LIVE CHANNEL REVIEWS - Real Advice for Small Channels

And we are live Hey everybody, this is Roberta Blake. Hope you create something awesome. Welcome back to the channel today We've got another round of live YouTube channel reviews for you. It is a Saturday. We're doing this on Saturday instead of Friday this time just because Friday was a little rough for me. We've got the storm coming in, so hopefully the power lasts and we don't get buried here in the snow. And hopefully you guys are safe wherever you are. But on Fridays, we like to do YouTube channel reviews. Sometimes we'll end up doing them on a Saturday. And today is one of those Saturdays. So we'll be reviewing some channels submitted by you for Super Chats. And the way we're going to do it is we're going to make sure that we give... One piece of advice in terms of what you're already doing well and acknowledge what you're doing well. One thing you should change immediately. And then what I would make sure and change in terms of your overall channel strategy for more growth, more subscribers, more views. So we're going to be looking at that. Interestingly, I've actually got into vibe coding and I have been working on a tool to actually help me with these channel reviews and do um some rating systems of them and also a tracker but in the meantime i'm gonna rely on our mods for help when it comes to tracking all of the channels and i'm gonna have to just um do the reviews completely manually um but i think it's gonna be interesting when i build finish building this dashboard that's gonna help me with the channel reviews um let's see Let me just make sure the mods know that we're live real quick. All right. We are live for channel reviews. Make sure they know. So hi to everybody in the chat. Yeah, the thumbnail for tonight's channel reviews was actually done using the 1 of 10 thumbnail generator. Hopefully you guys saw the live stream on Wednesday when we did our workshop around that. Because I think it's actually really interesting to do these kind of workshops and to show you guys how to use one of these tools just in real time and what it's capable of and so I think that that went really well We'll do a workshop at some point on Opus clip as well, but again shout out and thanks to our friends over at Oneoften.com best YouTube tool to help you guys with topics titles thumbnails and timing and you can find them linked in the description down below uh jackie says yep saw it on wednesday it was awesome yeah i'm glad that you thought so finally got a chance to catch you live how are you robert i'm doing all right so um let's see yeah well i'm waiting on uh some of the mods to come in to help us with um channel reviews and with keeping up with the form for you guys remember that you can submit those channel reviews via super chat also i'm going to talk to you guys a little bit about the current state of youtube so there's been a lot of chatter especially in my timeline on x about youtube long form views does youtube care about long form and people always have these absurd takes and i think they always just take all of this personally when it comes to youtube you'll hear all these takes oh youtube isn't pushing long form, it doesn't care about long form. YouTube goes where the audience goes because that's where the money is. People say, well, YouTube only cares about money. Well, let's think about that for a second. Let's assume for one minute that that's true. I'm not saying it is. Let's assume that that's true, though. If YouTube cares only about money, which most companies kind of do, that means that where was the money coming from? YouTube makes money from advertisers and from, excuse me, advertisers and paying YouTube premium subscribers. If they're following the money and then you're saying that they're forcing short form on us and that they're pushing short form, that suggests that the eyeballs and the advertisers are looking at short form. So that means that the people that are in a lack of alignment here would be the content creators that feel personally attacked and don't want to make short form or live streams. Because here's what we know. From YouTube CEO Neil Mohan and from statements made officially by YouTube, we know that YouTube Shorts gets 200 billion views a day. And we know that YouTube live streams, live streams like this one, that 30% of all logged in users daily watch live stream content on YouTube. These are habits and patterns that must have changed drastically over the last five years during the pandemic. Short form and live streams. We know that TikTok blew up during the pandemic. We know that streaming blew up during the pandemic. Those trends and that pattern of culture didn't go away. And there's a whole cohort of young people and not so young people who just got really into that type of content. We see people doing live streams. that get tons of views. Emily D. Baker, Caleb Hammer. You guys know Caleb Hammer. He is killing it with the live streams. Look at how many views he gets. Right now, right now, because of the polar storms, Ryan's Hall, y'all, has people watching his live stream. I think he has like 30,000 people watching live, 30, 50,000 people watching live. He's become YouTube's own weatherman, okay? So live streams and short form are killing it. It doesn't mean long form isn't killing it on YouTube, but long form is much harder to do than short form. Takes forever to make, forever to edit, and it may or may not, people may or may not click on it. Live streams are an event. People click on it or come in via Curiosity. People share it. It's live. It's ongoing. People can come in and out of it. People watch the replays of it. Live stream is killing it. Live stream podcasts, live stream debates, live stream weather updates right now, live streams during catastrophes, live streams during upheaval and events and things going on all over the world, chaos all over the world, and people are watching live streams of it, and they're watching that on YouTube. So here's the thing that people have to understand. It's not that long form is dying or that YouTube is not pushing long form. It's that people have options now. YouTube used to basically only be long form. So when something was only long form, that's all people watched or they didn't. But now they have options. And there's a whole cohort of people that, frankly, trust scrolling in their feed more than they trust clicking on some people's thumbnails. And that's not YouTube's fault. And that's certainly not the audience's fault. And so I think a lot of creators are just very quick to blame YouTube and blame the advertisers and blame money and blame capitalism. When the truth is, every time I go to an airport to go to a speaking engagement, I see people scrolling on their phone and I glance over and they're watching short form video on YouTube or TikTok or Instagram. It just is what it is. Like, my own mother watches short form and just sits there and scrolls on her phone for hours sometimes. I'll sit there. My brother, he mostly watches live streams. He's 31, and he'll sit there, and he'll be in somebody's stream for four hours while he's working on something, just sitting there, watching their stream, or just supporting them in the background there as their stream is going on. So it's, it's... Just that the viewing habits of people have changed. And they're not going to change back just because creators want them to. And so that's a whole thing, right? I think people need to understand that. We're getting a couple of questions here. Do we have the list of channels to review here? I think that technically in their country that shocking TV, I think technically in their country that this counts as a $20 super chat. So we're doing the channel reviews based on the super chats. I am looking for my mods to help with that and to keep track in the form. Let's see. So yeah, so we're still waiting on more. Yeah, Ryan's Hall Y'all is getting 75k people watching his live stream right now. So I want you to think about that. There's 75,000 people watching Ryan's Hall Y'all's stream right now. So that means that those people are not watching YouTube long or short form right this minute while they're watching that. So you see what I mean? Like there's... Like, it's just the difference of where people are at right now. And creators have to adapt to the culture and they have to know what the audience wants and how the audience behaves. Here's another thing that did happen, by the way, that is legit. There's a couple of legit changes because I'm not saying that long form doesn't have some issues on YouTube. For one thing, YouTube, stop counting ad block views. 30% of people on the internet use ad blockers. YouTube stop count ad block views. Long form views went down. Okay, cool. That's a reality. YouTube shrunk the amount of real estate for thumbnails on the YouTube homepage by about 60%. And so there's less thumbnails on the YouTube page, but they made them much bigger. Thumbnails are more competitive than ever. Yeah, long form views probably can go down. Those are two things that are legitimate. that happen. But it's not because they're just thrusting shorts on everybody. And again, YouTube wouldn't push shorts if people weren't watching them. It is what it is. In real world, in the real world, when I go out in the real world, I just constantly see people in my everyday life watching short form. When I get up in the morning, I find myself mindlessly scrolling short form. In the evening, When if I'm stupid enough to go to bed with my phone, I'm sitting there and I'm scrolling short form. I promise you that I watched 50 shorts today for some reason. I promise you I watched at least 50 shorts today for some reason. I promise you that that happened. I did not watch 50 long form videos today. I watched a handful of long form videos today, but I promise you that I watched 10 or 20 times more shorts any given day than I watched long form videos. And I promise you that I also watch live streams a lot more than I used to. I find myself watching live streams much more than I used to. I find myself watching Caleb Hammer. I find myself when there's severe weather, I end up watching Ryan's Hall, y'all. I end up, again, watching the live streams with Emily D. Baker or Lead Attorney or Legal Mindset. I kind of like watching those. And again, it's not everybody. But I think a lot of YouTube creators convince themselves they hate shorts, and so they convince themselves that everyone else does. I also think a lot of OG YouTube community type people, YouTube community type people, think that their culture is always the dominant culture. YouTube community type people also feel some kind of way about YouTube shorts, but they're also not acknowledging the rise of live streaming and the rise of podcast-like content. Podcast-like content is killing it right now. And let's be real. Do you know who's not crying about long-form views on YouTube right now? I'll tell you. Actually, in the chat, you guys can guess. What niche do you think is getting all the long-form views in the world right now? wasn't before and isn't complaining about long form views and monetization, but it's a niche that used to. It's a niche that used to complain about everything. And now it's the niche that's winning on YouTube more than anybody. What niche do you think it is? Let me know in the chat. Let me know in the comments if you're watching the replay. What niche do you think right now and for the last, oh, one to two years has been absolutely cleaning up on YouTube that didn't used to? In fact, it used to be a niche that used to be impossible to make money in, and now it's practically the only thing that makes real money. Oh, hell no, it's not gaming. Gaming's the worst it's ever been. It's not gaming. It's not sports. Video essays are doing worse than they've ever done. Nope, it's not animation. I'm just gonna cut to the punchline. I'm just gonna tell y'all. Politics. Politics, whether you love it or hate it. Politics. is winning on YouTube and it used to be one of the worst niches you could possibly do in YouTube and now it's politics. Politics is killing it. Daily news politics commentary, you almost can't lose. You almost can't lose. I don't know how it went over everybody's head. I think everybody said the niche that they're in because they wish that that was true and they were looking for a little bit of hope. I think that everyone projected and said the niche that they're in because they wanted to believe it when the answer was obvious. There's always chaos every day. There's always some knucklehead in politics in the news every day. There's always something new and you can literally spam. five, eight videos of long form of politics every single day and win. You can live stream politics for two hours a day as a news show, and you'll get super chats over super chats over super chats, and you'll win. You cut it up. You put out five or eight long form videos. You can milk 10 shorts a day out of it, and people will gobble it up, and they'll gobble it up, and it's absolutely winning. And guess what? The advertisers... from mainstream media have came over. The advertisers used to stay away from politics. Advertisers used to, now they can't get enough of advertising on politics channels. They're sponsoring the hell out of them. You have all these sponsors that used to stay away from it that are happy to do it now. You got all these advertisers happy to jump in on it now. It is wild, and it's an endless route of content, and they never have to increase their quality or production. Once they have a good camera and a good microphone, they never have to spend a dime ever again. It's the most profitable single niche opportunity on YouTube in the modern era. Single most profitable. It's the highest margin, lowest cost. There doesn't seem to be any audience fatigue whatsoever. Oh, yes, politics channels are actually paying. I am dead serious about this. I've seen the stats. I've seen the AdSense. There are politics channels on YouTube right now that aren't even the biggest politics channels getting $50,000 to $120,000 a month. And they're not even the biggest. Caleb Hammer, the financial YouTuber, started a whole nother channel so they could talk about news, politics, and culture and do live streams on it and makes money hand over fist to the point to where His memberships on YouTube, even after YouTube takes their 30%, are making over $200,000 a month from his YouTube channel memberships. $200,000 a month from channel memberships. That's how serious it's gotten. That's the state of YouTube. So it's not that long form doesn't win on YouTube. It's that people, to some degree, frankly, got bored with the same song and dance. that YouTubers are doing. Gaming, gaming, people don't make actual gaming content if I'm being honest with you, and I coach gamers. I've coached so many gamers, okay? And here's the thing, people don't make gaming content. What people are doing is they say they wanna do YouTube gaming, and what they wanna do is they wanna be paid to get on YouTube and play video games, and there is a difference. They're not making gaming content, they're trying to get paid on YouTube for playing video games, and there is a difference. And that is why the overwhelming majority of them fail at it, and don't make any money. On top of that, it's very hard to monetize because they're beholden to a third-party IP. They're also beholden to whether people like the game studio. And here's the truth. Gaming, gaming, the electronics for gaming with the components with RAM, GPUs, all of that, enthusiasts are priced out of the market. But I'll be real with you. No one needs all this RAM and GPUs anyway. Gaming graphics did not need to go