome, Italy, New York, Paris, Japan, Tokyo, Hong Kong. Anything like that doing YouTube shorts on a daily basis covering a destination, Hawaii, Philippines. I can see any channel that covers a vacation destination or one of the great cities of the world doing YouTube shorts, five to eight video uploads every single day. A channel like that can definitely get outsized views, grow to 100,000 subscribers. have some of those shorts go viral and easily make high ad revenue, getting tens of millions of views every week. Yeah, absolutely. So again, a lot of people are underestimating shorts because they keep comparing them one to one with regular YouTube videos. One to one YouTube videos with shorts is ridiculous and it's unreasonable and it's stupid. It's 10 to one, 10 shorts to one YouTube video. So like that's the big difference. and if people thought of it from that perspective and anyone i've changed their mind on this it's working like so that's we've cracked youtube shorts we've cracked even youtube live streaming and the shorts the live stream pipeline um with few exceptions i'm not a viral video guy i'm not a viral video strategist i don't particularly care about that so aside from some outlier ideas that i did have go viral for clients I'm not big on the viral video formula thesis and for a lot of the type of channels I work with because I mostly, aside from the gamers I work with, I mostly work with people over 30. We're not optimizing for viral videos because usually you need a young audience for that. And I've already explained the dynamics there. So we don't optimize around it, right? It's not that I couldn't do it. I don't like the market off of it because it's too much of a long shot. I like to market off of things where we have duplicatable, repeatable success over and over, where we're just leveraging human behavior and psychology and predictive patterns that we can exploit, right? In a healthy way that's not like evil. So when it comes to that, yeah, we've got it locked in and figured out. There are nuances to different niches. There's different ways we do it. We don't necessarily go with that same strategy for every type of thing. for irl and vlogging and storytelling it actually does work though um it can work for reaction style content like we said and there's a different strategy for doing it three to five with product reviews for beauty and tech and things like that but you add youtube shopping if you're at 10k subscribers you add youtube shopping affiliate to it and then it prints crazy money and you're not even worried about the ad revenue and the views at that point So there is a pathway for that. For somebody like Home Rapid Repair, Larry from Home Rapid Repair, if he was doing three to five shorts a day around home improvement and tools or even tool roundups and how to do it and showing you a top-down or POV perspective of hand tools and power tools and then tagging that with YouTube Shopping and then also maybe a QR code for the Amazon affiliate side. He'd be printing money hand over fist with those YouTube shorts, regardless of how the views go. If he was doing that many of them, he'd be making money on the affiliate side hand over fist, which he's already doing, but he would possibly double the revenue from the affiliate side because it's a niche that lends itself to, yes, guys are going to buy power tools, hand tools, crafting tools, and they're going to watch a home repair DIY channel. around doing that and they're absolutely going to order that stuff from ace hardware or from um amazon easily um especially seeing demonstrations of those tools or five tips around using them or round up of best tools to use for this thing so it makes perfect sense same thing for camera view channels it makes perfect sense um crafting channels beauty channels especially And the bulk strategy for beauty channels is easily huge for beauty and makeup channels. Done. So some of these things niche dependent, but the philosophy and theory around them has nothing. I won't say nothing. There is a part of it that's the YouTube algorithm. Most of it is human behavior, consumerism, buying psychology, and leveraging things like FOMO, right? So it's all human behavior. And that's what doesn't change. Algorithms change. People don't. That's the way you could look at algorithms change. People don't. For the most part. Most people. So that's all you have to think about. Psychology. Personality. You go off of that. You have a path to victory as long as you build your strategies around that. So we got. one of our last channel reviews so here is the incentive collection returning um channel review here um definitely seeing some updates to this channel again i would um for as many videos as this channel does have i would customize the layout and put more of the playlist of channels featured on the home page here uh to round this out for first impressions Let's see. For videos and the updates, I actually think these thumbnails are a huge improvement and stronger overall. They may not be getting traction right away, but I do think that these are much stronger in terms of their clickability and their branding. The only reason I think some of these might be underperforming right now is I actually know quite a bit about scents. And my best friend Malcolm put me onto this and for our cologne collections and stuff like that. Because he's a actor, he's a working actor. And so he thinks about these things a lot. Got me into it a couple of years ago. So I stepped my game up, especially as a public speaker and someone who goes to conferences. I think that this style will work better. and you should keep a b testing it the quality of the videos is actually strong here i think that it depends on mostly given the history of your videos that did perform is the brand of these cents decide how many views it gets and whether people are looking that i also think um new releases play a role um and also the blind buy series is okay but let's look at what your top performing series actually is because your top performing series are our individual videos and the just buy it series so the just buy it series are your strongest performers i would try making the just buy it series with this new approach to the thumbnails and see how that performs because historically Only out of your top 12 videos historically, Incentive Collection, only one of them, no, sorry, two of them, two out of your most watched videos of all time are blind buys. Most of your top videos are not the blind buy videos. They are the just buy it videos. Okay? So I would look at that. That being said, even with this change in strategy, you're getting some more views, even over the last three weeks, on this style of thumbnail. And for your size of audience and how niche the content is, this isn't bad. I also see that you're going back and changing some of the thumbnails. So that's cool. But I would update... this style and try in general your best videos are the Just Buy It series. And this one, I think that this thumbnail style on the Just Buy It videos could do better. So I would look at doing that because the Just Buy It video here is a little bit maybe too busy and I don't think you need the fall 2025 branding in this. I think it's better. with this Just Buy It with the style similar to the Blind Buy now. Just Buy It videos perform better for you, so I would also do more of those. There's nothing wrong with doing Blind Buy videos, but you should do more Just Buy It videos because those have just historically been the best series on the channel overall. I do like how you stepped your game up with the thumbnails and branding. I dig it. I think a lot of people in the chat dig it. But let's see. Your best overall performing videos, only a handful of them have been the videos in the car. I do think people like from a video viewing standpoint, and I could be wrong. Maybe your chat is telling you or your comments are telling you they like the videos in the car. But I think the videos that show you using... the gloves is just something different and unique and people like that and there's just kind of like a vibe there um so just consider that but if you are seeing that people do good review viewer retention and you're getting good comments off of doing the videos in the car then i don't got a problem with the fact that you're doing them for almost all of the videos now um you know but I would just say consider looking at things like that in terms of what people are responding to more and people are responding to most. And I would just check the retention numbers on that. I think for the street game show, you need less busy thumbnails there. I think you should figure out one line of text for that, maybe two or three words. So consider doing those thumbnails more in the style of those college campus videos that people do, the man on the street college campus videos. Maybe do them more like that. But again, I like some of the direction with the overall style here and where it's going. And I think there are improvements here. And again, I think the visual brand is getting stronger. I kind of would like to see some of that vibe in the profile pic and even in the channel banner. I think that that could be worth pursuing. So those are my thoughts for the incentive collection. What do you all think? Do you disagree? Do you agree? I think that the overall channel direction is getting sharper. It's getting cleaner. It's getting... To look a little bit more premium and I do like that. I think there are still some other things that could be there but I would love to know your thoughts on this and What you see that you feel could still be improved. I also think that the Consistency is going to ultimately in the long run help the channel. This is an extremely niche type of content I do think it's positioned very well, but I do think there are some minor improvements. And I also think there need to be more comparison videos and more listicle videos. But those are my thoughts. Let me know what you think if you're watching the live stream in the chat. Let me know if you're watching the replay in the comment section. What are your ideas? What are your thoughts? Yeah, but overall incentive collection, good job. Still think there's room for improvement here. uh think that this could still get more traction over time and i also think that more comparison videos more just buy it on individual product reviews um you know i think more roundups i think um more top five videos are going to do well so i would look at things like that yeah channel reviews are typically on fridays i was having some issues um last friday so we moved it to saturday for today to just not have to skip another week um but yeah it's usually on fridays yeah the thing about shorts is people don't have to click on them and you'd be surprised um how selective people are when they have to pick something and make a choice or the role decision fatigue can make and things when they're just scrolling there's not really any agency involved and therefore um People are surprisingly receptive to things that they would never choose on their own in that situation. And that's an outlier advantage that shorts have. And the supply and demand curve, ironically, the demand for shorts, as much as you guys may not believe this, drastically out-indexes the supply. So there's more demand for shorts than there is a supply of quality Shorts done in good quality, done in good value, and done consistently enough to meet the demand. So as much as you might think shorts are saturated, it's the opposite. Shorts are not saturated. There's more demand than there is supply for YouTube shorts that are quality and are not AI slop. See, there's the key. Shorts that are not AI slop, the demand is much higher. Then the supply, and it's not even close yet. Still early days. Still early days. Yeah, I generally will try to schedule the live streams. UntouchableN84 says, I've been doing the Blitz five shorts a day. I'm a Rocket League gaming channel. What would be your take on getting the views to be more consistent? You have to give it more time. Like I said, this is not something... that you do for a week. This is something you do for 30 to 90 days to build traction on it. And it's five minimum, eight maximum every day for 30 to 90 days, never missing a day to maximize results on this. For something like Rocket League as a gaming channel, if that game is still popular and in demand, The key is things that people aren't going to scroll away from when they see it's Rocket League. So you want to make sure that the shorts are quality. Usually the best thing for gameplay videos like this is to have clippable moments from good or high-level gameplay or exciting gameplay with commentary. That is interesting enough to capture the viewer's attention immediately in the first two seconds of the video. If they can't be interested in the first two seconds of the video, 1-1000, 2-1000, swipe away. Because think about it. Two seconds is longer than you think it is. Two seconds is 1-1000, 2-1000. That's two seconds. That's a lot. for someone that's sitting there on their phone and they're making a judgment call they're in or they're out they can swipe up now so you better make sure that that first two seconds already proves that this is worth it there's there should not be some warm-up there's no setting up there's no nope nope we're right in it and this is cool it's that or get out so that's important um so again there has to be something there that is attractive, enticing, interesting to the viewer just that bloody quickly. Also, hashtags are largely meaningless for shorts. Hey Roberto, I know you believe in being platform agnostic, but for an entertainment channel like mine, how can I create my own thing and have 100% control? If you're an entertainment channel, at some point you need to consider how do you make your own IP that doesn't revolve around fair use and is still interesting. to a viewer. So that is a very important component long term of entertainment channels. The best entertainers in YouTube no longer rely on fair use. MrBeast is the biggest, and I know that's a crazy example, but think about it. MrBeast does not rely on fair use at all. Ryan Trahan does not rely on