11:19Ed Lawrence · Tutorial
How to come up with YouTube ideas (like a $10M strategist)
A five-step system for picking video topics off buyer data and revenue-per-view, not off whatever already got views.
August 24thThe argument in one line.
A video's reach is decided before it is filmed: the idea and its packaging decide who clicks, and every tenfold jump in views per upload demands a broader idea and a sharper angle, not a better edit.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You run a long-form YouTube channel stuck somewhere between a few thousand and a few hundred thousand views per video and can't tell what is holding it back.
- You're about to publish your first videos and want to know which parts of a video actually decide whether it gets shown to anyone.
- You write titles and design thumbnails for a channel and want concrete rules for text, arrows, eye paths, and title rhythm.
- You sell a service or product and want to understand why a small, targeted video can out-earn a viral one.
- You read YouTube Studio analytics and aren't sure whether click-through rate, average percentage viewed, or impressions deserves your attention.
SKIP IF…
- You want short-form (Shorts, Reels, TikTok) tactics. Everything here is about long-form uploads.
- You're building a faceless or AI-generated channel. The guest says outright that this is not what he works on.
- You want a step-by-step production or editing tutorial. The interview stays at the level of strategy, ideas, and packaging.
The full version, fast.
Views on YouTube are mostly decided before the camera rolls. The idea sets the ceiling, and packaging (title, thumbnail, and the first seconds of the intro) decides whether the platform shows the video at all. Thumbnails depend mostly on their text, titles should be short, rhythmic, and built around about three focal points, and the intro should state the video's point within five seconds, then add a layer the packaging never promised. Once a channel stalls, the fix is rarely a better edit. Copy outliers to reach 100K, learn why they worked to reach a million, and pull in people outside your niche to reach ten million. Track impressions, average percentage viewed, and watch duration. Treat click-through rate as secondary.
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Create a free account →Who's talking.
00:39hostWill Cannon
00:00guestJake Bryant
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 00:39
01 · Cold open
Teaser montage of the interview's boldest claims: a million views on a first upload, split testing, and how much top creators earn per month.
00:39 – 12:46
02 · Level 1: why packaging wins
A contrarian title inspired by a novel becomes Mark Manson's top video of the year. A violin teacher jumps from 500 to 160,000 views with only a new title and thumbnail. The guest traces his path from TV post-production to strategy and a 50M-view Minecraft video built on a MrBeast-style cold open.
12:46 – 18:03
03 · Thumbnails, text and split testing
First-principles thumbnail design: cover the text to see how little the image says alone, keep copy brief, pair it with a contrasting image, and split test even on brand-new channels.
18:03 – 24:48
04 · Ideas are everything, and where to find them
Why the idea sets the ceiling, how Crime and Punishment and The Idiot produced a hit title, why fiction and philosophy feed ideation, and how outlier search tools help beginners.
24:48 – 37:55
05 · Goals, money and the first months
Decide whether you want views or revenue, find what you offer that nobody else does, accept that early videos are worse than you think, set realistic first-month expectations, and build an intro that holds viewers at 5 seconds, 30 seconds, and 3 minutes.
37:55 – 46:48
06 · Level 2: 1K to 100K and YouTube as a partner
Copy outliers to break out of '10K jail,' then learn why they worked. Treat YouTube as a distribution business that wants hits, not a slot machine. Money can't buy views, and affiliate links and your own offer beat AdSense.
46:48 – 1:02:05
07 · Title craft and matching the audience
Four title tools (irony, max loading, rhythm, three focal points), a packaging mistake that attracted the wrong audience, a 1,000-view video that sold $100,000, standout channels and thumbnails, and how the guest picks clients.
1:02:05 – 1:13:10
08 · Level 3: 100K to 1M, process over results
Fix the process instead of chasing results, treat design as the frosting on concept and angle, use the knitted-armor example to test angles, and see why YouTube now pushes brand-new creators.
1:13:10 – 1:24:07
09 · Metrics, RPMs and retention graphs
The three metrics that matter (APV, AVD, impressions), why CTR misleads, typical RPM ranges and why topic drives them, why content quality plateaus like candy, and how building tension flattens the end of a retention graph.