anywhere after like... 2016. We didn't need an upgrade in graphics after 2016. We needed people to make better games, better stories, and better gameplay mechanics. Gaming peaked in 2016. The PS5 is a tragedy. The PS5 has less than like 25 games. Why does the Nintendo Switch 2 have more games than the PS5? It's stupid. Graphics and the obsession with graphics is stupid. We never needed it. I'm an OG gamer. We never needed the graphics to go this far. Graphics were fine where they were in 2016. But now, priced out of the market. So PC gaming enthusiast, priced out of the market. The price, even for console games, relative to inflation, is not that bad. But the market for those people, inflation eats up their buying power and their dollars. So it kind of sucks for a gaming enthusiast in that regard. Okay. The other thing with that is... People are very upset with a lot of the gaming studios and the AAA studios. They don't feel like they're making a quality product anymore. They feel overcharged. They feel like they're paying for all this DLC. So gaming is in decline because people are mad at the gaming studios. And here's the part. People have a bunch of old video games that they can still play in their back catalog. They have a lot of retro games they can play that are great, that are fun, that were always good enough, and they were good enough five years ago. So you're seeing a decline in gaming because the reality is... The studios aren't delivering. If you're a hardware PC gaming enthusiast, you've been priced out of the market. And when's the last time a new game didn't ultimately disappoint you? So it does hurt the channels around gaming and gaming tech. Yeah, you have someone here in the chat. So you have the nerdy entrepreneur in the chat. Every other game release is damn near a half done game. I couldn't agree more. And the thing is, and then people are upset also with a lot of the live service games. Live service games that people love are going offline. Not enough people played them or bought the DLC or whatever. They didn't have a good business model. Instead of making a complete game that is standalone, they did all these live service models and now they can't maintain them. So a lot of the culture of YouTube was YouTube gaming. And YouTube gaming is fading. So you have a lot of people complaining. Then you have all the faceless channels on YouTube. Faceless channels on YouTube are mad because YouTube is cracking down on AI faceless channels and YouTube automation and cash cow channels. And so those folks are always mad about it too. And then they already ate the market of video essay channels. So the video essay people are largely mad because they got lumped in. with these people making AI slop, they get accused of making AI slop when they're all homegrown human content. So they're frustrated with that. Video essay channels usually also tend to be mad at the world in general, a lot of times, not all of them, but quite a few. And so you have those combination of circumstances. These things are very hard to make, and then they do all this research. But then on the other hand, a lot of the video essay channels intersect with culture and politics. You have people who spend weeks working on a script, losing to somebody, doing a hot take or reaction video. Even the reaction meta, someone reacts to their video essay, gives a bunch of hot takes on a live stream and gets more views than the original video essay did. And so those folks are absolutely upset about that and discouraged and don't want to make content. So you have that. So you have a lot of niches that have not accepted where we are as a culture right now. And that the culture has changed. And when the culture changes, the YouTube meta changes. Mr. Beast type content, it faded also with the pandemic. You notice that no one talks about beastification anymore. No more copycat Mr. Beast channels anymore. So that's a thing. Let's see. Joe to Benny says would love a review. I make engineering videos I'm just trying to maximize as much as I can eventually I want to use live showing the creation of certain hardware while answering questions alright, so we'll add you to We'll add you to the queue here. Let's see Okay My main two mods are not available tonight. I might have to do it solo, which is fine. I can do it Let's see. I just have to grab Form here. Let's see. Yeah, I can do this manually if I have to, which is fine. And today is the 24th. Since I have, like, very minimal mod support for the form, I have mods for the chat, but not for the channel review form. I'm going to have to do it manually myself, which means it might take me. a little bit longer than usual, which means I also probably am going to have to limit it to five channel reviews tonight because that's probably all I'll be able to manage by myself if I have to also manage the form, look up the channel links, and do all of that. So you have to bear with me here. You'd be surprised how much doing a live stream and doing it very well on YouTube relies on having the support of a really good mod team. Some of you'd be surprised. Some of you may not be surprised. All right, so Jada Benny, we've got you queued up. I'm checking on something because we had another super chat come in from Shocking. cause tv and i think for their country they technically qualify for um a channel review um so we're gonna try and do that yeah but the rules for channel reviews are in the chat for those of you who'd like one uh so we are doing them via super chats and something you guys may not know is we actually track for the channel reviews we track the Sub count the video count the view count and we also timestamp when I do the review So that's like some of the things that the mods do in the background usually while I am doing the actual channel review Even track the amount of videos people have uploaded and then that's actually helping us with understanding The amount of growth that people have And we're able to kind of say, hey, this person's actually come a long way. They've been doing the work. So like we go a little further probably than a lot of people do when it comes to this in terms of that. And it's something that we worked out. And again, shout out to Katie Ukulele, Doug Hewson, and then all the other mods for helping keep up with that. Yeah, Doug is the best. Absolutely. Yeah, eventually. So the thing is I'm working on a tool. to help me with channel reviews that is going to be able to handle some of this via vibe coding when i want to do a diagnostic on a channel and i'm having to go back into my bag of tricks from where i started because ironically before youtube uh since i was 13 years old i've actually been doing web design and coding and i taught myself html css and javascript from the time i was like 13 14. I taught myself with the internet and with books and now I'm teaching myself More advanced coding and vibe coding. I did a little web development back in the day But I was mostly doing action script. I did some PHP and Python But I was my best thing was aside from front-facing it was action script so So one of the things That I've been working on is a vibe coding tool that will help me do these channel reviews in terms of automatically tracking the You know this information and being able to push a button and then it'll have all this information and then number as far as the the channel the handle the URL the view count the video upload count I will also be able to collect short form versus long form uploads and Theoretically the views on long form versus short form in theory And if I can get that part right. And then on top of that, I'll be able to fill out certain things in a form while I'm doing a review of saying, okay, I'm rating it this, I'm rating it that. It'll be able to take a screenshot. We'll be able to archive it. And then it'll save it to a database. Then if I end up reviewing the channel again, I'll be able to pull up the channel again, clock in another instance of the channel, and then we'll also be able to track growth that way. and some other cool things. It'll also kind of be able to give me like certain stats on the channel just at a glance. So that's my hope with the tool that I'm vibe coding internally to help me do channel reviews internally. And I think it'll be different. And so whenever that's done, I think it'll also change the live stream a little bit because it'll be so cool to be able to actually bring up a channel inside of my tool. and then just have those stats laid out and then do the scoreboard and analysis afterward. I think that'll be really dope. So there's just something I'm working on. Let's see. Hey, Roberto, I was on the channel a while back. Content focused on fictional cost breakdowns. Yeah, I think I remember this. Since then, I pivoted hard in the game. Anime industry economics seems to be working. Okay, cool. Yep. I'd love your take. Yeah, I remember your channel, actually, especially monetization paths jump out beyond ads, digital products, affiliates or studio style plays trying to build this into a small media business long term. Yeah. One of the harder things about that is whenever you cover someone else's intellectual property, that's hard. If you're pivoting to industry economics, that could actually help offset some of that. So that's interesting. Shocking cost TV. I'm sure some reason I'm having a problem finding the channel. Oh, there it is. Maybe I just typed in your handle wrong before. All right, I found it. Yeah, so we've got two of five channels in the queue for channel reviews. So that's cool. Yeah, B-Ron Sports says, I also like to put YouTube on a background while I sleep or working stuff. It'll have streams sometimes. Yeah, that's very common. Yep. Yeah, Ryan's haul, y'all, is great. And, like, again, he gets tons of super chats. And, yeah. Angela Denise says, hey, bro, something going on with YouTube right now. I've heard a lot of chatter about views being done. I've also noticed my views down tremendously over the last week or so. A lot of people have a lot of speculation on this, but there's so many different things going on. One, I think people, one, actually also are underestimating how much of their audience might be an international audience. And right now the world is a little chaotic. So you might see a dip in views off of that. YouTube is aggressively filtering ad block viewers. So ad block viewers, people have ad block installed, completely worthless. Like it doesn't show up in your channel views at all anymore. 30% of users on the internet use ad blockers. So that's a big hit to people. Even people who may not be expecting it. So that is a thing. YouTube viewing patterns, they're not only seasonal, they're conditional based on there are other things distracting people right now that would normally watch casual content. As I said, watch this. If what I said about politics taking up so many views on YouTube and getting mass views and that people watch. multiple politics videos a day, that means there are less other videos that they're otherwise watching. So right now, a large amount, a non-trivial amount of people are watching all these politics live streams, watching all these politics channels, and all this stuff that's happening in the world, all of the chaos, the fact that right now... There's a couple of different countries that might have their leadership overthrown. There's a lot going on. And so we only have a limited amount of attention and time in the day. The attention is drifting away from the content that used to be dominant on YouTube and it's drifting away to other things. The other thing that people have to understand is also any of your stuff, if it's tied to consumer products, if the economy... is not doing well, consumer product content also does suffer. Matt, for example, I was talking earlier about Matt Miller's PCs and some other PC content. Oh, I see we got another review super chat here. Thank you. So again, another primary example of this is in the PC enthusiast market, they're just people who've been priced out of the hobby. of PC gaming. If people are priced out of the Hobbit of PC gaming, are they going to watch content about products they can no longer afford? So anything that is, because by the way, camera YouTube has been going through this, camera YouTube has been like, oh, we have so many good cameras now. But cameras have also been getting so good that people are like, okay, I don't need a new camera even though I like hearing about them. Okay, I don't need it. And if I don't need it and I'm not gonna buy it, then what's the point, right? Even I find myself, I love that content to death. I love those creators. I find myself watching less of it because at this point, I'm just like, do I really need one more bloody camera? Is that really what I'm gonna do with my money right now? And the answer is, well, no. That's not what I'm about to do with my money right now. So I think that a lot of us, And I understand exactly how it all works. Trust me. I do this too. I internalize this too. But here's the thing. We're taking something personally that has very little to do with us and has more to do with just where the world is right now, where people's attention is, where people's finances are, where their availability of time. If you want to know also what happened with people moving to short form, a harsh reality is that One of the things with people moving to watching short form is they just stopped wanting to make a decision about one more thing to click on. Like every time you have to click on a video, you have to debate it and you have to arm wrestle with yourself about the decision of what you're going to watch, what you're going to pick to watch. Those of you who grew up like me, but television, don't y'all remember how exhausting it was to sit there and to actually flip through the television? And to sit there and try to find something to watch on television. Don't you guys remember that to be an exhausting exercise? Do you think YouTube has really gotten any different? Like, YouTube's the new television. So, to some degree, like, people are just tired and exhausted and mentally fatigued when it comes to, like, figuring out what they want to watch. They don't have to... figure out what they want to watch if it just means they can scroll through their feed and the decision is made for them and then if they don't like it they just swipe up so it's like clicking the remote clicking the remote people used to click around and channel surf that channel surfing is now happening on youtube all right jackie d mckebert we've got you here for number three yep I remember lying on the living room floor with your kid's bowl of cereal. Yeah. Yeah, it's a thing. So, like, people are channel surfing on YouTube, and they're just scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. And so, yeah, so for a lot of people, they're not watching certain videos because it's not in their budget or because they've moved on from a certain style of consumer content. They've moved on to other things. There's, like... Remember, there was a point where politics wasn't doing well on YouTube and gaming was. There was a point when camera gear was killing it and Peter McKinnon was getting like a million views every upload. That's not happening right now. So these things come in waves. And it's culture. It's culture. There was a point where reaction videos weren't winning on YouTube anymore and the reaction meta declined on YouTube. The reaction meta is back now. It used to be that movie review channels and TV show review channels used to do very well on YouTube. You know what happened? A lot of people got mad at, think about it, you used to be able to kill it making a Game of Thrones channel, and then