fair use at all. Casey Neistat does not rely on fair use at all. A lot of people are still hung up in the era of YouTube Let's Play channels and YouTube reaction channels that rely entirely on other people's intellectual property. But I want you to think about it. Aside from OG gaming channels like Markiplier, PewDiePie, Jacksepticeye, CoreyXKenshin, and even reaction channels like SniperWolf. Almost none of the top leading channels in YouTube, over 10 million, over 50 million, unless they're gaming channels, rely on fair use content. They all make original content and they can therefore win on any platform that they show up on. And they also get to license their content to Amazon and Netflix because they don't rely on fair use. They make their own thing. and don't have to rely on fair use for their content. That is key and pivotal long-term. Now, as a smaller and beginner channel, or if that's what you're known for, that may not feel like an option for you. But long-term, that's what people do. Some people will initially rely on... fair use and intellectual property and copyright material to get traction build an audience but the long-term play to have control and to own everything is to eventually launch your own thing that does not rely on that in any way shape or form at all again your best example is the biggest youtubers i don't think the stoke twin the stoke twins to my knowledge i don't think they rely on fair use or other people's intellectual property at all and they're uh the next channel in line to probably compete with like mr beast right um coca melon doesn't rely on fair use i believe what they do is they only use existing nursery rhymes that are in the public domain and are not subject to copyright anymore um kids diana show um vlad and nicky like nastia they are uh kids channels sure but they don't rely on fair use to my knowledge at all um people who are really smart make their own ip for animated stuff in entertainment like bluey or something like that they make their own thing right um there's room right now in the entertainment niche for original intellectual property around animated cartoons that have themes and messages that can be the next generation of um that sort of thing Somebody could start a puppeteer-based channel and be the next Sesame Street and win in today's market. For people who don't like the direction of Sesame Street, don't like the direction of some of these things, somebody can win in that market. Somebody can take the same concept of something like Wishbone, not copy it beat for beat, do their own version, and they could win. Somebody could, instead of worrying about buying the rights and rebooting, read in rainbow they can make something with those themes and elements their own messaging a different mission statement and they could um capture the nostalgia of something like that but do it for modern times and they could absolutely win somebody could make something very similar to jim henson's the storyteller but their own version of it cast it and perform it and ultimately could win in this market that you could also look to for entertainment looking at YouTube channels that pivoted in a direction, were rejected by their audience that people used to love that were big and massive. You could just say, what if I take the ideas from previously successful YouTubers that failed, had scandals, and I literally just replaced them and do an updated new version. Don't take their name, don't beat for beat copy their ideas, but recapture the same things that made those YouTubers great and just move into that because people loved them until they didn't because something about them changed. Repeat that process and then this time don't change or alienate or betray the audience or have a scandal and get yourself canceled. And then boom, you have a successful formula. Or look to a nostalgic entertainment property from the days of MTV, VH1, or Comedy Central that Gen Z never got to experience because they were born 20 years too late for it. Literally, for the most part, take concepts from that idea or remix it or borrow it, recontextualize it somewhat in a modern way, but not for the modern audience because it doesn't exist, and redo some concept like that that these kids have never seen because they're 25 years too young for it or something like that or 30 years too young for it. And then all of a sudden, you've got the next new hit. show on YouTube that captures this generation because the psychology of what teenagers and college kids like to see doesn't change. The only thing that changes is the style, the branding, the marketing, and who's relevant. That's it. It's not really that complicated in the realm of entertainment. The challenge is an execution and an ideation, but it's not that complicated. Right? It's whether or not you can pull it off more than anything. So it's largely an execution thing. Original ideas are largely overrated. Primary example, original ideas are overrated. Here's my proof. Look at all the reaction channels. There's nothing original about them. For the most part, there's nothing original about 99% of reaction channels that are getting outsized views. There's nothing original about a lot of gaming channels that are getting outsized views. Originality is overrated. Execution is underrated. It's understanding what people value more, what people value most, and why. And then positioning against that psychology and then executing in a unique way. Not necessarily an original way, but executing in a unique way. Usually through hybrids or remixing, revamping, or going to an extreme of something. That would make all of the difference. Another example of entertainment channels and how to win entertainment channels. Literally challenge videos are still a format, but again, taking on breaking extreme world records. Someone could build a high effort channel around that and win. Even when they fail the challenges, people will watch for the stakes. But... They can't be BS or uninteresting world records. They have to be world records that are insanely interesting to watch. So that'd be another entertainment play. The reason people don't do these things is because of the effort involved. People are looking for formats that can be low effort, accessible, and things that they can do from their bedroom or things that they can do while they're broke. And the thing is... If it's so accessible and so easy to do, then that means that the market is flooded with low value, low effort, low quality content of people chasing that exact same thing. What is not saturated is high effort content, high quality content, high value content, and consistent, reliable creators. That is the market that is not saturated, which is why there are less than 1 million channels with silver play buttons. And there are not, I think, there may not be 100,000 channels with gold play buttons yet either to my remembrance. I think that the number is lower. I think the number is there may be at most close to 70,000 or so channels globally with gold play buttons. I have the data somewhere. But it's not 100,000 channels with gold play buttons yet, even with YouTube Shorts, if I remember correctly. But it's not a million channels worldwide with silver play buttons. I don't even think North America has 100,000 silver play buttons yet. Certainly not 150,000. The English-speaking market doesn't even have a quarter million silver play buttons yet. So, hey, most of you, you speak in English. There ain't a quarter million channels that speak English that have silver play buttons. North America doesn't even have 100,000 channels with silver play buttons across all the hundreds of niches in YouTube. And then, even if they did, how many of those are short channels? How many of those are retired content creators? How many of those are corporations that have five silver play buttons like Microsoft and Adobe do? So that means the number of homegrown content creators that speak English in North America that have silver play buttons that are not shorts channels, not corporations, not celebrities, and not OG YouTubers that have retired is probably less than 50, 60,000 active creators. for long form across every single niche in YouTube that live in North America and speak English. You do not have nearly as much competition as you actually think you do. It's in your head. So again, even with most people trying to do entertainment channels, most people are not coming up with interesting enough concepts to deliver on and they don't even have to be original. A lot of it could borrow from remixing two or three OG nostalgic properties that Gen Z audiences and Gen Alpha audiences are too young to have ever seen to know where you got your inspiration from. And then you just have to update it a little bit and execute differently. Again, not quite for the modern audience because modern audience doesn't exist. Humans don't change. Algorithms do. And trends. come back around and around. Yeah, I agree for Incentive Collection that if the channel banner showed a lineup of different fragrance containers instead of just the name, that would make it easier to identify what it's about. It would also showcase the quality of the images and photography and lighting, which I think is one of the strongest value propositions that Incentive Collection has going from because like he's a really, in my belief, a talented product photographer and product. cinematographer so i think that that's actually really compelling so i would agree with you hey melly what's up moz appreciate you man yep yeah the old hannah barbara cat cartoons you if somebody did especially with youtube shorts for animation even if they cheated a little bit quote unquote cheated a little bit with um ai if someone made in a modern animation style Contextualized and did not steal the name and IP for like the Herculoids but made their own version of the Herculoids made their own version of droopy But not stealing it made their own version of Augie doggy and doggy daddy Made their own version of things like that Or snagglepuss. Or a Hong Kong foo-y number one super guy. Something like that, right? Like, but their own version. Not stealing these nostalgic properties, but saying, hey, what's an original idea for a cartoon that plays on a nostalgic trope or style or gimmick or makes fun of something because it's from a bygone era? And what about reimagining that? Somebody today. And they don't even have to be the greatest animator. If you're just a good illustrator and you can also do the voice acting, you can draw it yourself, then animate it. with AI and kind of hybridize and cheat and stop whining about AI and actually use it effectively to say, I'm a good illustrator, but I don't have the tools, software, or money to be an animation studio. Oh, wait, I will draw stills and then have the AI cheat and do the animation, which is what computer animation actually does anyway. You just, instead of having to learn some of the programatics of computer animation and tweening, the AI will do that work, but you could be the illustrator, draw it. own the IP because you created the characters and you drew it, and then you're just using AI to make a derivative work, aka still protected by copyright, of your original drawing, animate it, and then all of a sudden, boom, you're now a YouTube animation channel that can actually scale because you can actually put out multiple YouTube shorts a day of interesting, unique content that follows the kind of formats and styles of vignettes and parts of like kind of old school animation tropes, like The Hanna-Barbera cartoons, whether that's the Herculoids or Augie Doggie or Snagglepuss or things of that nature from the Hanna-Barbera era or Space Ghost or things like that or the old Text Avery style of stuff like that. Really cool. Those things can... easily be brought back in this era and people would enjoy them and scroll and watch shorts. We're seeing people do animated YouTube shorts and win animating old school fables or even animating old folklore or cautionary tales and bringing them to life with some kind of twist or things of that nature. So it can be done. It can be done and it's now accessible, affordable for anyone with a good idea to just do these things. And it's, and so yeah. So again, I remember this stuff. I grew up with it even before Boomerang. I grew up with this stuff. So yeah, someone could do that and win by just reviving the aesthetic. of old nostalgic properties or reviving not even the aesthetic but the tropes and then doing it with new style animation and could do that very quickly with the resources and tools available now um so again it's something you can do um Basically, Eric July with the Ripaverse, yep, this is a really good example. With the downtrend of American comics, constant push of certain things, uh, was able to capitalize on that space. Absolutely, be a disruptor in space. Oh, people don't like the direction it's going. Okay, cool, disruption. And again, you don't need to win the majority of people, you just need a cult of superfans and you're set. For life, even. So, yeah. Ripaverse sold millions. Absolutely. And you can use YouTube and social media to do it. So again, if someone makes a really good animated thing or revives a con... I'll give you a primary example. Pop the Balloon works on every social media site and even works on mainstream streaming services. And all Pop the Balloon does is it's a twist on the hot or not trend that MTV picked up, which was an internet trend. And MTV brought that. But Hot or Not is just a revival of a dating show from the 80s, which was a revival of a dating show from the 70s. And most people just don't understand that these things just get repurposed for each consecutive generation. Okay? YouTube prank videos are derivative of... um mtv's punked with ashton kutcher which is derivative of smile you're on candid camera and america's funniest home videos and as the uh as a clip show america's funniest home videos guess what's derivative of that equals three with ray william johnson is the river of that tosh point fro sorry sorry tosh point o tosh point o is derivative of equals three, but they're both derivative of America's Funniest Home Videos. The original clip show, the original