1:24:07 – 1:35:44
10 · Cadence, uploading less and testing
Weekly uploads at 100K for data and reps, quarterly uploads for a 10M-view creator, a kids' channel that doubled monthly views by uploading less, the strategists the guest learns from, and why not to kill a thumbnail test early.
1:35:44 – 1:49:54
11 · Level 4: 1M to 10M, niche integration and going broad
Merge your niche with a broader subject, push the angle toward mass entertainment, see why data only corrects while ideas multiply, match the intro to the thumbnail, and write titles that attract people who don't care about the niche yet.
1:49:54 – 1:56:24
12 · AI, art and the future of creators
The guest's case that AI can imitate but can't replace creators, because art that connects needs a person's specific taste, experience, and soul.
1:56:24 – 2:14:25
13 · Level 5: 10M and up, obsession and the next MrBeast
Building a 26M-view idea and thumbnail shot by shot, top-200 channel income, looking outside YouTube for ideas, turning down MrBeast's team, why work-life balance disappears at 10M, and the prediction that the next MrBeast will be an animation channel.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- A violin teacher went from 500 views per video to 160,000 on one upload after changing nothing but the title and thumbnail.
- Cover the text on a thumbnail and ask what the image alone tells you; most of the time the answer is nothing.
- Adding a small arrow to a thumbnail produces a large, measurable jump in impressions in head-to-head thumbnail tests.
- Don't repeat the same word in the title and the thumbnail, because both are limited space and each should carry new information.
- Split testing thumbnails matters most on a brand-new channel, not least, because the winning version is the one that earns the views.
- Only about 12% of long-form YouTube videos ever pass 1,000 views, according to the strategist's figures.
- If you keep a viewer for three minutes, roughly 30% of them will still be watching at the end of the video.
- Front-loading a title isn't enough; strip it until every remaining word carries information and there is no fat left.
- A title the viewer has to reread has already failed, so read titles silently and cut anything that breaks the rhythm.
- Click-through rate means nothing without impressions: 20% on 100 impressions loses to 2% on a million.
- A video with 1,000 views sold ten $10,000 offers, because it spoke only to buyers of that service.
- Two talking-head videos with the same view count can earn tenfold different ad revenue, based only on the topic and the advertisers it attracts.
- Retention graphs go flattest at the end when the video builds toward one unresolved decision, not when the cutting gets faster.
- A channel stuck at 100K views per video needs weekly uploads for data, while a channel at 10M can upload once a quarter.
- One kids' channel went from 100 million to 200 million monthly views after it started uploading less often.
- Don't swap a thumbnail during the first quiet 24 to 48 hours; many videos only take off after several dormant days.
- Fixing retention drop-offs can nudge a video from 800,000 to 3 million views, but 10 million only comes from a bigger idea.
- To reach 10 million views, merge your niche with a subject almost everyone cares about, such as money.
- YouTube is a distribution business that needs creators to make hit videos, so it now actively gives brand-new channels a shot at an audience.
- The highest-growth ideas often come from books, films, and philosophy, because competitors are only scrolling YouTube for inspiration.
Views are won by the idea and its packaging.
WHAT TO LEARN
Production quality has a ceiling, so each jump in views per upload comes from a better idea, a sharper angle, and a title, thumbnail, and intro that sell it.
02Level 1: why packaging wins
- Before blaming the algorithm, change only the title and thumbnail; a violin channel went from 500 to 160,000 views without touching the video.
- Count the intro as packaging, since hover play shows it before the click, and make it confirm the promise immediately.
03Thumbnails, text and split testing
- Test a thumbnail by covering its text; if the image alone says nothing, the few words on it need to do almost all the work.
- Keep thumbnail text brief, pair it with an image that contrasts with it, and never repeat the title's words.
- Split test titles and thumbnails on new channels too, because the version that wins is the one that earns views.
04Ideas are everything, and where to find them
- Look for ideas in novels, philosophy, and films, because competitors only mine other YouTube videos.
- Beginners can start by searching outlier videos, the ones that beat their channel's last ten uploads, and study what they share.
05Goals, money and the first months
- Decide first whether you want views or revenue, because the strategy differs and AdSense alone rarely pays in year one.