season six, seven, and eight happened. Think about it. You couldn't lose doing Game of Thrones content on YouTube. Even I got in on it back in the day. You couldn't lose doing Game of Thrones content. And then what happened? Everyone got pissed at the showrunners and got angry at the showrunners because seasons six, seven, and eight happened. And so that hurt that content. Movie review channels, they suffered because of the writer's strike. TV show review channels, they suffered because of the writer's strike. And the young generation, yeah, the young generation cares much less about sports and absolutely... Cares a lot more about gaming. I think sports content is making a comeback though. I'll be honest I think sports is making a comeback to some degree, but it's partly also more people that are Millennials and Gen Xers giving it more attention in terms of that and it's less I would argue that people are the young people are getting into sports. If you even look at right now what's happening with the NFL and the NBA, it's not the young people that are keeping it alive. It's just really not. It's just more millennials, Gen Xers, and boomers doubling down and participating more. And the NFL and the NBA have realized they need to cater to older audiences and that younger audiences that nothing they do has worked. Matt Miller's PC. The hardest thing to do is finding a video to watch while I eat. Yeah, so here's the thing. For a lot of you, I want you all to think about as creators and internalize this. Haven't you found it more frustrating than ever, even when you look only for long form videos? Haven't you found that most long form videos are not interesting to you anymore? That it's hard to find something to watch, to click on, and that you actually want to watch? Haven't you found that a lot of the creators that you would want to watch are uploading less and less and less? And it's partly because creators that make quality content, the creators who made the highest quality content on YouTube are getting older, getting married, starting families, having children. And so content is not the priority that it was for those creators that it was five or 10 years ago. A lot of my friends, They're married now. They have kids now. They don't make content like they used to. And so that's a big thing. The young YouTubers or the mega viral YouTubers, they're all, most of them not married, don't have kids. But a lot of them are getting married now. ARAC is engaged. MrBeast is engaged. Do you really think that they're going to make content the way that they're doing now and keep up with this pace after their first kid comes? It's not going to be that way. It's not going to be that way. So they're going to age out too. But here's the thing that no one wants to say. The younger generation and cohort of YouTubers does not have the talent that an older generation has. The YouTubers that are under 30 right now do not have the talent of the YouTubers over 30 and the OG YouTubers over 40 when they were in their prime. This next generation is not nearly as talented as the two generations that came before them. And no one wants to say that because no one wants to be the old fart in the room that's taking a dump on the young people. And I totally get that. I totally respect that. And there are great and talented young people out there, but they are the minority within their collective niche and genres. Whereas YouTube used to have a greater overall abundance of high quality creators. That cohort of high quality creators is aging out of the market, moving on with their life. and are pulling back from content to live that life that they worked for. That's the truth. And you can see it in the creators that are getting married and starting families are moving on from content little by little, piece by piece. And that's why it feels, at least in my opinion, in my opinion, that's why it feels like there's less high quality content on YouTube to watch. And it's not because they're forcing shorts down our throat, quote unquote. It's because the older cohort of the highest quality content creators you and I have ever enjoyed are aging out of the market and they're moving on from content creation to start families. MatPat, game theorist, multiple theory channels, game theorist, film theorist, GTA Live, they moved on, he and his wife Stephanie, and they started their family and they're moving on from content. Philip DeFranco almost retired last year. So that's something that no one is willing to talk about or acknowledge is just that the YouTubers who had a really good run the last 10 years are moving on, getting married, starting families, having kids, and they're not making content the way they used to, not as often. And there was a generation of YouTubers before that that were really good that also had the same thing, and they've moved on as well. Some of them have adult children now. They've been doing YouTube so long. They were doing YouTube so long. There are children who were the face of a family channel who now are adults who have children of their own that they're doing YouTube with. If you remember Cute Girl Hairstyles and you remember Brooklyn and Bailey, the twins on YouTube, they're adults now. I believe they have families of their own. They're like, and they literally grew up on YouTube. They grew up on YouTube. They did YouTube for like 18 years. 18, 20 years. In a way, it's more that I'd pull back. It's that I'd be involved. So the question here is, do you think you'd move away from YouTube when you start a family? I'm 41. The answer is probably yes. The answer is probably a resounding yes, but not completely. I would find a way to do content, and it would basically be that I'd have to completely... outsource a lot of the operational part of it and just become talent only and then do my consulting and coaching and even figure out a little bit of a pullback on that. And it really depends. And then I would still find a way to do it as they as kids start school and mature. Oh, yeah, I'd get my time back. So, yeah, there's a window of time where that's true. And then I would come back if I wanted to, unless I found something that allowed me the outlet that I really wanted to enjoy more. It's possible that I would go more the podcasting route and just be able to fit it in there. But I'll tell you this, if I was 30 and then I had kids, even if I was a full-time YouTuber, I'd pull back quite a bit in that situation, absolutely. And I bloody well wouldn't be making content. While I'm on my, like, I would probably take a two-month honeymoon and wouldn't be making content while I'm on my two-month honeymoon. So if I didn't make content in advance, there just wouldn't be uploads. So absolutely. Like, people say family first. Not everyone means it. Not everyone means it. But yeah, I get married. Two-month honeymoon. And if I didn't make content in advance, you're not going to see me for two months. Easy. So, you know, that's the kind of thing. But also there are some people they just what they do is they put on their effort into You know less frequency but higher quality some people pull back I mean I'll give you a primary example one of the biggest users of all time is leaving it behind the outdoor boys I think a lot of you love the out outdoor boys outdoor boys You know their family is like okay. We're pulling back fame is encroaching on our life and You know they don't feel great about so they're like they love YouTube but It's also that. Roberto, you have to treat YouTube like being self-employed 40 hours a week plus a week. Depends on workflow and depends on teams. If someone has a team and they've reduced themselves to talent, then they can do less of that and they can be talent instead of operations. Ideally, someone can get to a place where they can be talent instead of operations. Then they don't have to treat like 40 hours a week while they're solo. If you're a solo creator, yeah. If you're a solo creator, probably. Unless you're... wildly efficient, unless you're wildly efficient, but getting to that efficiency is difficult on your own. One of the reasons I coach people is I'm able to get them to some of that efficiency. I took one person from eight hours of video editing to three hours of video editing per upload because his workflow was that bad. His workflow for video editing was so inefficient that he was doing eight hours of work on what was a three hour task for his videos. I got him in three hours instead of eight hours with not any loss of quality. In fact, it improved the quality because we really could have taken it down to two hours, but we improved the quality because his video editing workflow was so wildly efficient because he did not know how just two tools in his video editing software worked or that they existed. He didn't know that two tools in his video editing software worked or even existed. And just the awareness of that completely changed his entire life by itself. And he got back hours and hours a month of his time. And so it was infinitely more valuable than anything he paid me for the call that we weren't on just to fix his workflow because the workflow was trash and was costing him five hours per upload they didn't need. And he was able to get it down to two hours, but we added an hour to up the quality because now we could without him suffering. And so he went from stretching out eight hours of editing on an upload spread out across two to three days after work to being able to do an upload and spend three hours of editing in just one session and one to two sessions work less and get better quality because he was just that inefficient at using his editing software, which was Adobe Premiere Pro, which I'm like, you know, I'm an expert at Adobe Premiere Pro. And it just changed his entire life off of that because now he was getting five hours back on every upload while improving the quality. So again, the timing thing really, really depends on just how efficient your workflow is, what your content demands. A lot of the people doing news commentary and politics, all they have to do is live stream for one to two hours, cut up the clips, possibly not even do that. They have their editor cut up the clips, do the thumbnails. and their operations. So that person, that person doing that news and commentary channel might be doing a four-hour workday at best. They might be doing a four-hour workday, four to five days a week, and that's it. So they might be doing 16 to 20 hours, maybe 25 if they do some admin work, assuming they didn't outsource it. So Adobe Premiere Pro is better than Final Cut Pro. I'll put it like this. Adobe Premiere Pro can automate eliminating all your silences, all your stop... and pause words like ums and ahs, and it can do it even on like a 20, 30 minute video. It can eliminate all of that and do the rough cut for you, and it can do it in three minutes. In three minutes, it can take out all your silences and dead airs, all your ums and ahs with the text video editor instantly and on a 20 minute video in three minutes and give you the transcript. That's Adobe Premiere Pro. DaVinci Resolve can technically do that as well. People who still use Final Cut Pro, I would recommend you get a subscription to Gling AI. And people do not realize that that instantaneously changes everything for them. I would argue color grading in Adobe Premiere Pro is faster and easier than doing it in Final Cut. Final Cut has not kept up with the times. Its main thing is that Adobe has a subscription model. People hate on Adobe for having a subscription model. Final Cut wins there for a lot of people. DaVinci has a high learning curve. So even though it's free or there's a paid version for the same amount as Final Cut, the learning curve turns a lot of people off. Yeah, text-based video editing shaves hours off of your time. I swear to you, it's the best thing ever. And 80% of people don't know about it. 80% of people don't know about it. Yeah, I understand with the outdoor boys too. It's like it's one thing when people are asking you for pictures when they start asking your kids or approaching them Especially when you're not there. Absolutely. That becomes a thing So again a lot of youtubers are moving on for that reason as well as they start families is there just becomes a privacy issue Thanks, appreciate that Yeah, motivation theory running was a family vlogger The shenanigans and now three of the five kids are adults. Yeah, so I think that A lot of people don't understand that we're in an era of YouTube where we need YouTube understands this, by the way, as a company. We need a younger cohort of creators. That's also why some of the fixation on shorts is we need something low barrier to entry that gets young people. at least doing YouTube at all and gets them excited. And so we needed the TikTok generation to come onto YouTube. They need to then come over to long form, but you have to onboard them long form. Young people are intimidated by starting with long form, not getting views. They get easily discouraged. So YouTube needed shorts to bring in young people, but the young people still haven't reached that point to where you don't have as many young people stepping up. Where's the next young person that's on the level of MatPat or Freddie Wong or the Outdoor Boys or Tom Scott or in the gaming side, where's a young YouTube gamer that is enjoyable to walk as Zach Scott Gaming or the Rad Brad? Where's the next young person that's Corey Kenshin or Markiplier? Where's the next young Markiplier? We haven't had anyone step up. to really be the next Markiplier or the next Jacksepticeye or the next PewDiePie. We just haven't. There are some standout young people. You have EyeshowSpeed or whatever, but we don't have nearly the cohort of young talent under 20 and under 25 on the platform that we used to. So we don't have anybody to replace the older generation as they leave. And it actually really is affecting... The platform we don't have five yet. We have three we have three So far yeah, we've got three of the five that we need and I've got those loaded up Which reminds me I gotta fill out this part of the form and shout out to the mods for Handling this one. I don't have to do it. So it's so much easier So much easier when they're here. Let's see Yeah, so again, we have more channels than ever, by the way, that have 100,000 or a million subscribers. But again, I just don't think we have, and it's no offense to anybody, we just don't have the same level of talent on the platform that we used to back in the day. And you can definitely tell. Savvy Tech Tips says, I got a question. When I create a post, it's not going on my homepage. I have my post on my homepage. I'm not sure. That could be either a glitch or that could be a customization issue. What about CyberLink PowerDirector as an Aang program? I used it back in the day when I was younger. It hasn't kept up with the times, is my understanding. Filmora would probably be more of an equivalent to it in terms of a budget option, but Filmora has had its controversies. So I would say there's that. They have used it back in the day and I didn't hate it. It was good to me when I was using it. I was way back in the way though. Like I was like I was using I was using power Cyberlink Power Director before YouTube existed. To be honest with you. I was using that back in the day as a real player. My C Prince says Roberto there's a lad called Luke who people are calling the new Tom Scott. Interesting. Yeah. Hopefully we do get a younger generation that is capable of reaching the levels and not just the subscriber counts because what you have is you will have young people who reach the subscriber counts but not the levels of talent not the effort levels of craftsmanship