reaction channel, the original reaction channel is America's Funniest Home Videos. The original prank channel is, smile, you're on candid camera. Real TV is what every YouTube reaction and commentary channel that does body cam footage, News reactions, all of those are derivative of real TV. TMZ is somewhat derivative of that. Every format you see in YouTube is derivative largely of 2000s era and 90s era mainstream media, which is almost all derivative of media from the 70s. You can point to a YouTube thing and I can tell you what it's derivative of. The difference is... that there are people generationally who didn't get to participate in certain trends and as a result they wouldn't be aware of the point of origin for where the original concept came from and then they think they're discovering something new. for those of you who are anime fans all modern shonen anime is derivative of tropes established in dragon ball all shown in anime in the modern era is derivative of tropes largely and first established in dragon ball and dragon ball z for the most part um and also other anime of that era including yu yu hakashou uh so almost everything In modern shounen anime is derivative of that. Almost everything in modern mecha anime is derivative of Macross and Mobile Suit Gundam. Almost everything in modern Bishoujo anime is derivative of Fushyugi Yugi, Escaflowne, and Sailor Moon. Yeah, ask me how big of a nerd I am. Just about everything... In the TCGA space, the trading card game space, is derivative of Magic the Gathering specifically. So that's really where the nothing new under the sun concept plays out in real life. You have to understand, most people watch Star Wars and don't realize how derivative it is of a combination of five things that Lucas borrowed from including um spaghetti westerns uh product review youtube is derivative of qvc and home shopping network and late night infomercials like the sham wow guy youtube podcasts are largely derivative they think they're derivative of dro rogan they're actually mostly derivative of howard stern yeah anyway let's do um little crafty nook i know you've been rating and that waiting and then we'll do um untouchable Yeah, also Tom Green. I would agree with that. YouTube pranksters are not only derivative of Ashton Kutcheon, that MTV era, but they're also derivative of Steve-O, who also became a YouTuber, and what he did with Jackass. All right, let's... So we got a returning channel, longtime friend of the channel, Lil Crappy Nook. All right, 900 videos, 1.5K. Profile pick is fine. I would probably focus more on a closeup for the profile pick, sharpen that up a little bit, but otherwise it's fine. I would say if the channel banner could be a little cleaner, then that would be good. But other than that, what it does write is it does tell you the schedule for the updates and what to expect. So I do like that it has that going for it. For card making, card making is a very specific niche hobby. I don't know that I've seen many channels that grow large in this compared to things like sewing as a craft, but this is something that a lot of people do care about. It's just not the hugest audience in the world. So the upper limit that I would think that this could go to is maybe 10,000, 20,000. I think that the hardest challenge here is the thumbnails. The most successful thumbnails you've done in the past have been these top-down overlay thumbnails. And I think that any and all of your thumbnails should be probably top-down overlay thumbnails. When you do those, those tend to do better. I also think they don't need to overly rely on text. I think they're better. if they show rather than tell because the videos that seem to have the most consistent views from you in the hundreds to thousands of views are these top-down overlay thumbnails that don't rely on text so I would try to probably use that approach And so that's where I would put more of the focus. And I think it'd also give it a much more consistent look. I think that if more of the videos, based on what was popular, focus on putting tips in the title or project or how-to in the title, even potentially show us. I don't think you should put the dates in these things. because it makes the video itself dated. I think if you use and lead with affordability, that's something that people would care about. So there is a pattern to which videos do well for you and also using a time constraint also. So I think that those things largely play a big role here in what does and doesn't perform. So I would say positioning against that is the biggest issue here. It looks like you're trying and succeeding largely at being consistent in the uploads. But again, I think that the issue might have to do with some consistency of doing what is performed, at least as far as the titles and the thumbnails. And I think that the strong suit is... realistic thumbnails rather than designed based thumbnails that show projects, processes, and materials. So I think more of that literal top down is going to be the key here to trying to increase the consistency of the views for this type of thing. Instead of these canvas style thumbnails, again, process photography based thumbnails. that show the project and the cutting board and that's what people respond to more with your channel and respond to most with their channel and what they would value in terms of the title positioning like i said a focus on things like affordability focusing on time constraints and um focusing like i mean this so you only have 10 minutes this is working for you the so you only have two minutes 10 minutes to do something that works it makes sense it's a time constraint um things that use the materials in the title uh sheet load and so on and so forth these are things that people probably search for and are looking for um again prioritizing affordability budget time constraint that's going to be how you package and position these videos to do well you're probably fine on retention and production for what it is, and people are probably okay with that. So that would be my main advice here, aside from some updates to the branding. And like I said, don't feel discouraged. This is just the kind of niche where, again, the most I could ever see it doing is... potentially 10,000, 20,000 subscribers because of how hyper-specific this is and that it is becoming a lost art. So just keep that in mind and keep going. I think it'll be okay. But what do you guys think? I know this is a very, very narrow niche channel, but I think that there is still some potential. for a little crafty nook to grow here. Particularly, I would say more in the views than the subscribers. There are outlier videos here with hundreds, if not thousands of views. I think being able to crack hundreds of views on the videos is possible. But I think top-down overlay videos that show what you're actually gonna be doing and what you're actually gonna be getting out of the projects is the key to making that all work. But what do you think? Let me know in the comments or let me know in the live chat if you're still watching live. And there you go. So hopefully that's helpful, Lil' Crapty Nook. I wanted to keep this actionable and not hyper critical for you. Because again, what you're doing is much more narrow than most of the types of channels that we've talked about so far. I want to address this thing from NC. Begin to question the whole avatar, especially starting out. I don't think you know who your audience is. I think your videos show you that. Am I wrong? It depends on the creator. Someone who's self, let's say you're like me. When I was 28, I knew who for the time of my current incarnation of my channel, I absolutely at 28 knew who my audience avatar was. It was somebody five to 10 years younger than me starting a career as a creative professional because that's who I was most likely to be able to help. with the skills that I had and what I was confident to talk about. So I knew exactly who my audience avatar was. It was someone who either needed my skills or was younger than me starting out or is older than me but not experienced in my career field. So someone that wants to do the thing that I have the skill to do that doesn't know how to do it. That was my audience avatar. Someone who wants my skills and does not have them. And that could be someone older or younger than me, but they definitely have less experience than me in my career field. Audience avatar. So that was my initial audience avatar. As I pivoted my content, it was somebody who doesn't understand how to grow social media and market themselves and build a personal brand or an online business. That evolved into being a content creator who doesn't have the creative skills that I had when I started the channel. or the business or marketing savvy that I had in building a personal brand on social media and wants to monetize on content platforms now, aka YouTube and podcasting and live streaming, but doesn't have the technical skills I had that got me a job as a creative professional, nor the marketing skills that made me a consultant and a professional public speaker or someone with a personal brand that they could monetize. So the evolution, of I became these things and you have not is always what essentially was my audience avatar. Someone who wants to achieve the outcomes that I already have. That's what works for a self-aware content creator in their late 20s, early 30s, 40s, 50s, who has achieved something and knows I can just literally go. and someone who has not achieved the things that I've achieved. I mean, this is largely for an education brand. For an education brand, your audience avatar is person who doesn't know what I know, person who doesn't have the skill that I have, person who doesn't have the outcome that I have. Lifestyle content creator, someone who would like to live the life that I am currently living and does not. Someone who wants the aesthetic that I have and does not. Someone. who hasn't brought the product and I bought it so they don't have to. Lifestyle Creators Audience Avatar is someone who desires this lifestyle, aspires to have this lifestyle and doesn't currently have it. Or someone who does have this lifestyle but wants to be in a community of other people that share the lifestyle and the values associated with it or the experiences that we share because we have this similar lifestyle. That's exactly what a lifestyle brand is. entertainment the audience avatar is someone that's interested and attracted to this thing or to me as the host or presenter of this thing so audience avatar for an entertainer somebody who would be entertained by this topic or subject matter and is interested and attracted to this or finds me personally to be interesting or attractive for these reasons, or because I present in this way. It is not complicated to figure out your audience avatar for the most part. A lot of you are A, either overthinking it or not thinking about it hard enough. Making random content to figure out your audience avatar is why 90% of content creators don't have a thousand. By the way, if you really just are, I care about too many things. I don't know who I am. I'm not trying to be hard on anyone or be dismissive. A lot of the reason that a lot of people will not niche down, will not decide who the audience they want to attract and the tribe they want to attract is, is to me often a sign that you have not figured yourself out and you have not found yourself yet and you don't know what your own identity is yet as a person, which is a common struggle in a modern era where people have no direction, no purpose, no vision for their life. and have largely looked to other people to tell them who they are. The simplest way to understand yourself is to understand what do you spend the most of your time thinking about, talking about, or doing? What have you done with yourself? If I wasn't doing education content, you know what I could do if I was an entertainment channel or if I desperately wanted to be? I could literally just... I could literally just be a 100K Star Wars YouTuber. And I know I keep saying that. People are like, well, why don't you do it? I'm 40. I have too many things going on right now. I'm writing a second book. It's too much, right? And still trying to grow this YouTube channel and get back to regular content, do streams, coaching with Awesome Creator Academy, taking clients. You know, there's just too much. Why would I say, Roberto, why would you say you could be a 100K Star Wars YouTuber? Because I literally can talk your ear off about 30 different individual Sith Lords without looking anything up and can tell you about the various different uh, shisms within the Jedi order and can tell you about the Jedi Sith Wars without thinking about it. I can name more than 20 star systems within the star Wars universe. I can tell you deep lore about the original trilogy, prequel trilogy, even the sequels, and also the cold war era of the old Republic without even thinking about it. I can literally write you titles. for 1,000 videos about Star Wars and not think about it. So I have deep, intimate lore and knowledge that would allow me to make an entertainment edutainment channel, 80% entertainment, 20% education, specifically about... Star Wars exclusively and I know that by sheer volume of uploading 1,000 long-form videos and God knows how many shorts about that that on some level eventually I could grow a channel like that to a hundred thousand subscribers because there's a demand for it There's a big enough audience. And why would I know that? I know the audience avatar, because I know that there are millions of star Wars nerds and geeks just like me that don't have the deep knowledge of the lore that I have, but are interested and excited about that thing. Despite Disney's best efforts to ruin the franchise. Yeah, I said it. So it's. something where, oh, I have deep knowledge. I know exactly who the audience is and what they would like. I'm reflective of that. I'm receptive to that. Oh, I could go in that direction. So I know that. If I were going to do a lifestyle channel, it would have to be a men's lifestyle channel that focused on personal development and motivation for men. And specifically, I would