- State the video's point in the first five seconds, then add a layer the packaging never promised to hold viewers to three minutes.
- A reachable first-month goal is 100,000 views on one video, provided you serve an audience with real demand and package it well.
06Level 2: 1K to 100K and YouTube as a partner
- To escape 10K jail, copy what outliers in your field do, then learn why each borrowed thumbnail or title worked so you stop depending on copying.
- Treat YouTube as a distribution business that profits from your hits, and ask how to serve the platform instead of how to get views.
- Earn early income from affiliate links, sponsors, or your own offer rather than waiting for ad revenue to add up.
07Title craft and matching the audience
- Build titles with irony, cut them down to only load-bearing words, read them silently for rhythm, and hold them to about three focal points.
- Package for the audience you want to buy from you; entertainment-style packaging on an education channel can bring views but fewer sales.
- A tiny, targeted video can outearn a viral one: 1,000 views sold ten $10,000 offers by speaking only to buyers.
08Level 3: 100K to 1M, process over results
- When results stall, audit the process that produces ideas and packaging instead of pressuring the team about numbers.
- Design is about 10% of a thumbnail's power; the concept and the angle on that concept carry the rest.
- Choose an angle that stays on concept and creates tension, like an arrow fired at knitted armor, not a random shock.
09Metrics, RPMs and retention graphs
- Judge a video by impressions, average percentage viewed, and average view duration; click-through rate is only meaningful alongside impressions.
- RPM follows topic and advertiser demand, so the same talking head can earn ten times more by choosing subjects wealthier buyers watch.
- Flatten the end of a retention graph by building toward one unresolved decision rather than cutting faster.
10Cadence, uploading less and testing
- At 100K per video, upload weekly or every two weeks, because every upload is data and reps you can't afford to skip.
- Once videos take much longer to make and pull millions of views, uploading less often can raise total monthly views.
- Don't swap a thumbnail during the first quiet days unless it contains a real mistake, such as a word most viewers won't understand.
11Level 4: 1M to 10M, niche integration and going broad
- To go from 1M to 10M, fuse your niche with a subject nearly everyone cares about, such as money, so outsiders click.
- Analytics corrections recover underperforming videos, but a tenfold jump only comes from a bigger idea and angle.
- Prefer titles that spark curiosity over titles that summarize; 'Only 2% of violinists understand this' beat a top-10 list title on watch time.
12AI, art and the future of creators
- AI can imitate a creator's voice, but it can't supply your specific taste, lived experience, or soul, which is what audiences connect with.
- Expect disruption from AI content, but also expect audiences to reject fully synthetic creators even when they can't tell the difference.
13Level 5: 10M and up, obsession and the next MrBeast
- At 10M views, plan every thumbnail element: eye path from left to right, depth, a single red accent, mid-action poses, and an opening line that repeats the title.
- Teams plateau channels at the top because nobody wants the result as badly as the owner, so the owner has to set the standard.
- A great idea with okay packaging wins at the 10M level, while an okay idea with great packaging is enough for 100K.
Terms worth knowing.
- Packaging
- Everything a viewer sees before and just after clicking: the title, the thumbnail, and the opening seconds of the video, which also auto-play when someone hovers over a thumbnail.
- APV (average percentage viewed)
- The share of a video people watch. Used here to judge the first 30 seconds, it shows whether the intro kept the promise made by the title and thumbnail.
- AVD (average view duration)
- How long, on average, viewers keep watching a video. It rises with total watch time and usually dips as the video gets shown to broader audiences.
- Impressions
- The number of times YouTube showed a video's thumbnail to someone. Without impressions, a video cannot get views no matter how good its other numbers are.
- CTR (click-through rate)
- The percentage of impressions that turned into a click. A high rate on very few impressions can still mean almost no views.
- RPM (revenue per mille)
- The money a creator earns per thousand views. Roughly $1 to $4 is low, $5 to $10 is about average, and $15 or more is strong.
- One of ten
- A video that outperformed the channel's previous ten uploads. It ranks first of ten, so it marks an outlier worth studying.
- Outlier theory
- The practice of finding videos that far outperform their own channel's normal results and borrowing what made them work, especially their titles and thumbnails.