not the levels of charisma not the levels of intellectual ability or curiosity of their predecessors it's just something that I've noticed is that some of these people they can reach the level of subscribers of their idols, but not the level of talent or intellectual ability or creativity or craft. Think about it like this. Who has really come along and actually been a legit contender for the queen of DIY content? Who actually came up and made better content than Lore DIY? I don't think I actually saw it, and I actually pay attention to the DIY niche and the crafting niche, and I don't think anyone really came and dethroned Laura DIY. I don't think that anyone actually really came along that truly, and again, you'd be surprised. I keep an eye on everything, and I have clients in every niche. We never really got anyone ever again that had the class, craftsmanship, and creativity in the beauty niche of when Michelle Fawn left. When Michelle Fawn left the beauty niche of YouTube, it devolved into drama, gossip, backbiting, and mean girl content very quickly. The single greatest beauty and makeup YouTuber that had class, creativity, and craft locked down. was Michelle Phan. Michelle Phan's cinematography was so good that men outside of the beauty niche decided to mimic her cinematography techniques and get macro lenses for some of their content in the tech niche. Like the cinematography and creativity that she used in the beauty niche found its way to tech YouTube. That's how inspiring Michelle Phan was. And she was the embodiment of being a class act and staying out of drama and cattiness on this platform. Ryan Trahan is the only person I've ever seen that I think could be a spiritual successor to Casey Neistat. He's the only one. Maybe I need to look harder, but Ryan Trahan has it, and he's not overdoing the production. And there's heart in what he's doing. I think he's the only person who can be a spiritual successor to Casey Neistat. Roberto, Luke is shining because he's taking the time and effort to do good content. Most of the other younger people don't want to serve the audience. There's an attitude problem, even selfish. Yeah, I think that a lot of these people just want to get famous. So I think there's a difference between people who like they have. I think it's fine to want to make money on YouTube. In fact, I actually respect people more if they say I want to make money on YouTube than they say I want to be famous. See, but I'm older, right? So I would think that way. Young people respect chasing fame more than they respect chasing money. If a young person says, I want to be famous, I don't care about the money, I just want the views, I just want the community, I just want the love, then young people eat that up, gobble them up, and will then make them rich. And so it's a really interesting hack. But as long as a young person says, I want to be famous and I want to be known and I want to be accepted instead of I want to be rich, everyone will love that young person. But if someone older straight up says, I want to do this and I want to be paid well for it, older people will understand and appreciate that. Older people will accept all of you here in the audience. You're older. You will accept the idea that. It makes sense to do YouTube if you can make money at it. And if you keep doing it for years and years and never make money on it, then it may not make sense to keep doing it because it takes so much time, so much effort. And if you're not getting at least compensated for it, it may not be worth it for an adult that has competing responsibility. There are other hobbies, right? Adults can, in the chat, let me know in the chat if you guys feel that way. I think adults can accept that and respect that. I think people, if they're over 25, over 30, they have a job, they have a mortgage, they have kids, that they can completely respect, yeah, if I'm gonna do something, it's gotta make money because my life isn't comfortable. Even if you, oh, we'll get a real job. People who have a real job work 40, 50, 60 hours a week. If they do something outside of that, a lot of times, if they were doing it for fun, it can't also feel like labor. And YouTube very much will also be labor. So there is no just for fun to that for most people, even if they make good money at a day job, taking on YouTube as a part-time job, they won't do it just for fun as a hobby. It does not make sense for an adult. There are exceptions to that rule. Obviously, there are exceptions to that rule. But for most adults, they cannot square that. They can't justify it, especially if they're married and they have children. They can't justify 10, 20 hours a week of doing content that doesn't make any money and then not give that time to the family. There's just no way. So the only person who thinks that way is a kid that's not married and doesn't have a family and doesn't have to pay a mortgage and is still comfortable living in the college dorm, living off mom and dad. or again, likes is fine with being in their like cheap apartment situation, where a child like person can have the attitude that, oh yeah, I just do this thing for fun or whatever. And I don't care if I ever make any money off of it. And they would rather have the attention. That's a real thing. But after 30, if you have any kind of adult responsibility, well, that goes away. Um, Raman Razi. Actually, I love that name. That's actually pretty cool. Raman Razi says, and so yeah, we've got one more slide open after this. So Raman Razi says, I need long form help, please. Having a hard time finding audience since our channel was grown on shorts. Yeah, we can address that for you. Um, let me see. Yeah, we've helped a couple of channels pivot to long form. Uh, there are some challenges with that, but it can be done. Let's see here. Alright, we've got your channel URL Yeah, by the way, I type it I type the super chats into the form I actually still got it. I still have a typing speed of close to 60 words per minute or higher with no look to no look like They'll got the home row keys still got it This is impressive by the way, Rahman Razi in terms of the views you guys have gotten on the short form I could see also why it uh can feel like a struggle into long form you also have to change your expectations around um long form views um and again might be worth doing a actual one-on-one coaching call after this uh yep i can see exactly what uh what's happening here here yep we're gonna review the channel because here's the thing you guys are making great thumbnails you guys are making great thumbnails the problem is um You guys do not have enough of a cadence on long form because probably being discouraged compared to short form views, but you have a short form audience. But there are ways to help your long form, but you guys would really, we'll get into it on your channel review, but you guys would really have to do more long form. You also would have to point non-related shorts using the related shorts link to the long form. Oh, and here is the last channel review. Can I pin this comment? Yeah. Okay, cool. Chat on the road. Good to see you again, my friend. So chat on the road is going to be our last one. Chad on the road. Hello, Roberto. I would love a channel review, please. Thanks so much for your... All right, you got it. Oh, you're almost to 1,000 subscribers, Chad. On 137 videos, no less. Yep, right on track to about 100,000 views. Yep, you're about right on track, actually. It's about what I normally would expect. Not all of those were... World 4B, there were some of those were shorts, too. Interesting. Okay, cool. We've got our channel reviews in. All right, so yeah, we're going to start in on these channel reviews here now that we've got... All of those via the super chats. Thanks so much to everyone who submitted. Yeah, right Let's get into these channel reviews. All right, so we're gonna start with shocking cost TV All right, so shocking cost TV We've actually done a review for them before former gaming executive making videos that help you better understand money in games and they're also doing stuff on the Economics of games and it seems to be going pretty well for them. So let's see I also think there is a good commentary angle here for how people feel about the gaming industry. So I think that there's something very smart that you're doing is you acknowledge something I said earlier on stream. You're leaning into the current culture and the fact that people are very upset with the direction of a lot of these studios. And so you went from just talking about the economics in games and anime, which was really cool. And I felt like you were doing a great job there. But this pivot works for you. Street Fighter VI is the most expensive fighting game ever. Yeah, people feel some kind of way about that. And they feel some kind of way about the money that these studios are making them pay. And so you leaned into... the real frustration felt in the gaming community and you were rewarded pretty much right away with getting 10 times more views per upload than you would normally get. I would do more aggressive titles sometimes. This Warner Brothers one about Mortal Kombat into a DLC ripoff, this could have been stronger if you literally said, Mortal Kombat sold its soul and is ripping you off and then maybe the thumbnail literally should have been like Shang Tsung with like a bunch of freaking money. Like, you know, so maybe that one would have done better. But again, still a worthwhile experience. It's probably a good video. It just probably didn't hit when people see it because... They don't think about Warner Brothers when they think about Mortal Kombat. Mortal Kombat by itself would have been just the franchise or the thing they'd be associated with that they would have cared about that would have gotten their attention. So I think that you should have just led with Mortal Kombat. You don't need the Warner Brothers part. You could have maybe even used their logo. And again, I think that people would have went with that. And if they also would have recognized Shang Tsung and the whole ripoff thing. And so I think that would have worked. Let's see. The Rise, Fall, and Final Breath of Dragon Ball Z Fighter. This one didn't do bad, but you could have just done The Rise and Fall. Actually, I have a better title for this one. Maybe you can still change it. The Deserved Downfall of Dragon Ball Fighter Z or Why Dragon Ball Fighter Z Deserved Its Downfall. Again, more aggressive title, and you can use that title structure. for more of your videos. You saw that you had success with the rise and fall of fighting game tournaments. A lot of people in the community are feeling that. A lot of OGs. I haven't been in the fighting game scene in a minute. I used to play tournaments. I used to play tournaments for Moe vs. Capcom, Capcom vs. SNK, Tekken. Little bit of... you know smash but not like crazy into the scene like some people so i would have actually still watched this because i still know what evo is so i yeah i would have watched this and yeah street fighter of course um more on the street fighter i would say street fire alpha series back is when i was probably kind of in my prime back then with that but yeah so people would definitely like watch that i would have watched this I think the thumbnail still could have been better, but I would have watched this. Why top fighting game players are broke. Okay, this is a good one. The thumbnail still could have been better, but again, excellent views on this. The economy of hating low tier god. Very smart commentary style video there. How Bandai turned One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 into a DLC ripoff. Yeah, so the DLC ripoff series. Again, people have very strong, strong feelings about that, so I can see why it's doing well. So you found a really strong niche here. What I would do is try not to get trapped by the fighting games alone and lean into, again, the broader culture beyond just the fighting games of people being angry about these things and not feeling they're getting their money's worth. I think you could do a commentary video on GTA. and people would watch that for sure about GTA 6, even if it's somewhat speculation. People would watch that one, absolutely. I think that people would absolutely watch a retrospective on some games that deserved their downfall and flopped. from AAA studios and say these games deserve to fail or they deserve their downfall, the deserved failure of this game, that game, the next or the other. I also think if you did something around the economics of FaZe Clan, you did something around the economics of FaZe Clan and the economics of eSports, people would really actually be very curious about that and would want to watch that. If there are members of FaZe that went broke, people would watch a video about that as well. If there are studios that clearly have made mistakes where they rubbed their fan base the wrong way, that would work. Any controversies around Steam or even the new Steam console, people would watch that. People would watch a speculation video as to will the new Steam console be a ripoff. And yes, I agree that the thumbnails can be much better. Some of them are a little busy. The titles are really carrying these, to be honest. Roberto, who's the target audience? So the target audience for this is actually disenfranchised and frustrated people within the gaming community. You can even make videos about the price of PC gaming and about gamers being priced out of the market right now. by everything that's happening with AI, people would watch that. People would watch a video, probably also around the economics of Ark Raiders or Silksong right now, probably. Actually, they'd probably watch something about why Silksong won and then this other game, Blank Game, failed. They would watch something like that. While Silksong deserves to win and this game deserves to fail. People would watch something like that. The truth is the audience for this is angry video game nerds. It's literally angry video game nerds who are the audience for this, myself included. But I'm not as angry about it as a lot of people. I'm just kind of over it. But yeah, it'd be the disenfranchised gaming community. It'd be the people who feel frustrated that they've been priced out of their hobby. feel frustrated that their hobby has become a cash grab for major corporations. There'd be people also, by the way, even people who might be upset with things in the Pokemon franchise right now around the 30th anniversary. That's not the worst idea. If people have strong feelings about Pokemon ZA or did it save the franchise? So there are things, again, Because what it is, is people who click on these videos, they already feel this. They're already talking about this. These videos validate the real feelings of the viewer. So, yeah. I mean, honestly, as a Tekken fan, Tekken 8 was trash. Someone's asking about the indie market. Look, I mean, you could celebrate the indie market, but I don't really think that celebrating the indie market gets as many views as... criticizing the mainstream market that could be incorporated into a video where it's held up as an example so that there's a positive thing in the video but you wouldn't lead with that in the title and thumbnail the truth is um youtube is a game of psychology we think that it's a game of craftsmanship and quality it's not and that's also why even though these are not ranking very high for me on thumbnails The topics and titles carry it, right? If it's topic, title, thumbnail, and timing, the topics, you're getting a five. The timing, you're getting a five from me on topic. You're getting a five from me on timing. Titles, most of these titles, you could be getting a three, four, or five from me on those titles, and they're working for you. And they're frankly getting far more views than you even have subs. So you're waiting on the titles. The thumbnails, A lot of these are a two or a three. Some of them I could give a 3.5. But here's the thing. This Mario thumbnail is a five, but the title is a one. A five out of five thumbnail will not save a one out of five title. And I'm sure the video itself is great, by the way. These views also still are not bad. These views are about equivalent to the amount of subscribers you have, but it's not these outlier views. So I'm not even criticizing the video that bad. But the thing is a title can definitely do a lot more than a thumbnail. If you get the topic and title and timing right, and all of those are four out of five or five out of five, and then the thumbnail is a two out of five. you could still win, clearly. And again, these aren't even the worst thumbnails. A lot of them are busy, but they also immediately get the point. And a lot of them do leverage familiarity bias. People know what they're getting into. And because they're not perfect thumbnails, they feel probably like they're gonna hear from a real fan and get a real opinion. It's not that I don't think a better thumbnail would do better. A better thumbnail would do better in my opinion. But some of these, the thumbnails are fine. Like this Street Fighter one, this is fine. It's not my favorite thumbnail, but I'm gonna give it a 3.5. The Tekken, I'll give it a 3.5, maybe even a four. But you don't always need a five out of five thumbnail to win. If the topic, title, and timing are correct, you can win on that alone, even if the thumbnail is not great. So, huge pivot for you. Look at the dead or alive. This one, you want everything. The thumbnail is, I'll give it about 3.5 or a 4 for the thumbnail. The title, I'm going to give it a 4. The topic, I'm going to give it a 5. And the timing, I'm going to give it a 5. So, you have a very high score with this one. I think that means you get an 18 out of 20 from me on this one. And it's got 50,000 views. You've got 3,000 subscribers. Similar on the Tekken 8. Tekken 8, you're getting an 18 or 19 score from me on this one. And out of 20. And look at the views. 