target men my own age and or younger and offer them motivation, encouragement, no coddling, real talk, but acknowledge their issues and their problems. Probably stay the hell away from the dating advice part of it because it's just bloody toxic and it's just a mess and there's no upside to doing it. And I would focus primarily just on motivation, personal development, career development, the importance of... frugality and getting your finances in line and developing yourself and finding your inner identity based on success, accomplishment, and a vision for your life. And I would probably be able to pull that off as a lifestyle education hybrid, focusing on self-improvement, self-help, personal development, and doing inner work and focusing on building your confidence and self-esteem exclusively for men and just target men. 40 something and under and boom endless possibilities to grow that to a hundred thousand subscribers making a thousand videos about that that's how i would do life so i've told you i know how i do entertainment i know how i could do lifestyle and why Because all I have to do is look to and isolate an aspect of my own identity and my own lived experience and my own deep knowledge and problems or things that I've solved or things that people would be interested and attracted to. And it's like, okay, what's the, I cannot talk to you deeply about music in the way that I can talk to you about Star Wars or anime. So if I went entertainment, I have to go in that direction. I'm not a professional gamer. I'm a OG casual gamer that had professional gameplay abilities in certain franchises in my 20s where it became addictive and competitive and it wasn't fun to be around me if I played against you. So I wouldn't do those things. So I, because it's not healthy for me, so I would never touch the gaming content because it wouldn't be healthy for me. Also, I wouldn't adapt to the modern gaming audience, so it wouldn't matter and it wouldn't work. So I wouldn't touch that. So what would I do? forever franchises that multi-generational viewers, which would be Star Wars or anime. So where I have deep knowledge and I would go there. So that would be the only really offshoot for me doing an entertainment channel. The only other option for that would be to do reaction commentary videos, but I don't love that aspect of it because unless I only do it to viral YouTube internet personalities who won't copyright strike me, there's too much liability and too much risk. So unless I went that route, wouldn't do it. Don't wanna do it with politics because it's just a toxic audience. So even though it would print money hand over fist. So again, I know exactly what I could do if I went to an entertainment channel because all I have to do is isolate the part of me that would have a clear audience avatar that has a large viewership base. And I would just isolate and narrow down to that one thing, that one aspect, that one part of my identity and then milk it. Very simple. Same thing for lifestyle content. What is a problem I already solved? I solved a lot of my own problems with personal development, depression, anxiety, career development, success, growing up under, you know, underprivileged, like being in my 20s and being broke, knowing what being a broke young man looks like and what it does and doesn't do for you, knowing how to climb my way to success. and go lifestyle education or I could go education entertainment and do a tech channel. Tech channel, I could replace TechQuickie because they don't put out enough consistent content and they haven't updated a bunch of their old videos. I could replace what Linus Media did with TechQuickie and win on tech edutainment. And it's easy to produce, fast turnaround, lower overhead because they have too many employees, yada, yada, yada. And I could do it at equal or higher quality, 100K subscribers minimum on that. So there's another pivot that I could have done with a fresh from zero channel. Why? Isolate an aspect of my identity, aka I'm a tech nerd, I can speak well, I can do fast, brief explanations of tech easily. and do it in a fun and entertainment way that makes people understand it and insert dad jokes. Okay, easy win. Plus I know how as a rep designer and photographer to win on the packaging for that. It's not hard, it's search friendly plus clickable at browse if people care about tech. They can isolate, again, isolate part of my identity. Isolate the part of me that is the kid who was building computers at 14, 15 years old. So boom. You just isolate an aspect of your identity and interest and you leave the rest on the table and say, okay, I don't need to make content about this. I can go enjoy those things offline. I will make content about this one thing and I don't need to express the whole gamut of all of my interest or all of my personality and I will just focus on one aspect of my identity and that is my content. The rest of my identity is served in real life experiences. It is not that complicated, you guys. You are overthinking this. or again, you are succumbing to this temptation to be all things to all people at once, and it doesn't work. So it's this simple. Isolate an aspect of your identity. That is the content, that is the audience avatar. You don't need to serve all of your interest through content creation. You can live your life and you can say, but I'm this and I'm this and I'm all these things. And you can be those things when you're not making content and you can do them in the real world and enjoy them and not monetize them. You can do that. It is a thing. So like that's the issue here. So again, is understanding here are the things that matter more and most to you, isolating it down to one thing and staying in that lane with content and not hating it and realizing that every other part of your identity and all your other hobbies and all your other interests can be lived offline and not monetized and kept for yourself and don't have to be validated by everybody in the world That is what so many of you struggle with, but that struggle is why 90% of people cannot get to 1,000 subscribers and monetize their YouTube channel, and 97% of content creators cannot get to 10,000 subscribers because they will not commit to one thing and do it well and do it to the best of their ability, and that's the key here. And I just told you, I have an answer for this of if I wasn't doing the content I'm currently doing, which is not the content I did that got me to zero to 100,000 subscribers, by the way. What else could I do to get from zero to 100,000 subscribers in five to seven years or in 1,000 videos? 500 to 1,000 videos. It originally took me 800 videos to get from zero to 100,000 subscribers. So I always estimate that it would take me 500 to 1,000 long form videos to get from zero to 100,000 if I don't abuse the short split strategy and I only do long form. I always estimate 500 to 1,000 videos in one direction for one audience consistently at two to three uploads per week would get me from zero to 100,000. I estimate that that would take me three, five, or seven years, depending on consistency of uploads to accomplish that because I said it's 500 to 1,000 videos. So the output schedule says that that is somewhere between three to seven years depending on whether it's two videos a week or three videos a week just based on cadence right because that means 100 to 150 videos a year which means the earliest it could be is in the three to five year range the latest would then be closer to the five to seven year range right just based on numbers so for 500 to a thousand video outputs of long form only not shorts not even live streams right So, concept here requires focus and simplifying these things down, then looking at scale outputs and compounding and just narrowing in on a number of executions that basically makes it very difficult to fail, but only assuming that the niche is big enough within that narrow lens to accommodate that. And therefore, I would be choosing things that I know have massive scale. Tech. obviously has massive scale the biggest tech channels are over 10 million subscribers the biggest tech youtube channels are over 20 million subscribers so if i got a fraction of that success a hundred thousand is not impossible given the number of channels that have over 1 million subscribers to 10 million subscribers in tech so i know that the biggest channel for biggest channels for star wars content are between one and three million. So I know I can get to 100,000 if I made 1,000 videos that were good quality, good information around Star Wars because I know the fan base exists. So I'd have that validation for that. Men's mental health, personal development, self-improvement. How many millions of books has Tony Robbins sold? How many millions of books has Robert Greene sold? How many millions of books? has john maxwell sold how many millions of books um you know how many copies of atomic habits have sold how many books has stephen covey sold so uh there you go validation of the market so i know that that's an an existent a thing that exists okay cool um a new young men are always rolling off the assembly line at least for now so like oh growing market duh so easy right you just position against that so i showed you how to do lifestyle i do enter entertainment um if i was going to do education again again just go broad scale go to tech there you go like explain this thing about technology in five minutes or less okay cool um review this product and tell us uh whether we should buy it or not done compare these two products done easy so again What do I position against? Position against the products that have the most demand in Amazon or have the most marketing and ad spend against them in Amazon or are the largest consumer brands in the world. Done. So again, simple. So for each of the three main types of content and their hybrid variations, I have an aspect of how would I narrow in on what aspect of my identity represents this? and has a viable proven audience avatar that already has a large uh you know a total addressable market has a large total addressable market okay cool what themes of that apply to my specific personal identity that allowed me to do that with confidence and that i could commit to okay got it i could just lock in so again that's how you guys would figure this out And so again, the issue is you keep going back between three things that you have a depth of knowledge, but which ones deserves to be a channel. The one that has, okay, I'll narrow this down for you. Of the three, let's go through this. Of the three, which one has the largest total addressable market? Is the one that has the largest total addressable market of proven views, subscribers, and buyers also one of the... out of the three is it in the top two of ones you have the most knowledge about okay and out of those is it in the top two of the easiest to execute and be consistent on and move fast so is it does it have the largest total addressable market which one has the largest total busable market which one do you have the most knowledge in out of the three Which one has the fastest speed of execution? Which one has the highest profitability? Find the overlap and intersectionality of that. How big is the total addressable market? How good am I at this or knowledgeable? How fast and easy is it for me to do? How much money does it make? Pick the thing that checks the most of those boxes out of the three and it's over. So that's my answer for multi-passionate people. For multi-passionate people, which thing that you're multi-passionate about has the largest total addressable market? Provable total addressable market. Of those things, which one makes the more money? Is there an intersection between a high total addressable market and high profitability? Great. Is there an intersection because you are passionate about all of them? Okay, that box is checked. Now, Out of all those things, all right, which ones have the highest total wrestle market? Which ones make the most money? Okay, which one are you the best at that has the largest market? Which one are you best at that makes the most money and has the largest market? Okay, and you don't hate this thing, you like it enough? Okay, cool. That's the thing that you go with. You go with the one that checks the most of those boxes in common, and that is the answer. So that is what you would need to do. I will probably make a video about that of what my answer is for multi-passionate creators because the answer is Ikigai. The answer is Ikigai. You're passionate about five things? Cool. And which of those five things has the biggest audience? Which of those five things makes the most money? Which of those five things are you the best in that you can be? Okay. So which one of those five things checked the most of those boxes and came in first place for the majority of them? You pick that. Yeah, absolutely. It's no problem. Like, this is, again, and I'm not trying to be mean or harsh to anybody with this. I'm just saying that this is a common, common, common, over and over and over again thing for creators, but we just have to be practical about it instead of emotional about it. Super Gamer Pro. If you're not a pro level player, Or a speedrunner. I mean, you've been doing this for one year. One year's meaningless. How many uploads did you do? How many uploads did you do? A year tells me nothing. You could have done 10 videos in a year and I go, okay, that's not enough. Like, if you did 500 videos in a year and you have 350 subscribers, you're probably not as good at that game as you think or you're not as good at packaging content around that game as you think. So... I don't have any context here. If you tell me you have 350 subs in a year, it doesn't matter if it's a year. What matters is how many uploads did you do in that time? Because if it's you have 350 subs in a year and you only did 10 uploads, in a way, that's impressive that you got that many subscribers, but it's also not impressive that that's as many videos as you made. If you have 350 subs and you made 350 videos, then that actually means, okay, this is probably a hobby and you need to either keep it a hobby or reconsider. So that context would matter here. Untouchable