63 views. 63K views. You have 3,000 subscribers. So again, you're doing fine. Shocking cost TV. If anything, my biggest worry is you're probably not asking for subscribers two to three minutes into the video after you've delivered some value. And then so people are not thinking to subscribe. You have just enough content to where they should be able to subscribe for more. Your upload cadence of about roughly once a week here is solid. And I think that might be the right balance of quality and quantity for you. If you could only improve your thumbnails, you could go even bigger. But this is... fine in terms of um success and views so extremely well done wait why is my uh button here not working trying to i'm trying to use my sound effects here interesting i'll try to look at that later then and see why that's not working um but yeah but great job on this so that's my review for shocking cause tv what do you guys think do you agree with me that for the most part Leaning into a topic people really care about at the right time probably supersedes everything else Communicating that in the title the most important thing and then the thumbnail doesn't have to carry the whole video thumbnails are important I always harp on thumbnails, but if you can literally win on topic title and timing the thumbnail I'm not saying it doesn't matter but clearly Clearly you saw imperfect thumbnails still get 50 60 40 thousand views On a 3,000 subscriber channel, you saw it with your own eyes. So again, tell me what you think. Do you agree with me? Do you disagree with me? Would you do anything different? Let me know in the comments if you're watching the replay. Let me know in the chat if you're watching live. Boom. I don't know why my sound pad isn't working. I find that so annoying. Because I really wanted to give you like the air horns like effect and everything like that or the applause effect. But I don't know why my soundboard isn't working. Yep, the thumbnails are busy. They can be improved. Take a little bit of inspiration from game theory in terms of clean thumbnails that still communicate a point. Game theory is probably like one of the best at that. You're doing a commentary style thing. So yeah, but great job overall. But yeah, I mean, I think it's solid. I think that was a right directional move for you. I think that was the right pivot. I think it's smart. Oh, that's really clever. You've always thought of your channel as the love child of how money works and game theory. That is brilliant combining those two. Exactly. Yeah, combining genres is a thing that most people don't figure out how effective it is, and yet it's extraordinarily effective. So I would highly agree with that. All right, so next up, we've got Jota Benny. I think I'm pronouncing it right. Jota Benny, electrical engineer. All right, so we've got Jada Benny here. 105 videos, 6,800 subscribers, almost 7,000 subscribers. Favorite black electrical engineer. I make videos to help other electrical engineers. Okay, great. So it's a utility channel. You've got a podcast here that you did at some point. Probably could stand to maybe you discontinue the podcast. Maybe that can just be its own thing because it might be holding the channel back. Let's see. Some of these are gonna be evergreen videos. So they're gonna be a slow burn. Let's see what your most popular content is. Day in the life of electrical engineer. I think you should do a day of the life in the electrical engineer. Maybe once a month if you can pull it off. Once a month if you can pull it off. That would matter. Looks like he had an old video about Dogecoin. I'd learn electrical engineering in 2026. If I could start over. Yeah. So what people really want to know. is they want to, aside from whatever your lifestyle stuff is here, which I would make the lifestyle stuff, I would start making members only content around lifestyle stuff. I would focus on electrical engineering. If you want to talk about stocks and money and like you could make a money channel and make it its own channel and you will do really well with that. You know, people will definitely watch that. And then also people... love hearing from people like themselves in finance so if you want to start a finance channel um as you know a black professional talking about money and finance i would do a separate channel for that completely and i think you could i think you should if you're passionate about it this channel should just be a utility channel for the electrical engineering side the day in the life thing should be a once a month video for you uh because i think people We'll watch that. Again, this is a really good thumbnail and a good video editing style on the finance thing. But look at this, you're mixing too many audiences. You have too many interests and you're mixing too many of them. This channel needs to be stripped down to electrical engineering and utility videos for getting people into that, getting people information around that and how to get access to it. You know, the army component here, if that's how you got in as an officer, that makes perfect sense. So again, this channel needs to focus entirely on the career development and revealing the truth about the career of being an electrical engineer. What you can do is you can find plenty of other career-driven channels that focus on a career or a trade, especially the trades, being a plumber, You know doing this doing that and focus on that this other stuff Why people young people are leaving Facebook money social media people? Clearly we're signaling to you that this isn't it and that you have a very unique high-paying job that people want to get into everyone keeps talking about the trades everyone keeps talking about You know Can you do this with or without a degree? People want to know if it's valuable with a degree, you need to focus this. Would I say it's better to take off the non-relevant videos? I would unlist them from the channel. And I think that that would be useful and helpful. It'll look better for the stats a little bit, even though the stats are really good. Think about it like this. Look at your views and your subs, and then think about how many videos. you have out of those 105 that have nothing to do with electrical engineering the channel should be much more focused and i think people will find it um much cleaner and more professional if you literally just strip out all the videos that have nothing to do with electrical engineering which probably leads you in terms of long form with about maybe uh 50 60 videos which in a way is even more impressive in terms of like you may only have, actually if you take out all the videos that aren't about electrical engineering at all, you might have stripped this down to like 35 long form videos, but there are 35 long form videos all about electrical engineering. That's probably actually better for the channel. And again, not even just from an algorithmic perspective, but from just the perspective of people being able to trust the information. They would trust the information more if literally all they see from you is content. around electrical engineering and trades and About the value of degrees in the trades and so on so forth or about how the army Gave you the opportunity They would value those things and they would value the day in the life content. They would value the information around salary they You know They would value the options around career path, the should you go back to school, answering questions. If your content answers every question someone could have about electrical engineering, that's going to be incredibly valuable. It's going to be evergreen. You can make the same videos every year, believe it or not, and just go over. Also, what's changed, what's different, and know that people are going to receive it differently and that new people enter in the market every year and that they will have a bias for the latest video about the thing. They'll have a bias toward 2026 or 2027 versus 2025. So right now, also, people are looking for a safe career that they can lock in on that's not going to be replaced by AI. So this is an opportunity. And I would focus on that. And again, I would make more of these day in life. It is I'd make it a monthly series. And I think you do really well. And people would latch on to that. And there's an audience for that. And there's an audience for people who really just want to watch black professionals. There just is. So I would lean into that. And I would scrap the content. That's not about that. I think you can leave this Tesla video up. This is like the one non-electrical engineering video that I would say you could leave up. Let's see. I think you could scrap the podcast here. I don't know if you're still doing the podcast. You did a couple of episodes. If you want to do a podcast in the future, I would make it its own brand and its own channel. It seems like a lot to manage. between oh you're telling me to do that and then have a finance channel but again it seems like you're really into this stuff but again you need to separate it in a way to where um people can understand what's happening and so the the separation needs to happen there and that needs to just be clear separation for people is there a difference between making the videos unlisted versus private i would say the difference is some of this content that you made you made it for a reason and some people got value out of it and they may have linked it or bookmarked it if you unlist it it goes off of your channel and it goes out of search and goes out of the algorithm so that's taken off the table however it means if there are people who bookmarked it downloaded it found it valuable even if that's like 100 people 500 people they would still have access to the video even though you unlisted it so it has no effect on you But this is a way to just kind of maybe do something nice for the people that for whatever reason might have put that video into a playlist or Something like that. So like you did this video covering whether black market is a scam if you unlist That one maybe you can leave that up because you say engineer experience but again if there's certain videos that People valued that didn't have anything to do with electrical engineering and they playlisted or bookmarked it, then maybe it's worth unlisting those. If not, then you could always private them. So that's the key difference, I would say. Unlisting videos still allows people who bookmark them in any way to enjoy them. Privating means they don't have access anymore. Yeah, I could see discontinuing the podcast and it'd be too much to work on both, but I think the finance channel is something you want to do and it might be practical. uh the rpms on finance content are so high but so are career content like engineering i focus on one to two videos a week on this engineering channel and i would just do the finance content when you can until you have more room for it on another channel and i think that that'd be fine and i think that's what would um help you probably the most um so yeah also it looks like you did something really similar to my youtube channel banner so you put new videos in there every week so good job so overall I think that this is solid. It's an excellent start for your first 100 videos. Congratulations. I think you did really well with it. I'm trying to think if there's anything else here. I think mostly that's it in terms of what I have for you. I think you've done a really strong job here. I just think it needs to be focused and locked in and pared down so that the audience can have that trust and reliability and know what to expect and only what to expect. And I think it's going to do well. I think that shouldn't be too long here before we see you have 10,000 subscribers. So great job. What do you guys think? Do you agree with me? Let me know in the comments if you're watching the replay. Let me know in the chat if you're watching live. There we go. Another channel review completed. Yeah. Hey, how's it going, David? Yeah, I do think that he did a good job with the banner. David, would really look forward to whenever you're ready to do another one-on-one for 2026. You've been killing it. But if you ever want to do your 2026 roadmap, hit me up. Let's get on a one-on-one. But you're absolutely killing it. I was actually just telling somebody about your channel and using it as an example about real estate. And I think I was talking about it today on the Opus Clip stream this morning when I was just talking about... the value of like how when people have a successful business thriving on YouTube, that the views aren't everything, but if they do want to point traffic towards something like their YouTube shorts, oh yeah, you'd point it to the thing that gets you the sales and grows the business and makes the phone ring. You wouldn't just point it to something, oh, I want this video to do well. No, you'd point it to the video that makes you money. So yeah, so I was using you as a really good example of a channel that is optimized for growing one's business. Because I think you do that really well, probably better than a lot of people. Jada Benny says, thank you, Roberto, for the information. Update channel banner after your last channel review because I didn't have one as well. Love your format and made a similar version. Thank you so much. Yeah, absolutely. I've been thinking of doing something with like some small update or something or some free thing