says, I noticed that being a variety streamer is very hard for me to grow. Do you think it's still worth having those videos on my channel? Could hurt my channel now that I'm growing fast on Rocket Lead? My thought is this. For those variety things, you can unlist them as you upload new Rocket League videos. So if you upload a long form Rocket Lead video, unlist two non-Rocket League videos, starting with some of your oldest Rocket League content. And then just slowly, as you produce new content, delist irrelevant old content by making it unlisted. I wouldn't necessarily delete those videos. I would just do that. Lucky says, as a casual gamer, can I do hidden gems mobile games? I'll put it to you like this. If something's a hidden gem, that means that when the company that made it spent the most money marketing it possible, had years of marketing it possible, and spent millions of dollars, they still couldn't make people interested in it. If your goal was to grow a YouTube channel, And I'm just putting this out here. I'm not trying to be mean at all. I just want you, we're doing a critical thinking exercise. Because I see this happen all the time. I see a creator that's done like a thousand videos as 5,000 subscribers because they keep trying to make hidden gems of the internet happen. They keep trying to make fetch happen, so to speak, right? They're Gretchen out here trying to make fetch happen. I want you to consider this. If these companies spent millions of dollars in marketing and advertising and in influencer marketing and bought ad campaigns across every major platform and they couldn't make the game popular, why would that grow your channel talking about it organically? And why would that work? And why would people all of a sudden care about this game as a hidden gem when the company spent millions of dollars and couldn't make people care about it? I want you to think about that. And I'm not trying to be rude. I'm not trying to be ugly. I'm making a point here. If a company has millions of dollars, buys eyeballs through direct advertising, and cannot accomplish making a game popular and making it relevant, why would organically your content become popular and relevant talking about a game that even millions of dollars couldn't make people care about? Which is why, with rare exceptions, people who try to do this with video games, movies, Television shows, internet, nostalgia, or memes that themselves never broke into mainstream awareness cannot seem to grow YouTube channels around them no matter how many videos they make because they are trying to make fetch happen. I'm not telling you you can't do it if it's in your heart of hearts, which is why I tell everybody make 100 crappy videos. Pick all of your most passionate projects burning in your heart, no matter how good or bad the ideas are. Execute them to the best of your ability. Publish them on your channel and see how it goes because some expert like me could always be wrong and you could always pull it off or you'll never have to at least answer that what if I tried this because you will see it and you will see that it flopped or it didn't. And you will know. It'll never be a question mark in your head. driving you crazy if you just get it over with and get it out of your system and you can see for yourself whether it succeeds or fails and that's what a lot of people need to do which is why i always give people permission to have an experimental phase of youtube and make 100 crappy videos i always recommend so that they don't waste their time as much to get that done in one to two years as quickly as possible so i always say upload one to two videos a week and if you want to Make your first 100 crappy videos. Make what you want to make. Don't take anyone's advice. Don't niche down. If you really, really just feel like you'll never be able to move on if you don't get to make what you want because that's in you or you have this artist thing in you, speed run it. Make those 100 videos in year one or year two as your learning experience and to see what it gets you and so that you can say you did what you wanted to do. Get it over with and that's that. Then you'll know what works, what didn't, what people respond to, and you'll have some understanding. And then we can always review your results and tell you what went wrong. And then you will know, because you will have tried. I will never discourage someone from trying to do what they have their heart set on, because some people are never able to make content or focus or niche down or do whatever they need to do until they feel they've been given permission to express themselves. they'll run into those limitations. And you're saying you tried it so far and all you got was like 5K impressions. Right, because that's as many people as YouTube was able to identify, as would care in this, as evidenced by the fact that something is a hidden gem because most people weren't interested in it, even when there was an advertising budget that desperately tried to make people care about it and cost millions of dollars and millions of dollars couldn't make people care about it. So organic content probably can't either. So like, that's how that happens. Super Gamer Pro says, how can I get my first 100 to 1,000 subscribers faster? Also, how do I know what content people want from me? It's not about what people want from you. It's what people want in general, right? It's what people want in general. Take yourself out of the equation. They don't know you and they don't have a reason to know you and they don't have a reason to care about you. Hard for people to hear. But they don't know you. You're not important in this equation, especially as a gamer. They care about the games. They care about the content. So here's the thing. There's not enough context for me to tell you how do you get your first 100 or 1,000 subscribers or what do you know what people are. I'm going to tell you the truth, Super Gamer Pro. What do you bring to the table for gaming content? And do not say your personality because no one cares. And that sounds harsh, but I'm telling you. You already don't even have 100 subscribers. So that means that your personality is not the selling point of your channel. Because if it was, we wouldn't be having this conversation. And again, I'm not trying, like so many people will take this so much the wrong way or wanna have hurt feelings over it. I am being honest. I'm one of the only people that will be honest with a lot of you about this. You have to consider that if your personality is not already growing your channel, that at least at this point in time, it is not going to. And if you're gonna do gaming content, there's a very simple question you have to answer. Why should I watch you and what you're making about this game instead of playing the video game myself? Why should I watch your gaming channel instead of playing this video game myself and enjoying it? What do you bring to the table? Because a pro gamer can say, I'm better at the game than you. You will see high level gameplay, you will see competitive gameplay, or you will learn aspects of how to become a better player. A pro gamer can say that. So a pro gamer has a value proposition for a casual player that incentivizes them to watch. A player that is making a player's guide for the video can attract new and returning players to the game. An example is a creator I coached, Obdude. Obdude makes videos around Clash Royale and new and returning players can watch his videos, his in a nutshell videos, where he concisely and entertainingly explains what's current and new in the game and what the individual cards are and what they do and how to use them. Beating your fans if they're casuals doesn't necessarily, what makes you a pro? What makes you a pro? Are you a speed runner? Are you ranked in a game? Have you been given the designation of pro by the gaming dev community of that game? What makes you a pro? And is it undeniable? Do you have some award or prestige? Because if you can say you're world champion at a game, you can say you're a pro. If you can claim you're a ranked player, if you can claim your ranked player, then you can claim you're a pro. If you have a world record, you can say you're a pro. If you're a speed runner, you can say you're a pro. If you win tournaments, you can say you're a pro. If you have a prestige rank in the game or have a award through the game that is rarefied or an achievement that's rarefied, then you can say that. Got all badges on the game and got ranked in 2023, so does that count? then what you need to do is you should make content and package it in such a way that only a pro player would be capable of making that content. And you should package the content around feats you could do that only someone with a high level of skill can pull off. But if you're going to do that, you should make... the best thumbnail that is possible and easy to understand that demonstrates that and your title should convey this high level feat that only you can do. Onion Butter did a video where he beat Hitman without killing anybody. That's almost too good to be true. So People will click on it because they're curious about it. That's why it got him millions of views as one of his first uploads. What about uploading weekly and live streaming Saturday? I mean consistently. Everybody does that. Everybody does that. There's not something special about that per se. So it's like, super pro gamer, what you have to do is you have to figure out a unique value proposition, positioning, and high quality packaging, and yes, make consistent content. But you really have to understand how to position as far as something that the viewers will value that they cannot get if they watch something else. That has to be the answer. Anyway, we have to move on because we have one last channel review. We can't spend more time on this than we have. So let's see. All right. Speaking of gaming, we've got N4. I think that's I'm pronouncing this correct N84 Untouchable N84 I'm just gonna call you untouchable here. So it looks like You primarily play Rocket League almost 20,000 subscribers 12k videos. I'm going to assume that a lot of this is shorts. You recently embraced the shorts blitz Strategy very very recently. So that's interesting My curiosity is what is the view ceiling for your shorts? Okay, your view ceiling for shorts actually is not too bad. I don't know why though it's putting popular shorts out of order since you have 29K views on that short there and then you have 18K views here, 32. Like, I don't know if popular shorts is broken or something, but I do think that... there is potential because shorts are evergreen for more of your shorts to pop over time so i would keep posting a high volume of shorts and it looks like recently you got 32k there and that was an outlier so i would look at doing more of that in terms of your videos your most popular videos were around uh streaming stuff rather than rocket league and it looks like some other games Let's see if any of your most popular videos have ever broken through as far as Rocket League. Some of those old subscribers apparently had nothing to do with Rocket League. You also haven't been as consistent, nearly as consistent with long form, and you were all over the place with variety. It looks like the growth came from probably the Rocket League videos. So my answer to this is your oldest content, you could probably start unlisting a couple of those at a time, especially as you upload new content. But even with focusing on Rocket League, here's my advice for Rocket League stuff here. Take yourself out of the thumbnails. Focus the thumbnails on the game and on the most interesting thing in the game itself. which will not be you. For most gamers, believe it or not, that's a lot of your answer is for gamers, you don't need to be in the thumbnail. You can be in the profile pic, you can be in the banner, you don't need to be in the thumbnail. Most people care about the game, not you. And in general, even when you establish your brand, 50% of the viewers, if you are growing, will be first time viewers, 80% will be non-subscribers. So just put the game in the thumbnail and that will actually accomplish a lot of the work for you. Let's see. Yeah. So that will work better because I'll show you a primary example of this. If I go to YouTube and I go Rocket League, here's another tip for you. videos around rocket league that would be interesting to new and returning players i mean primary example this thing got 17k views with a really simple thumbnail um out of nowhere this uh thing from three weeks ago anyone can make this thumbnail and it's got 255k views and if people never see how many subscribers this channel has they'd still click on that video if they are a new or returning player to rocket league um zen rocket league gameplay one hour um 2v2 35k views so like i don't even know if this channel even has a bunch of subscribers so like but this is this looks like a successful rocket league channel so this channel has 40k subs look at the thumbnails the thumbnails um have the most important aspect of the game um they don't have the creator's face in them at all um these are the videos that got the highest views for this um so ultimately that's what would work since there's so many of these videos that have over 100 000 views and again um like Again, for you gamers, Obdude who makes Clash Royale videos. I coached Obdude. Oh, wrong channel. Obdude. Obdude. So I coached Obdude for two different sessions twice. Back when he was transitioning from Clash Mini content to Clash Royale content because Clash Mini didn't end up having its global launch, right? So you had to pivot completely to a new game. And this in a nutshell series works because new and returning players can all watch these videos and it would make sense to them and it's evergreen. Same thing for explaining every blank in Clash Royale. Every win condition, explaining every this, listicle guides on how to do things. So mid-ladder gameplay, That's a mechanic that people would want to know about explaining every tornado King activation so explaining everything and in a nutshell videos and How this thing works all are evergreen videos? that people