for a basic channel banner to help people out. Because a lot of people's channel banners just are like... either atrocious or non-existent. So I've been thinking about something like that. I just haven't figured out what I want to do with that yet. Let's see here. Next up, we've got Jackie D. McKeever. All right. So we've got Jackie D. McKeever, a Christian life coach for women. So the thing with this banner, Jackie, is that on most screens, people will not be able to read all of this. You would be probably best served. just having your name and that you're a Christian life coach for Christian women and then your website and that's it. Just those three lines of text, kind of like a billboard. Billboards, you usually don't see more than three lines of text, usually not that much stuff on it. So definitely consider cleaning that up and paring that down a little bit. And then in terms of images and graphics for it then, You might want to consider using some Christian imagery in there just so that at a glance people understand what it is. So think closer in terms of a billboard when it comes to this. In general, if you guys are looking for how should your YouTube channel banner be, I want you to think about putting yourself on a billboard that people would have to be able to scan really quickly with their eyes as they drive 85. miles per hour on i-95 south when they're only supposed to be doing 65 and i want you to think about how much can they really read as they see that billboard while they're going 85 miles per hour right and that would give you a better indication of just the thought behind what a youtube channel banner should be and shouldn't be so a youtube channel banner should be a billboard not a business card And that's just advice for everybody. So let's see. Channel layout. You have quite a few playlists here. So your customization of the channel is largely okay in terms of what it is. However, I think that there's a mismatch because you're a Christian life coach for Christian women, but there's a playlist here that is on the marketing and coaching side for funnels. I think that you might need to start a channel that is about marketing and sales for women who want to get into coaching if you want to make that content because I think it confuses people with the mix of content. Now, I think that this immediately stands out to me that you have this the reaction content. versus the other content because that's a standout immediately. So let's see what your most popular content is. So three years ago, I can see why you had some of the coaching content. Three years ago, there was an audience for you around the coaching stuff. I think maybe you should start a second channel helping women start coaching businesses. I think that could be very good for you. The affiliate marketing revenue on that is really good. So I think you should do that. For anything around beauty and cosmetics, I think you should maybe move that content to your Instagram and TikTok and do Instagram and TikTok around that. But this business content, I think you should have another channel for business content. And then you should have a channel like, and then another one that's faith-based, right? So the more recent content, it's not about the dress. I think that you should consider doing reaction content to people within the Christian community and other Christian content creators. And I think that that's where your content in this particular niche would shine. Because when I see 2,000 views on a reaction video... Well, I'm assuming I'm not sure what the context of the dress video is or who Dr. Jamal Bryant is. I don't know who that is. I'm assuming that that's somebody within the Christian community or that they're a Christian content creator or they're a pastor or something to that degree. So I would assume that that's the case. And if that's the case, and you can let me know in the chat, it's a mega church leader. Okay. So here's what I think. I think that if you, for the faith-based content, reacted to the megachurch pastors and the larger Christian YouTubers, and you gave your actual opinions on what you think about what they're saying, and you did it in reaction-style content and showed clips of what they say, and then you give your opinions, that that will disproportionately get more views than basically anything you've ever done. When I'm looking at the channel, it's the difference between 20 views and 2,000 views. And that's a pretty big difference, is the difference between 2,000 views and 200 views. It's a really big difference. So with that being the case, and seeing if we sort by your literal most popular content, and then what is and what isn't, I think that it, like, this is very telling. And so I think that the business content goes on another YouTube channel. Beauty, makeup, any of that stuff that the ladies like, TikTok and Instagram, and you make it in short form. And that this channel becomes you giving your opinions and your advice to women on your perspective. of what these mega church leaders and Christian influencers are saying and doing and how someone like you feels about it. I wouldn't say that I'm saying be more focused on micro theme channels than macro. I think that most creators, arguably most creators capacity, at least when they're smaller, would lean in that direction, but it's not an either or, it's situational. And that's just what it happens to have been in the case of many of these creators. I also think most people may not qualify for macro themes. Most people's situation and personality is not suited for macro themes, nor is there any indicator that their audience is responding to it. But I think as a good foundation for getting disproportionately more attention around your content and your thoughts and people to listen to you and what you think and what you believe. that you have to tap into these mega church leaders that people have familiarity with. Now, obviously you want to get much better with the thumbnails. And for that, you want to definitely look at other commentary and reaction channels for the thumbnails. Even though it's a completely different niche and love her or hate her from a thumbnail standpoint, and I know it's more that she does politics stuff, But in terms of reactions and a thumbnail style that would work for you, Candace Owens' thumbnail style would work for you, even though you can literally apply it to a completely different genre. So you could literally steal her thumbnail style and apply it to this genre, and it would work, and it would be much better than your current thumbnail style, and it actually is practical. Just so people can get the point here visually of what I mean is I'm saying take this thumbnail style here and basically apply it for reactions. You don't have to do the film reel thing, but this reaction style thumbnail where you're talking about people or multiple people will work. And so, yeah, so like just taking something that's already working. and then applying it in a different niche will work and you can use a different color scheme and there you go you don't have to reinvent the wheel you do not have to overthink this in terms of adding the clips for the reactions you can do it via screen sharing very similar to how i do the screen sharing for the channel reviews because there is a such thing as a split screen type mode So let me see if I have, let's see. I know I have it here somewhere. So there are things where you could split the screen and you could, you could split the screen and you could adjust it. And so you could technically do your reactions and you could just like kind of try to fit the screen in such a way that you have the ability to do that. And so then it would, in theory, that would work. You know so you just size up the screen and then you could split it and you could do your reactions this way So again, I'm using stream yard so you could do that and then Go back to my full screen layout here So yeah, so you could just do that and that would allow you to do the reactions pretty straightforward But yeah, ultimately for you Ultimately for you. Those are the things that would probably matter the most is Aside from just improving if you can the camera quality. I don't know what you're filming with You have a dedicated microphone in terms of your headset. It's allowing you to have your hands free But yeah, so like I said this for your channel art think more like a billboard For the thumbnails, I would just steal the reaction format of Candace Owens Yeah, even five days ago the fact that you responded you reacted to Joel Osteen much more views, hundreds of times more views. So clearly the theme is react to the mega churches, react to the mega churches. Joel Osteen, Clefler Dollar, all of them. I don't even know. Is Clefler Dollar still a thing? Like, so that would matter. And probably the religious influencers on TikTok and YouTube probably as well. So that's what I would look at for you. And I think that that would work for your content. But what do you all think? Do you agree with me on how to improve Jackie's channel and that that's a unique angle to the faith-based content is that she can give her genuine reactions and opinions as a woman to what the megachurch leaders are saying and whether she agrees with them or not? Because I think that that's something different. I think it's something a community would clearly enjoy. I think the numbers, when we're seeing 2,000 views versus 20 views, 600 views versus seven. I think the numbers speak for themselves that that's the direction to go in. I also think splitting the content on making money online and coaching into its own channel is probably for the best. What do you all think? Do you agree with me? Disagree with me? Let me know in the chat if you're watching live. Let me know in the comments if you're watching the replay. All right, there you go. Oh yeah, those would be super interesting reactions. I think there's a desire. There's a desire for normal people to hear their own thoughts reflected out loud by someone who has the guts to say things in public that people think in private. So yeah. So I think that that makes a big difference. You will, but will it hurt to make the devotionals for the live? I mean, it won't hurt. It's just that it's not performing for you. Well, it has sometimes. So I would try to figure out. I would try to figure out. how to maybe make that more effective or maybe with you doing this other content it brings more people into those live streams or maybe you do those as vertical live streams to get more views on that but if there's also something you feel compelled to do or that you really enjoy I'm not gonna tell you not to do it I'm not gonna tell you not to do it it's possible that might do better though with vertical live streams if anything so if you want to do the devotionals You can do the devotional live streams, but they might do better as vertical live streams, honestly. And you might find that there's more of a community there. I don't think it hurts anything. And there's separate audiences and there's separate algorithms. So again, a lot of people shouldn't worry about, oh, doing shorts, doing lives and doing regular long form. If you're a larger channel that's been established for years, like my bigger issue with multi-format, even on my channel, is just that if you're a mid-tier channel, that's larger than like 100,000, but you're not so famous that you have millions of subscribers, then these things work a little differently for you. And that's why people don't think that they work to do multi-format. Multi-format works for small YouTubers and works for mega YouTubers. It doesn't work when mid-tier YouTubers just start doing them sometimes. So that's kind of a key point. Again, a lot of times people mistake what does or doesn't work for my channel as what to do versus what I'm telling you to do when I review, which is why I publicly review channels and I publicly on X show the case studies from my clients, whether they're small creators or whether they're large creators, I share the case studies because my channel is just my channel. And there are things that make sense for my channel that will not make sense to a lot of you, but also because I have a business behind my channel, but also because my channel. is a channel from 2009 my channel has been through six different administrations of youtube my channel has been through six different administrations of youtube it is not the same as any of you that started a channel like after 2016 or 2020 because like my legacy channels are notoriously buggy And the only difference in around it is just the mega YouTubers whose legacy channels have millions of subscribers. They're safe. But those of us who have older channels that have been through six different administrations of YouTube, our channels and our databases are cooked, my friends. That's also why it's incredibly notable that small channels. have grown and blown up a lot faster than OG channels and why so many small and new YouTubers have gotten bigger than OG YouTubers without having to be better. So do understand that it works a little differently if you built a long form audience for like almost two decades and then added shorts. It doesn't work if you're not a rich and famous YouTuber, you know, as easily. But if you started a small channel and you did shorts, you'd get 10X the views on those shorts a lot of times. Then you have subscribers. Sometimes 100X the views and you have subscribers and it'll never hurt your channel. Even when you get to 100K, you'll be fine because you would have built a short form audience. With our channels, us OG YouTubers, we didn't even have notifications when we built our subscriber base. And then YouTube pushed notifications and then they made it where notifications didn't even matter at one point. Even though when you had them, then they did this whole, oh, we'll notify for all. And they convoluted it. And it kind of messed up a lot of what we had going. There's features in YouTube we used to have. And we built entire videos around these features. And then they took away those features. So for a lot of us OG YouTubers, it is radically a different experience. So that's where I tell a lot of you. Unfortunately, sometimes it is going to be do what I say rather than what I do because what I say is what works for my clients and gets them gold play buttons and silver play buttons. Again, the way I run my channel is the way I have to run my channel for my personality, my business, and the fact that I built my channel around a lot of things in YouTube over the years that they took away and don't exist. So Jackie says, should I go through and unlist the other videos you suggested putting on another channel? I would unlist them. And yeah, I would start, you know, transitioning the business content to another channel. Yeah, the vertical streams make a lot more views for sure. Let's see. All right, so next up we have Raman Razi. And this will probably be a little bit of an example of the split on audiences that I'm talking about. So we have Raman Razi. They have primarily been a shorts channel and they've killed it with shorts and that's where their audience is and that's where they grew their audience They've got some probably some mega viral videos here 300,000 subscribers and Let's see. Yep started in the pandemic So a couple of things with this channel Pandemic era short form youtubers blew up massively but the culture of the pandemic has shifted and changed and we are not in the pandemic anymore so um the 80 bump in captive audience that we had for about three or four years has petered off in the last two to three years and so we can't expect those same outcomes but you guys still do have content that pops and you have videos that go viral like this one and so on and so forth and you have a really cool channel you have a cute family this is the kind of stuff that i could see doing well and short form can be evergreen so videos can still pop later and shorts very much is a quantity game more than is a quality game uh because it's algorithmic feed instead people have to click on the videos so it's very very different so it makes sense that you guys were able to grow so big and so fast during the pandemic But it also makes sense that in transitioning to long form videos, that's a little bit more challenging, especially since you're making fairly high quality, highly edited long form videos in some ways. The compilation of the shorts is not necessarily going to work on this type of channel, believe it or not. It would work on TikTok to do that, but not in long form YouTube. This content there's nothing wrong with this content, but you're starting from zero with a audience That isn't accustomed to doing long form and you haven't done enough long form to warm up the channel so there are Let's see three six nine twelve fifteen eighteen nineteen twenty so there are twenty long form videos on this channel That's it For YouTube to really grasp long form, unless you just happen to go viral on the long form, it usually takes a lot more. And that's 20 videos over a two-year period. And so that means that that's, and then a couple of those are just compilation videos. So long form has not really been given a chance here, and you guys want to do long form. For long form to work on this channel, You will have to do weekly long-form videos that are dedicated weekly long-form videos. Understand that you don't have a long-form audience yet, and you will have to do those once a week probably for at least two years. Now, there are people out there you could work with that are good at getting videos like yours to go viral, potentially. They're going to... come up with strategies around that, but that's also hit or miss. It's also wildly expensive. And by the way, some of these did really well. You may not feel like they did well because you're used to having 300,000 subscribers and all these views, but that was on short form. If we make the assumption that you have 1% of your audience for long form, and it was a collab before the collab feature. Oh yeah, you would have gotten more views on that then. You can actually still add the collaborator to it and maybe that would help. But I actually have a couple of tips that can help you here. Because here's the thing. If we assume that only 1% of your audience even cares about long form, then these views that you're getting are fine, believe it or not. Now, and that's probably the truth because you don't have a long form audience. The other thing is, you've not posted enough long form videos. They're not even a once a month. posting cadence for the long form videos to make the audience care about long form videos. And I could see that that's probably because you guys got discouraged on the long form. What I would do is because you win on short form, I would not stop doing short form and I would keep making money off of the short form, but I would invest in long-term growth with weekly long form videos, keeping the thumbnails as high quality as possible. You don't have to really up the quality that much of the long form videos. The long form videos quality is fine. The thumbnails just have to be equal or better thumbnails, titles that people want that are good. You might need to tap into both trends and collabs. And here's the other thing though. The other thing here is you have to temper your expectations for long form. Long form videos. in general struggle to break 10,000 views and you don't even have a long form audience. So you need to understand that your views are actually fine because YouTube doesn't show most of the content to subscribers in the first place. And you don't have long form subscribers. You might as well have zero to a thousand long form subscribers or even 3000 long form subscribers. And if you had 3000 long form subscribers, you would not be sad about these views at all. is that short form can be just misleading on that type of thing. And the reverse is true. If you had 300,000 subscribers and you had only done long form and you did 500 long form videos, and then you did 20 shorts, and then you were wondering why you don't have shorts views, I'd be telling you the same thing. I'd be telling you the exact same thing. Even I deal with that with the fact I didn't build a shorts audience and now I'm doing daily shorts. The views are abysmal. but I have to build that audience from nothing. That being said, quality here for your long form is good. Clearly the editing, scripting, and video production is good. I think that people who have kids would love this content. This content is also exactly what YouTube is looking for, for content to put on television screens. So your ideas are okay. Your ideas are okay. Some of the titles are a little bit off. The titles can be improved a little bit in some cases. but your ideas and your execution of your ideas are fine. Some things are a packaging issue. Some things are an audience mismatch issue. And your biggest thing is you just have not given YouTube enough videos to build a long form audience yet. You know, I'll give you an example. This is extreme. To get to 100,000 subscribers on YouTube for long form, I had to make 800 videos. I had to make 800 videos. MrBeast, MrBeast made 460 videos to get to 10,000 subscribers. I'm not telling you it's gonna take you that many videos to make a long form, to build a long form audience. But I always tell people building a long form audience that 100 videos is your down payment on your tuition to learn how to effectively make and package even decent long form videos. And that's just the like, The truth of it and so it could take a while but I think that you need to do weekly long form for like a year and I think that You can refine your ideas even better because the ideas aren't bad. It's that Okay, they haven't found their audience yet, but again YouTube already knows how to find you a short form audience It doesn't know how to find you a long form audience because as less than 20 videos to go off of and like three of them are compilations of shorts So, and has no consistency of that because on a 90 day reset, you don't have like enough content in 90 days or even 28 days for it to really have any consistency to find you an audience. So hopefully that makes sense. There are big YouTubers who are already famous and they can make like one video a month and be fine, but that's not most people. And I would say it's definitely not the case for someone trying to move from short form to long form. And again, a lot of short form creators who blew up during the pandemic experienced this. So you're not alone. It's completely normal. And this is not terrible. And by the way, I think clearly from a strategy standpoint, honestly, if I look at it for the long form, I can tell you some of your ideas that clearly stand out. So I think that spicy. is going to win. I think that large quantities of items are going to win. Your thumbnail style is good. Your thumbnail artist is decent. I would study some of what HopeScope does and then think about how to make that around food-based content. I get what you guys were trying to do with leaning into the Labubu thing, but the Labubu thing was a micro trend that like, didn't really last. This idea is great for a family vlog, but not for a spectacle channel around food, which is what people interpret your content to be. So again, I think that the spicy thing is going to always do well because people like spicy challenges. And I would look into, there's two channels I would study. Well, actually more than two technically. I would study all of the Good Mythical Morning channel, you know, food channels. I would study all the Good Mythical Morning food channels, and I would study HopeScope, and then I would basically combine HopeScope with Good Mythical Morning, if that makes sense. You do the thumbnails? Oh, excellent. Yeah. So Mary Allison, HopeScope, yeah, Mary Allison, HopeScope, and the Mythical channels. If you study those, I think... in general, things will do well. Now, here's what else I think you should be doing. I think that you should be doing your short form still consistently. And I think you guys should be doing that on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, believe it or not, I would take all of your short form inventory and I would start uploading that to Facebook and making money from Facebook Reels if you're not doing that already. I'd be uploading them to Snapchat. On long form if there was anyone who could help you guys blow up on long form I would probably say that's Darrell leaves He's kind of perfect for exactly the type of thing you're doing out of anybody I don't think there's anybody I would recommend more Even myself to help you With long form because your content has viral potential I am I am very good at content strategy. I'm good at a lot of things I don't really specialize in viral content creation, but you guys' stuff leans in that direction and it has the potential for it. So Daryl Eves and what he does with Channel Jumpstart is probably the right fit for you guys because you're very heavy on the entertainment side. You're heavily on the family side. You have something that has broad appeal between. kids and food so you have a lot of broad appeal stuff Darryl leaves is probably and his program is probably the right fit for you guys because again he his people made the massive impact on hope scope and you guys have that kind of potential here and that's not my perfect wheelhouse I'm good But everyone has their specialty. This would be Daryl's. So those are my thoughts here. But anyway, great channel. Again, I love everything you guys are doing. And I really think the short form, you guys have clearly mastered that and killed that. It's just another set of skills to get to the long form. And it also requires just a different commitment. There's some stylistic changes. There's a lot of things involved. There's a lot of moving pieces But yeah, but what do you guys think? Do you guys agree with me? Do you disagree with me? What do you guys think of Raman, Razi? Again, this is the kind of thing that actually you know, I will honestly say I'm just looking at your channel overall if I had if I had kids This is the kind of channel I would feel safe on the approved list of them watching and I think that there's a lot there and I think that that is very much needed on YouTube and I think that there's a special place for those very wholesome channels that families can watch and that people can trust their kids with and so making content in that direction I think is very good I think it's very smart and so yeah this is the exact type of channel that if I had kids that I would trust them with sight unseen and someone that I'm like yeah it's it's perfectly okay for you to watch this yeah go watch Rozzy's stuff Oh, you're watching Rozzy. Okay, that's fine. I wouldn't ever second guess it So I think that the way you guys approached your channel as a family was really smart. I think it's very well done I think it's really a little executed I think that has the potential to be a big YouTube channel I think you do need somebody who has that expertise and what makes those kind of videos go viral I do not say that often most people don't qualify for viral content. I think you guys do But you would need the guidance of someone who specializes in that. But yeah, that's what I think. So do you guys, what do you guys think? Let me know in the chat. Let me know in the comments. Yep. It's your goal to join a challenge jumpstart this year. Yeah, I think you absolutely should. And I think that you should come to VidSummit. I think that that would make a big difference for you guys. Yeah. Oh, sorry about that, Rozzy. My nightbot mod, my auto mod is being too aggressive right now. Night bot you can chill man. We'll put night bot in timeout. Yeah. Yeah, David agrees. Also, thank you, David. I did see that you did donate some. Thank you. Okay, we're back. All right, we're frozen there for a second. I thought for a minute, I thought that maybe the storm got us. But yeah, thank you for gifting the channel memberships. Really appreciate you, man. Yep. would absolutely feel comfortable with kids watching this channel 100 all right we're gonna do our friend chat on the road and then we're gonna call it a night um it's uh midnight now so it's uh past roberto's birth bedtime it's past bro's bedtime and if i it's now that it's after midnight i can't eat anything or i'll turn into a gremlin you can't feed the roberto after midnight i think most of the audience here should be old enough to get that joke all right so we've got chad on the road um Really smart thing is if you guys are going to be on camera, definitely having a profile pic with your face goes a long way. Almost to 1,000 subscribers, so congratulations. Good for you. And yeah, 137 videos, decent playlist of series. So yeah, let's see what you've been up to. These thumbnails, in a way, are getting better, and they're decent in the storytelling. I love that you got this one for explaining an abandoned office building, what I've found. Because that one did almost 600 views. You're at almost 1,000 subscribers. This is a win for you. And some of these are doing really well. Two months ago, you got 7,000 views here. I think the haunted stuff isn't going to do well. Because I get where you're going with it. The haunted stuff largely missed. Yet the abandoned stuff is doing really well. It's not always doing as well, but it depends. And I think some of that could be thumbnail choices and title choices a little bit. Abandoned. Interesting abandoned things are doing well for you. Obviously, I think you need to study Josh Explorers. friend of mine, Josh Explorers, he does well. Yeah, the doing experiences in the different cities, that's not performing. I think people, and I've been seeing this with some of my other clients. I think, here's my thought. What if you explored abandoned places and the real life scenes of urban legends? I think people, I think it's very clear that there's some content people are responding to much more than others. And I'm seeing a trend here. So aside from like the very cool thing with the army helicopter ride, which is just a very cool, unique experience, right? Here's what people seem to actually like from you. And by the way, you maybe could even do a different channel around like. reviews product reviews I'm gonna recommend I'm gonna recommend that you consider a side channel where you do product reviews of just whatever because clearly you can do them very well and you have an interest for gadgets so I would say a second channel for that the other thing is people are not watching vacations stuff as much from you but they are watching really interesting unique experiences but They seem to like the curiosity and the esoteric stuff a lot more and a little bit of the Curiosity and creepy factor So what people so I would study the thumbnails of my friend Josh explores so Josh explore So again, I know he's a larger youtuber, but I feel like if you i feel like you could do very similar thumbnails if you really tried and they don't have to be like these kind of thumbnails as far as things have a little bit ai in them let's go back to even some of like um so like from 10 years ago these are like thumbnails from exploring with josh from 10 years ago when he was like a baby youtuber i think you can do this And I think that you can like find abandoned things like this. I