can watch indefinitely as a new player or a Returning player to the game or even a current player to the game and would find these videos interesting entertaining and or valuable This can be done with almost any game you can think of and is a viable strategy. The other thing is, it is content and these thumbnails, they're simple and easier to understand and you can filter in your homepage that if you care about this game, you can immediately recognize the character and the game and it required nothing fancy. It is dead simple and this works. This works so well and it's not just a Clash Royale thing. This is work for so many games. I cannot stress enough how straightforward this is. A lot of people overthink all of this when it comes to gaming. And again, the most interesting thing for someone who plays the game is the game that they're playing, the characters, the items, and the mechanics. And these things are iconic. they're branded they're marketing people pay for it in the advertising to make it iconic and to make it uh visually recognizable the most important thing to someone who cares about mario or donkey kong is not your face in the thumbnail it's mario or donkey kong in the thumbnail so again this is how you could rebrand for this because you could be getting five to ten times more views on every single one of these uploads if someone glances at this and they see Rocket League visually, and not just in the title, but in the thumbnail, and understand that's Rocket League. Because again, they don't necessarily care about Untouchable yet, and even if they did, they would care about Rocket League more. It is very difficult to get people to care more about you than the game that they're invested in playing, and that's even true for the largest content creators in gaming. There's exceptions to that. those people have been doing it for a decade or more at a high level but again it doesn't necessarily start that way so that's what you'd have to focus on so like i said i would focus on the type of thumbnails that already get over a hundred thousand to a million views for rocket league that don't have anyone's face in them and i would start positioning and making the highest quality thumbnails i can with that I also wouldn't put text at the bottom that's going to go into these timestamps because, again, rookie move there. So I wouldn't be doing that. Again, I would slowly start to unlist the old non-Rocket League videos if this is what the brand is going to be from now on. For variety gaming, I would say you could do a Twitch channel for variety gaming so that you have an outlet and you could do that. And so... You could still play games with your community and do that on Twitch. I would also look at taking Rocket League short form and uploading Rocket League short form to TikTok and monetizing that. So those would be my thoughts around this for you, Untouchable. And these are a lot of my thoughts and thesis around gaming. I've successfully coached a ton of gaming creators. That gold play button is from a gaming channel. My thesis around this is every content creator has to have the humility to understand that often they are not bigger than the niche and they are not bigger than the content in terms of what the viewer values more and what the viewer values most. In terms of packaging, if you have an iconic worldwide recognized brand that the owners of the IP are spending millions of dollars to promote. You might as well lead with that because people have seen that and know what it is. They have not seen and known your face and they don't care yet. So I would go with that. I would say that Rocket League is going to be more well known than any of us combined watching the channel or in the chat. So I would lead with that as my strength. You have this worldwide phenomenon that people have heard of. You might as well use the branding and use the iconic imagery and take advantage of that. When it comes to short form, you might as well repurpose that across multiple platforms. And short form is good in bulk. It may not get views and traction right away and maybe not on the platform that you prefer, but if you have three to five or five to eight uploads a day of short form gameplay that people can watch with gameplay and commentary, if you upload the YouTube shorts, if you upload the Instagram reels, if you upload the TikTok, if you upload to Snapchat, it has to hit somewhere. And if you're doing like five to eight of them a day, the odds of something hitting and being an outlier within that week and getting some traction is significantly high. This is a numbers game. And while people say, well, quality over quantity, quality over quantity, in most capacities, in most things when it comes to gaming, if you're not a pro gamer, there isn't a answer to the quality over quantity of it for the overwhelming majority of people. That's just how it is. And also, You have to account for taste. The younger the audience is, the less taste they have, which means that they may not value what you think quality is. They might have a different opinion of what quality is or what's valuable to them if it's majority a young audience playing the game. So there could be a generational gap in what quality is or what taste looks like or what they value. So it wouldn't necessarily make sense to over index on all this quality only for. the audience to reject it because you have a generational disconnect in what you subjectively care about so there's no accounting for taste as they would say right so you just have to take some of this with a grain of salt and position yourself for the maximum advantage And where that lies when it comes to packaging is leading with the thing they recognize and they care about and that is the game and the gameplay and the iconic figures, items, characters, vehicles, etc. So that'd be my advice to you, Untouchable. But what do you guys think? Do you agree with me? Do you disagree with me? Let me know in the chat if you're still watching live. Let me know in the comment section if you're watching the replay. So there you go. Thank you. That's gonna be so much easier when making the thumbnails. Also, the banner is okay. Yeah, the banner is okay. Super Gaming Pro, you didn't submit a channel review and we've closed reviews for tonight. NYC, the future, what about traveling niche? I'm a passport bro with doing five to eight shorts a day. Also, one long form every day for six months for a channel. Also doing three to five live streams a week. If the value proposition is not clear, if the titles are not extremely interesting, and don't have proven demand. And if the quality of the content and the value is not clear to the viewer, then just doing more of it won't necessarily grow. Because more of something people don't want, don't care about, don't identify with, isn't going to do anything. If you have made videos successfully... that got a high response and you made more of the videos with a high response, then that would work. If you have mastered packaging titles and thumbnails and you have five out of five titles, five out of five thumbnails, or at least four out of five on those, and they are already getting views and there's a proven demand and the comment section is saying, I want more of these. If they have high retention rates and people are saying, I want more of these. then making more of it would make sense because it would mean that the demand is higher than the supply. If the demand is not higher than the supply, increasing the supply has diminishing value and dilution because you're now saturating a market where there is no demand, which means you are devaluing and debasing everything and creating inflation. So you're creating inflation if the demand is not higher than the supply. If the demand is higher than supply and that's provable and you bring something that is valuable to the market that they can't get elsewhere, that they are telling you that they want, where they are saying, hey, it's dry out here and you're an oasis in the desert, then sure. But if you cannot do that. And if you're not making shorts that already perform and have a low swipe away, high view ratio, have high replay value, have high retention, then doing more of them doesn't matter. Because then you're flooding the market with a low quality product, increasing the supply when there's proven demand and when you can maintain quality assurance. And when you have a product that is viable and proven to be viable matters. That's why it's called a short split strategy and not a short spam strategy. What has to happen is the threshold of acceptable quality, what people will say yes to, has to be there. And we take yes for an answer. Then we mass produce what people want and what people are addicted to. go ahead and we increase the supply because the demand is proven and the demand exists. We only increase supply of something if there's proven demand and we can meet the standard of quality that the market will accept and say yes to. We don't need more of something that people are saying no to and rejecting or doesn't meet the standards of quality that they want. So we don't do that. There are no shortcuts. There are no gimmicks. There are no tricks. This is all about understanding basic economics and human behavior and first principles. That's it. So if you cannot maintain quality assurance and a standard threshold of quality, increasing quantity will not be meaningful. We do not have to make every single, the thing that YouTube artists and people and a lot of big YouTubers get wrong that doesn't work for medium and small creators or growing channels from zero is that always trying to make higher quality over and over and pursue it. It matters if you have a skill issue and you're starting from zero and you suck, then improving quality early on matters because your quality rating is 10 out of 100. 20 out of 100, it's a failing grade. So starting out, improving quality if you suck matters because it's a skill issue, right? If you start to make passable quality, then quantity will help you figure out your fumbles and get to crafting less things for the cull pile. as an artisan, it'll make it easier because you'll build on your better habits and routine. And then that gets you from 80 to 85. And then you stop making things at 80. And then your bottom is 85. And if your worst is 82, 83, 81, it's okay, but you're never putting out a 60 or a 70 out of a hundred. So it's getting to this threshold of acceptable quality and taking yes for an answer because most people can't discern the difference between 80 and 85. Most people actually can't even discern the difference between 80 and 90. So the thing is constantly perfectly getting between 80 and 85 instead of always trying to put out a banger that's 90 and chase 90 to 95, you would get more if you just always produce 80 to 85 and you can do that multiple times a day, every day, get the assembly line going, get the factory up and running and perfectly always ship. that product at 80, 85% quality, instead of chasing 90, 95% on occasion, you're better off. And you'll still end up sometimes having a 90 or 95 incidentally anyway. So you might as well just always, every day, keep printing 80s and 85s. As long as you never drop below 80 and end up accidentally cranking out a 60 or 70, As long as you can maintain a standard of production quality and build the assembly line and the printing factory, you're fine. Lock in. Because you won't get nearly as much getting 190 or 95, no matter what they tell you, as printing 10 or 20, 80 to 85s. And as they say, there's very little accounting for taste, and most people can't tell the difference between 80. and 85 let alone 85 and 90. so that's kind of the point here if you're not making something that's passable at 80 or 85 percent there's no point in mass producing something cheap and something low quality and something of low value there's no point in endless supply of 60s there's no point in endless supply of 30s there's no point in manufacturing mediocrity manufacturing something that people say yes to that is meaningful not manufacturing more of the coal pile of rejects so that's how you would have to do it and this is for all of you regardless of niche regardless of content type this is just the basic economics of attention and of um the market how valuable is short form podcast clips versus medium length clips on youtube you would do both you would do both you would just optimize for each because audience preferences exist and these are different preferences um for different viewer behaviors so you would create the option for each so it's big plate small plate or in this case you could argue it's small plate medium plate how big is your appetite how big are your eyeballs how big is your stomach so you would make sure that the options exist so they can consume the thing that they want the secret tip that most small creators don't know is that what they want to make usually has nothing to do with what people want to watch most small creators want to make the thing they want to make and they want to be rewarded and validated for it I'm going to fulfill it. Here is a desire. I'm going to fulfill it. Your wish is my command. The problem that small creators have is they're looking for the audience to fulfill their wishes instead of being the person who fulfills the wishes, desires of the audience. So it's mostly a combination of a skill issue and a maturity issue. Is that everyone wants to have their wishes fulfilled and the creator... wants the audience to be the genie. And that's the mistake. So the problem is most creators are there and are thinking about their own desires and they have no capacity to put the audience first. And then they're surprised that they do not have one. And that's a hard pill for people to swallow. It's something people do not like me saying. It is something that people are very pissed with me about, but it's just the truth. is that as a consumer, which is what a viewer is, they don't care about what you want. They care about what they want. And if you don't fulfill somebody's wishes, if you don't fulfill someone's desires, they will find someone who will. That is how everything in life works. Everything in life works in the way that