even think you could go and find these locations and they're probably still abandoned. They probably are still weird and creepy. And you could find, cause yeah, this was stuff before you even had a hundred thousand subscribers. Like I think you could find things like this abandoned air force base. I think you could find these really interesting esoteric. weird places, urban legends, asylums, sanitariums, abandoned schools, abandoned bunkers, finding abandoned bomb shelters, finding weird places that are abandoned, places that maybe have an urban legend. Like, those would, um, like, ghost towns, um, things like that. People would really dig that. And I think if you did thumbnails that are like this, which are not AI, because this is from like 10 years ago, then people will click on it out of curiosity just to see what it is. Like, look at this abandoned trolley graveyard. Like, an abandoned bus station. Find an abandoned bus station. Find an abandoned train station. Find access to the catacombs of New York. You know find weird stuff like that and people will resonate with it and there's all kinds of weird stuff like that all over the country and people are really into That sort of stuff and the like more macabre things that you've covered You know the more weird or creepy like people have dug that I've been really into that from you and those things can get thousands fun thousands of views So that's the direction I would go in And I think that even some of your recent successful videos kind of indicate that. And so finding things that are forgotten, abandoned, like haunted is a hit or miss, then I think you'll be okay. And so that's why I think is going to work and is working for you. I would A-B test you in the thumbnail versus not in the thumbnail. And I think there's already some of the indication of what people are looking for from your channel. And I think that that's how you're really going to win on this curiosity factor. I just think that even literally finding those old school YouTube videos around abandoned and forgotten places. I mean, I really think also, even with like some proven like stuff, the military angle of finding like abandoned military, finding like a helicopter graveyard. a tank graveyard um like finding um forgotten battlefields finding a forgotten like air base train station like any of these weird things an abandoned hospital people just watch that stuff they'll put on the background there's an audience for it And again, I think this one, this is an easy one, like for me, as far as like, there's proof of what will work here. Now again, I think that the cemeteries, the graveyards, people don't really dig that at all. The non-related videos, I don't think they have to go to private. I think you can get away with unlisted. You can private them if you want, or you can make some of them unlisted, what have you. But yeah, I would pare things down. i think it's usually helpful i think it confuses the audience and the algorithm less and i also think that um from a practical standpoint i think from a practical standpoint that if you just get the channel hyper focused around this experience around these curiosities around things forgotten abandoned forgotten and abandoned things and places I think that that would be this really interesting focus of I'm taking you around America's most interesting and insane forgotten and abandoned places. That kind of feels like the theme of a show and a reality TV show that we put on and that we watch and that we see. So I think that it's kind of like watching Ghost Hunters in a way. You know, so that's what I think but chat do you agree with me? Do you disagree with me? Let me know in the chat if you're watching the replay Let me know in the comment section. I think that it has potential I think that the potential is in just this different experience because if you like if I just came across and I was bored while I'm on a plane and then you showed me an abandoned train station an abandoned subway station abandoned bus station abandoned military installation. That's the kind of thing that while I'm in the airport, I'm just going to put it on my phone and I'm going to watch it. As for your banner, remember what I said about banners, you guys. Think billboards. Think about a billboard. Again, your banner, yours is going more with a vector art style. I'm not entirely against it, but it also doesn't tell you anything about the channel. There's no information in it. So again, even with that, I would make a billboard in the style of a billboard for a show that's a travel show. I'm actually, also I love the idea of your show just being chad on the road, but it's like, where am I taking you? I'm taking you on adventures, telling the stories of America's, America's, or even the world's abandoned and forgotten places. So like if someone literally goes, yeah, I found this channel and this dude, he goes and he finds. all these abandoned forgotten places he travels across the country he finds all these abandoned forgotten places like this you know abandoned military base this abandoned um hospital or asylum or sanitarium and everything like that it's really cool oh you got to watch this this guy chad you know like someone would say that someone would share that someone really i could see uh just even telling their friends about that like i'd be the kind of person like hey you got to watch this thing Like, oh, I found this really cool video. He's like, he went into this abandoned military installation and everything like that. He found all this weird stuff and everything. I couldn't even like find what some of these things were. I've never seen anything like this before. Like people will do that and it will be very interesting content. It'll be extraordinarily interesting content. It's also the kind of made for TV content that YouTube is pushing to television screens. One of the other things earlier that I was talking about with the changing culture is people are not watching long form on their phones. much they can watch live streams on their phone and chat and reply to them they can watch short form on their phone live stream experiences if people are wondering where all the live views going they're going to the television set they're going for when can I sit down or kick back or lay down on the couch and put something up on the TV and it's gonna be YouTube it's not gonna be Netflix it's not gonna be Hulu is not gonna be Hulu it's not gonna be Amazon it's gonna be YouTube and people are doing that and it's real and that's where the views are going one of the decline in the views uh that people are seeing is the culture of the fact that we don't want to watch long videos on our form phone anymore we want to watch short videos on our phone we want to watch vertical videos on our phone it's a real thing we want to watch long videos on our tv screen um Joe to Benny says, I feel like adding the location, the title would definitely help. I love seeing random things that are highly relatable because they're near me. Yeah, I think that could. And I also think for those videos, using YouTube's location setting could actually benefit you. For most people, they need to hide it because they don't need people knowing where they live exactly. But for those videos, putting the location, not only in the title, but also using the location thing in YouTube to highlight the location could actually benefit you. Yeah, I agree with that. So yeah, so those are things. And again, I'm giving you guys a little bit of the inside baseball on the current state of YouTube. So yeah, I think this would be the most significant overall change for you, Chad, is that. And again, also from a quality standpoint, just getting much better snapshots of these locations that really sell the, oh, that's interesting, that's scary, that's abandoned. Take multiple photos. And consider A-B testing interior versus exterior shots of these things. Find the most interesting and compelling version of an image for these places. Like even with exploring with Josh, he would use the inside sometimes versus the outside. And you can A-B test that now and say, okay, people respond more to the outside of this building versus the inside of this building and then go with whichever one wins. And that's a very good extreme. version of A-B testing, and that could work for a lot more of you guys that do anything involving travel or locations. Try testing and do an extreme A-B test of one photo versus the other as a thumbnail, but it's specifically exterior versus interior could be all the difference in the world. Yep. But that's what I have for you guys again today. Again, shout out to our good friends at 1 of 10 for sponsoring our channel review streams. Really appreciate them. If you haven't already, watch the replay. of our Wednesday workshop where I literally show you how to make high quality thumbnails using the one of ten thumbnail generation tool and how to combine that with your photos so you can actually have custom images not AI generated stuff that looks like everybody else's but stuff that is made for you but then takes all the design work out of it for you I showed you exactly how to do that and how to get the most out of one of ten so make sure you're checking that out We'll be most likely doing this again next week. I will be in California. I will be at YouTube headquarters for an event on Thursday that I'm doing there with 75 creators. YouTube invited me out. So I'll be doing a talk and a meet and greet thing there with some creators talking about YouTube's new AI tools, YouTube shopping monetization updates. and things like that hopefully getting to talk with some more youtube team members they're gonna let me film uh so channel members will get some of the behind the scenes from that uh some of it will show up in youtube shorts as well because if you guys haven't noticed what i'm doing with youtube shorts is different is i'm not as worried about the views that my youtube shorts are getting because the only reason that i'm really focusing on them is i am using them to show me speaking on stages and interviewing other creators my youtube shorts are serving a completely different purpose than most people's YouTube shorts. They are for specifically the purpose of when people see them, they see me speaking at events and on stages. There's a method to my madness. It may not work for other people. There's a method behind my madness to why my short form is literally I will be on a stage or I will talk to another person in real life. It's a method to my madness and we'll see how it goes. But. Yeah, you'll see some shorts from me from the event at YouTube headquarters that I'm going to next week. I fly out Wednesday. I'm there on Thursday. I'm staying through the weekend because if I'm traveling that late in the week, I just might as well stay the weekend. So I'll be back for the weekend. We'll most likely do a channel review stream while I'm in California on Friday. I arranged it in such a way to where I should still be able to do the stream with our friends at Opus Clip on Saturday, and then I'll come back Saturday evening back here to Atlanta, weather willing. And then I'll just rest on Sunday, and then we'll be back to normal going into February. So yeah, so that's on the table. No other major travel plan for February so far. It looks like I'm confirmed as a speaker at Social Media Marketing World in California for the end of April. I may be speaking in Seattle. If some of you are in Seattle at Creator Summit Seattle or Seattle Creator Summit, Benji Travis is hosting it. So I'll be there for that. So two of those in April. I may go to Florida in March, but if I do, Probably not going to see you guys because I'll probably just be going there for a little bit of a break. I will also be at an event. It looks like we'll have to confirm it with YouTube in Austin. I don't have the exact date in March. Yeah, it's March. In March, but I will be in Austin. So there's that. And then hopefully VidCon and VidSummit. So those are Roberto's travel plans and speaking engagements for the rest of the year, unless I do any events here in Atlanta or anybody else comes up with events and I end up doing them. So those are the things that are happening. That is the travel itinerary. I was able to see some of you in Orlando last week for PodFest. So that was always fun. Glad to do that every year. If B&H does Build Expo again, I'm going to try and see if I can be a speaker again this year. I wasn't last time, but I was the time before. And then high probability that if Kajabi does Kajabi Hero Live again, that I'll be attending that. That's usually in California. So I could end up in California for that. And in theory, I would be at Made on YouTube in New York sometime in September or October. Those are Roberto's, Roberto on the road, Roberto's travel plans. And so, yeah, so that's what I'll be up to. And, you know, again, I'll try to try, I'll try my best to keep up with the channel reviews on the weekends for you guys. And we will be coming back to Roberto doing long form content either toward the end of the month or the beginning of February. I've filmed a bunch of stuff. I'm going to be filming some more stuff tomorrow. while we're probably locked down for the storm. As long as the power holds, I'll probably just film all day tomorrow. And so, yeah, looking forward to it. Yep. Thanks so much for the well wishes. Thank you for the wishes on safe travels. Yeah, that's going to be it for tonight, you guys. Stay awesome, and I will catch you next week. Take care, and definitely stay safe. The storm is real out there, so everybody be careful. Becoming a content creator can be a very lonely process and adventure, but it doesn't have to be. When I first got started going from zero to 100,000 subscribers, I had to do it all by myself. I didn't have a community of like-minded and like-hearted creators to talk to or to ask for advice, and I certainly didn't have a mentor to guide me along the way. I built the Awesome Creator Academy Pro Group because when I was getting started, what would have meant the world to me is not to have to struggle alone when it comes to being a full-time content creator. If I had a community of creators that I could talk to and share information with, I would have avoided a lot of mistakes in my early career. And there would have been opportunities with brand deals where I would have gotten a better understanding of how to negotiate. And I wouldn't have undersold myself. I wouldn't have been taken advantage of in those early situations. So in the Awesome Creator Academy Pro Group, myself and our co-instructor Andy Rivera, we meet twice a week for office hours with our creators and we share information. We talk about how we're building our creator businesses and we offer constructive criticism and critique on the things that we're working on for our projects. You'll be part of a community of usually around 100 like-minded creators who are taking this seriously just like you are. You'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. You're 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.

YouTube Channel Reviews via Super Chat (rules in description)

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Review will address titles, thumbnails, one criticism and one compliment, and one piece of ACTIONABLE ADVICE.

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Timestamps: by  @DougHewsonYT

Here's the timestamps for Saturday's stream:
0:00 - LIVE CHANNEL REVIEWS - Real Advice for Small Channels
01:14:03 - CHANNEL REVIEW: Shocking Costs TV
01:32:06 - CHANNEL REVIEW: Jodabeni
01:45:24 - CHANNEL REVIEW: Jackie D McKeever
02:05:38 - CHANNEL REVIEW: Ramen Rozzie
02:23:51 - CHANNEL REVIEW: Chad On The Road