if you want to attract somebody, you have to be the embodiment and fulfillment of their wants, needs, and desires. Now, ideally, once you accomplish that, to some degree, they would reciprocate in an ideal scenario. But you need to understand that that option is not on the table if you are not capable of fulfilling their wants, needs, and desires in the first place. Because if you do not do that, you are not a priority, nor do you need to be. They will find someone who will do that for them. That is the nature. of humanity and how everything works. And once you understand that as cynical as it is, once you understand that you understand everything. And why would I know this? I worked in advertising and marketing. Our entire point of advertising and marketing is to position products and services as the thing that can grant people's desires, fulfill their needs. or provide for them something they want. That is the entire point. And most people, most content creators just don't accept that and want to selfishly make their thing and then say, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme the attention, gimme the views, make me viral, make me rich, and yay me, instead of what do people want? What do people need? What do they desire more and most? How can I give it to them with the least amount of friction, the least amount of frustration, the highest reliability, the most enjoyment possible? How do I make this something that's not a risk for them? How do I make them understand I'm not wasting their time? How do I make sure that I'm the best option? and that they understand I'm the best option at a glance in less than two seconds. In less than two seconds, how do they know that I'm going to fulfill their wishes? In less than two seconds, how do they know that they're going to get exactly what they want and exactly what they need? How do they know in less than two seconds that I'm not full of it? How do they know in less than two seconds that I'm the best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be? That is what winning in the marketplace of attention looks like. Urban Noise Music says, what are people giving their attention? Look into whatever that is and try to understand it. Then make videos based on that, preferably something that people want to watch. Exactly. In the earliest days of my channel, I focused on software tutorials and I usually went in two directions. What is the software that has the most advertising, marketing, and the strongest user base in creative services? Adobe. Great. And when I don't make stuff about Adobe, What is the thing that is disrupting the market and has the newest update or the newest release to it in the budget category? Because there are some people too broke for Adobe. Okay, great. And now what is the latest open source thing, latest open source tool or the most complicated open source problem that people are trying to solve for because it's $0 and they're broke, but it has a technical learning curve that they can't understand. Fantastic. So I went. to where there's a large total adjustable market because here's the people, all the millions of people Adobe has that actually spend money. So if I attract those people and I ever want them to buy anything, they're not poor. Fantastic. Here are budget people and maybe if I help them, there's a chance they have some money and they'll spend it with me because I helped them. Okay, cool. And here are $0 people with no budget and nothing. But they need help. What if I can get enough attention around that to where that elevates my visibility and status to the people at the mid tier and the high tier that actually have money? And so the buy-in from the people who don't at least provides me social proof and status. Fantastic. So I strategically positioned. around those things. And what did I do? It's search-friendly content. It's not entertaining at all. It focuses on, here's the thing. This is complex. This is frustrating. This is time-consuming. Or, hey, this is expensive. How do I do it for free? Hey, this is complicated. How do I do it more easily? Hey, I don't understand what this thing is. Can you help me figure it out? So I positioned against solving very specific problems around time, money, frustration, and difficulty. Human heuristics that will never change. So that was my answer to it. There is a different version of that that happens in entertainment. There's a different version of that that happens in lifestyle. But the concept is the same. Wants, needs, desires. No, you never spam content. Until the algorithm hits, because that's not the point. The algorithm is not there to serve a creator. The algorithm exists to serve a viewer. The creator who best serves the viewer is who wins. Because remember, the concept here is your wish is my command. None of you have valued creators that spammed content, because no matter how much the algorithm delivers something in front of you, that you are rejecting, you'll never care about it. So more of something is not gonna make you cave in and finally give something attention just because it's abundant. If you don't like, I'm allergic to strawberries, no amount of you making strawberry shortcake is ever going to win because I can't eat it. So you can never spam your way to success making something that people do not want. You cannot do it because if I don't want that, if I rejected it, doing it more will not help you. It will just piss me off. The algorithm cannot give you viral views by overexposing something people do not care about. There's a reason why some of you will see people with 5,000 videos and less than 1,000 subscribers is because They refuse to make something that people actually want to watch. Or they are not capable of making something that people actually want to watch. So again, no amount of quantity that we do not value. All right, because you guys keep arguing quality versus quantity. I will tell you the truth in a simple analogy. If I'm allergic to strawberries, there is no amount of quantity or no amount of quality that will allow you to get me to eat something that I'm only going to throw up anyway. So quality doesn't matter and quantity doesn't matter if I don't value that thing to begin with. And you can't usually make me value something that I don't already. If you had that power, you would exercise it. So for all of you, and again, this is not to be demeaning to anybody. It is just a simple fact that most content creators historically have never understood this concept because most big creators that you grew up watching always kept conflating quality with value because they didn't have the language and articulation to differentiate these two things and they don't know that it matters because that was never their expertise because they were never educators to begin with most of them. They were always just entertainers. So I don't know why teaching. was something that they decided that they were going to try to do. Because a lot of these entertainers and performers trying to pretend they're more erudite and more affluent than they actually are in terms and more articulate than they actually are is not particularly meaningful because they don't understand much more than how to be entertaining. It is what it is. Because if they did, they would not conflate value and quality. Value is a filter for preferences, priorities, prejudices, and problems that you find meaningful. That is how you differentiate value. Quality is an experience you have. And that's where the subjectivity comes in is like there's the quality of the experience you have. And then quantity is a proxy for consistency and frequency. And so here's the problem. Quality and quantity work best together, but neither of them nor the combination of them will do you any good if someone does not value that thing. So to use our analogy, you can make as much strawberry cheesecake as you want, and it can be as good as you like. but I cannot value it if I'm allergic to strawberries. Therefore, value is the filter that disqualifies you on both quality and quantity, and no amount of either or both will save you. Value to the viewer is the singular most important thing, because if you cannot attract, you cannot retain. If you cannot attract, you cannot retain. So value is the lens. for which you filter attraction and interest. And only then can you filter for experience. I was attracted and interested in this thing, and then my experience was either good or bad. If it was good, then I want more of that good, because what do I want? I want more of what I'm attracted to and interested in, if and only if that also led to a good experience. If I was attracted and interested to the thing and then I had a bad experience, I don't want more of a bad experience. So the first level is I must be interested and attracted to something. If you cannot attract, you cannot retain. So I must be attracted and interested in a thing or a person. Then I must have a good experience of them in order for me to be retained. And then. I will want to repeat that. And I can only repeat that if it is available. Therefore, quantity. If it is supplied to me, if a experience I value that I enjoyed is made available to me, I will continue to consume it. If I don't value it, I can't consume it. If I don't enjoy it, I don't repeat it. And this is the main thing that most of you would need to understand and need to learn in order to be successful at content creation and at everything else in life. If you do not attract, you cannot retain. If you do not retain, you cannot repeat. If you do not attract, you cannot retain. If you do not retain, you cannot repeat. Value, quality, quantity. If you do attract and you do retain, they will want to repeat, so let them as often as possible, as long as it can continue to remain attractive, continue to retain them through enjoyment, continue to let them repeat that cycle as many times as they are willing to. Roberto, you mentioned that create content that people want to watch. When starting out, how would one know that without starting out? You go where attention already exists. I don't need to make content to know that people value Star Wars content. I do not need to make content to know that there is a rabid fan base for content around the Clone Wars era or the Cold War era of the Republic. I would simply have to be someone who knows Star Wars, is part of that community, is part of that niche. I don't have to guess because I would know. I don't have to create content. around adobe tutorials to know that most people struggle with green screen color grading and motion graphics and to realize that i can make tutorials around green screen closed captioning motion graphics and color grading and color creation correction and motion tracking most people okay i don't have to make after effects videos to know that most people can't do motion tracking rotoscoping green screen background removal or particle effects in adobe after effects or kinetic typography i do not have to make that content to know that most people do not know how to do that and to know that most of the tutorials are outdated i do not have to make content first to know that i do not have to make content to know that there is a demand for lore videos around game of thrones harry potter and star wars I don't have to make content to know that people want to consume that content at all. The idea that you have to make content to know what people want to watch just means that you're not paying attention and not observing the market, not participating in the community, or that you don't have an awareness of human behavior. And that sounds harsh. That sounds belittling. But I'm making a valid point is why would you have to make content to know what people want to watch? Why would you have to make content to know what people want to watch? There's no guessing game here. There's no guessing game here. If there's a new television show that is coming out that's been very, very heavily marketed, a new content creator can just be early to being early to uploading a review as quickly as possible. for every episode of a new television show that's been heavily marketed because it will have an audience and will have a fan base make a really good title and really good thumbnail around that thing and people will click on it and watch it and they'll be early to the market if you're early to the market is the same thing but a highly promoted product highly promoted video game highly um promoted um anything because the attention has already been generated for you there are people who now want to know something about that oh your wish is my command there's a product that launches that's going to clearly sell millions of units because it's highly anticipated or there were leaks or whatever cool positioning a really good video that is for buyers who want to use that a lot of people make reviews a lot of people won't make long-term reviews a lot of people won't make 30-day review 60-day review day in the life video product feature top five products not everyone will make that type of video okay even if they do you know what everyone won't do everyone won't cut open that product dissect it and do a teardown video because that thing was really expensive but the person who does aka jerry rig everything will get views because oh that's different oh i'm wondering how that works so there's that thing oh really expensive product what happens if i cut it in half very expensive product what happens if i melt it down very expensive product what happens if i drop it in concrete very expensive product let's do an underwater test and review of this product. You know, again, we don't have to make content to know what people want to watch. We just need to have observation skills, pattern recognition, and critical thinking. New video game comes out. Great. Can I beat this game without doing blank? New video game comes out. How to do this in the game. How to beat the boss as quickly as possible. Every item in this game revealed. Every item location in this game revealed. Every item ranked. Every character right ranked. Every character build ranked. Top five character builds to accomplish blank. How to beat this boss in under this amount of time. This game, ultimate speed run. This game, world record speed run. This game, attempting the world record speed run. We do not have to guess. We don't have to guess at all when it comes to these things. Is there any rule of thumb for protecting your reputation? Recently interviewed a guest and realized after had a very negative past, thinking about not uploading it or adding a qualifier. You can interview or have the most wholesome, sweetest people in the world, and someone will be mad at them for existing. You could resurrect Martin Luther King Jr. and some people will be mad at the interview. You can resurrect Mahatma Gandhi. People will be mad at the interview. Then again, maybe he has a past that's been revealed. I haven't kept up. Mother Teresa, maybe she has a past and I haven't kept up. Like, I don't know. You could resurrect JFK and some people will be mad at you because he cheated on his wife with Marilyn Monroe, allegedly. Like, whatever. There's no one. You could resurrect. I'm not saying this in a blasphemous way. You could resurrect Jesus Christ or bring back Jesus Christ, sit there and do a three-hour podcast with Jesus Christ, and there'd be people calling to crucify both of you by the end of it. It doesn't matter. So the thing is, my point is, there's no pleasing anyone or everyone. If you don't feel like you glorified this person, or you promoted wrongdoing. I don't know that there's a reason to not upload the interview if you think it was interesting and you think the interview went well. And people have a past. If you interview Mike Tyson, it's not like he doesn't have a negative past, but people feel how they feel one way or the other. Some people will love it. Other people will be mad at you. I don't know that there's anyone interesting enough to talk to. that no one would dislike. So it is what it is. If you feel uncomfortable, that's the only reason you need to not do something, by the way. I'm not trying to pressure you into uploading this video. If you don't feel comfortable or you don't wanna deal with the headaches, that's the only reason you need to not upload a video. But if you're doing it because you're worried about how people are gonna feel or if they're gonna be offended or whatever, there's nothing you can, you might as well not ever make content. Because there's nothing you could do. You know, you get Taylor Swift, some people are going to be mad at you. So, I mean, there's nothing you can do and no one you can interview that someone won't dislike and be vocal about it. So, I mean, what are you going to do? You know? Another, yeah, another great insight here, Doug. You know, what people could do is you could look at the most popular content creators in your niche, look at what people complain about or dissatisfied, and realize that for every creator with a million views, a million subscribers, maybe 10 to 20% of the people disagree with them. So make a video that addresses the gap in the market. Yeah, like I said, you could literally have Jesus Christ in your podcast and by the end of it, people would want to crucify you both. And it is what it is. And it's a shame, but it is what it is. So there's nobody that people won't have a problem with on some level. There's no one who will be universally loved, universally praised. So what are you going to do? The main thing is what matters is would putting out a video like this in any way be against your own values, your own morals, your own ethics, or again, do you just not want to deal with it? Cause that's a good enough reason to not upload. Something is up too many headaches. Not going to bother. It's plenty of content that I don't make that I could make because up too many headaches not gonna matter i was gonna do a video main channel video about um youtube rolling back uh some policies and what they did with regard to um the future of reinstating channels with this uh pilot program i was even going to reach out to youtube and see if i could get on the record or potentially an interview with somebody from the policy team to explain what the deal is and what the intention is. And there are just so many people, even right now on X, they're just angry and there'll be nothing that YouTube as a company could say or do to appease them. And I get it. There's some legitimate grievances there. I don't want to get into it, but the vitriol around it is so toxic that even for the point of clarifying it, the most I'm willing now to do. is I may, on the podcast channel, for the purposes of facts and information, do a recorded non-livestream episode about it for the podcast channel with whatever information I get. Put that out there. Let it ride. Maybe write an article about it on the blog and also put an article about it out on LinkedIn. And that's it because I just don't want to deal with the people who are angry about this and are going to take it out on my video or sit there and use it to misrepresent me or clip it in a way that's dishonest or whine about me being a YouTube apologist or a YouTube shill when all I'm trying to do is get the accurate information out there about what the policy is, what it means. why creators jumped the gun and it was silly and naive for them to jump the gun and then claim that the platform pulled the rug out from them when they said, hey, we're going to do this. We're announcing that we're gonna do something. No, not that we've actually done it yet. Not that it's okay yet. And that's stupid to blame the platform for you literally not using any critical thinking and saying, again, okay, is the new thing we're supposed to do is just not announce something until it's done. And until it's ready, because a bunch of chuckleheads on the internet are going to do something when we say, hey, we're going to do something in the future. And then when it's not ready in an hour or less, they say, oh, you were lying to me. That's just stupid and disingenuous and dishonest. But if I go and I make a dedicated video saying that, all I'm going to do is get. They lied to me. It's like they told you they're going to do something and to stay tuned You can't say that they're lying to you if under 24 hours of them announcing something you sit there and you act like it's in launch That's stupid and again. Yeah in this case someone say Roberto you're entered You know someone might say that not you Doug, but someone might say Roberto you're interjecting your opinion there No, I'm interjecting common sense. I'm interjecting common sense if I say coming soon You can't go to my joint today and then say i lied when i said hey coming soon stay tuned and then you show up tomorrow and you're like where is it like i didn't lie to you you're just being silly at a certain point or like yeah when channels are saying hey here are the things youtube do are doing you have a bunch of aunties whining about ai slop when it's like you know if you actually make really good authentic content and you're not pandering to the lowest common denominator I don't know why you're worried about AI slop. I'm not worried about AI. AI can't replace me. I don't know what y'all are worried about. What are you making that is so low effort that you're worried that AI can replace it? I don't know what to tell you. I don't know what to tell you. I'm not worried about AI slop replacing me. Oh, Roberto, well, you don't make entertainment content. That's why it's like, if I made entertainment content, I would position myself knowing that, again, AI can't replace me because what would I do? I would... have proof of human and interact with my community and if i was making entertainment content i'd probably live stream to my community once a week shout out people call them by name really create a great community that they're happy to be a part of where they feel like they have friends where they feel supported and they can't get that from an ai okay so i'd be doing that i'd probably be doing some private curated commit event stuff that people or private membership that is so good that people pay to be a part of it ai can't do that okay I would sit there and I'd be doing things in real time that showcase my personality and AI can't do that not in real time and in any availability. So I'd have that. And then they know that they have proof of human with a human being that cares about them in some capacity as much as a stranger can care about somebody else. And so, oh, they'd have that. So AI can't really simulate that in a meaningful way. So I'd have proof of human, personality, private community. And so private curated community, proof of human, personality, and personality, proof of human, private community. There was another one. There was another P that I keep forgetting here. I forget the other P, but basically it's a breakdown of that. So I don't care about AI slop because it's not particularly meaningful. AI slop will be for a consumer audience that doesn't need what a human authentic content creator provides. And it's the lowest hanging fruit audience. And it's also the least affluent audience. So I don't know why people care about it. You can be annoyed by it, but it's not a threat to you if you're making anything of actual value. It's probably not a threat to you, to be honest. Do you think the new collab feature will launch a bunch of new collab shows? In theory, yes. I think AI is going to push creators to do in-person meetups and go beyond parasocial connection you can have with AI. Yeah, I agree with that. because again i think that one private curated communities especially around in-person events are going to be a key proof of human with live streaming is going to be a key personal brand and personality um is definitely um going to be a key as well there is a fourth p that i keep forgetting here personalized experiences that's it so personalized experience uh personal brand Private communities and proof of human are the four pillars for hedging against AI and AI slop. And anyone who values those core pillars can't be served by AI. So again, if you're delivering on those four pillars, I don't think you have to worry about AI. As long as those are values that your audience has, there's not a problem. If you're making things that don't revolve around the majority of those four pillars, yeah, you should be worried about being replaced by AI. If you don't have a strong personal brand and personality, you don't create personalized experiences for your audience, you don't leverage proof of human by building a... an emotional connection and you don't build private or public communities that are worth being a part of, then yeah, you got to worry about AI if you ain't doing those things. So again, I don't feel like it's a problem. And again, people who say, well, my feed is bombarded with it. I don't know what your viewing patterns are that lets that stuff get recommended to you because honestly, I barely ever see it because my viewing pattern doesn't open me up to it. So if you're seeing a lot of AI slop in your feed, the problem is usually your previous watch history. Have you seen AI live shopping experience responded comments and all? It's getting scary. Maybe, but here's the thing. I'm not into hyper consumerism, so it has no effect on me. I'm not into hyper consumerism. I'm not into buying things to buy things or out of FOMO. I'm not a impulse low agency buyer. So I'm immune to that. That's a form of kryptonite that has no effect on me. Yep. So yeah, so it wouldn't bother me. I mean, there's people that are going to be susceptible to that in the same way that they're susceptible to mass advertising or to impulse buying at the register or to addictive behavior like online gambling. So I do worry about it for those people, and I do feel for them. But for me, you know, it's not going to bother me. But anyway, those are some final thoughts and things. I'm going to wrap this up. Poor Doug Hewson is going to have to deal with the timestamps on this. So I appreciate you, Doug, and thanks so much for filling in his mod tonight. We'll catch you next week for Friday channel reviews. Yeah, we should be fine on those because it's not VidSummit yet. But yeah, stay awesome and we'll catch you next time. Stay tuned to learn a little bit more about Awesome Creator Academy and how you can join our pro group community. That is my private community where we offer office hours twice a week plus 100 hours of exclusive video training from our archives, not repurposed YouTube videos. And so You guys should definitely check that out. Stay awesome. We'll catch you next time. 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. You'll be part of a community of usually around 100 like-minded creators who are taking this seriously just like you are. You'll 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 or 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. Take care.

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TIMESTAMPS from @DougHewsonYT 

0:00 - LIVE YouTube Channel Reviews and Advice for Small Channels
11:57 - Burnout
27:08 - Thumbnails & Titles Formula
01:04:59 - ROI to Attend VidSummit and Other Creator Events
01:12:22 - CHANNEL REVIEW: The Basement Channel Show
01:24:49 - Q: Impressions Differences in the First 24 hours
01:34:28 - Q; How Long Before Changing a Title After Uploading?
01:37:48 - CHANNEL REVIEW: The Determined Gardener
01:51:41 - Q: Topic/Niche Advice for a Faceless YouTube channel
01:54:57 - Q: Minimum Size to Pull Off Certain Types of Content?
01:59:36 - CHANNEL REVIEW: Science of Success
02:23:02 - Q: Order to Develop Aspects of Video Creation
02:34:34 - CHANNEL REVIEW: Simply Taisha
02:55:36 - CHANNEL REVIEW: Secret Strolls
03:12:25 - CHANNEL REVIEW: InScentive Collection
03:24:06 - Q: More Consistent Views
03:26:39 - Q: Platform Agnostic and Making Your Own IP
03:50:49 - CHANNEL REVIEW: Lil Crafty Nook
03:57:53 - Q: Audience Avatar
04:22:51 - Q: 350 Subscribers in a Year, why?
04:24:03 - Q: Variety Streamer Content Hurting Channel
04:24:55 - Q: Can I Do Hidden Gems Mobile Games?
04:37:15 - CHANNEL REVIEW: UntouchableN8IV
04:51:29 - Quality vs Quantity
04:59:42 - Q: Short Form vs Medium Clips From Podcasts
05:00:38 - Q: One SecretTip That Most Small Creators Dont Know?
05:16:42 - How to Know What the Audience Wants Before Making Content
05:22:10 - Protecting Your Reputation