- Front loading
- Putting the most important words at the start of a title so the meaning survives if the title gets cut off in the feed.
- Max loading
- A stricter version of front loading: cutting a title down to the fewest words that still carry all the necessary information, with no filler anywhere.
- Guided intrigue
- Thumbnail text that tells viewers what to expect from the video without giving away the answer, so they have a reason to click.
- Concept and angle
- The concept is what the video is about. The angle is the specific tension or twist used to present it, such as shooting an arrow at knitted armor.
- Niche integration
- Combining a narrow topic with a subject far more people care about, such as money or the economy, so the video reaches viewers outside the niche.
- A/B thumbnail test
- YouTube's built-in test that shows different thumbnails or titles to different viewers and picks a winner based on watch time.
- Paying off the intro
- Making the opening seconds show exactly what the thumbnail and title promised, so viewers who clicked immediately see they are in the right place.
Things they pointed at.
00:51linkMark Manson, 'Intellectuals Are F*cking Idiots' video
02:04bookThe Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (Mark Manson)
19:24bookCrime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
19:44bookThe Idiot (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
22:48tool1of10 (outlier search, thumbnail and title generation)
39:03channelFounders podcast
47:37bookShakespeare's sonnets
50:34channelAlex Hormozi (channel positioning example)
54:03link'I Convinced a Stranger to Rob a Bank' (Mac and Harry)
56:49channelMichelle Khare (thumbnail example)
1:00:50productPaddy Galloway accelerator program
1:32:06productWi-Fi Money Mafia (strategist community)
1:32:29toolViewStats
1:32:29toolvidIQ
1:39:33linkJohnny Harris wealth-brackets video
2:12:05channelThe Amazing Digital Circus
Lines you could clip.
05:56
“I think it's actually more important than the video itself.”
13:59
“Look at a thumbnail with text, cover the text and ask yourself, what does this tell you? And what you find often is it doesn't tell you anything.”
28:47
“You can, off the bat, get a million views on your first video. It can absolutely happen.”
40:26
“YouTube is a business. They're not a charity and they're not a slot machine.”
43:43
“Your video is good if you get views. That's how you know it is good.”
59:21
“That's just a high level NPC behavior to say, I want to be the best.”
1:03:48
“We can't be results based. We just got to be heavily process orientated.”
1:04:44
“The design is the 10% frosting to make the rest of it look appealing.”
1:14:11
“I got 20% click-through rate, which is cool, except look at your impressions. It's like a hundred impressions.”
1:28:24
“If we want to get more views per month we should upload less, not more.”
1:41:27
“You might accidentally shoot to two mil, maybe three mil, but like 10 is not an accident.”
2:08:38
“They don't want this to succeed as badly as you do. Because at the end of the day, this is their job. But for you, this is your life.”
2:14:02
“The next Mr. Beast is the person who cracks the animation code.”
Where the conversation goes.
00:39 – 12:46densePackaging and proof stories
12:46 – 18:03denseThumbnail design and split testing
18:03 – 24:48steadyIdeation sources
24:48 – 37:55denseGoals, expectations, intros, first metrics
37:55 – 46:48denseOutlier theory, platform incentives, monetization
46:48 – 1:02:05denseTitle craft and audience fit
1:02:05 – 1:13:10denseProcess, concept vs angle, platform distribution
1:13:10 – 1:24:07denseMetrics, RPM, retention graphs
1:24:07 – 1:35:44denseUpload cadence and testing discipline
1:35:44 – 1:49:54denseNiche integration and broad packaging
1:49:54 – 1:56:24sparseAI and art
1:56:24 – 2:14:25steady10M-level craft, income, obsession, animation
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You can, off the bat, get a million views on your first video. YouTube is kind of a zero -sum game. If you want to go high level, I would go outside of YouTube.
How much did the biggest YouTuber you work with make in a month? Jake Bryant is the YouTube strategist. Who engineered growth for the platform's biggest creators?
We can't be results -based. We've just got to be heavily process -oriented. Should a new creator do A -B testing?
I have seen people go to a million views on a single video specifically because of how we split -tested it. But there's one question. What is stopping you from turning your content into a high -converting So level one, zero views.
So you've been in the YouTube game for over 10 years and you work with some of the top YouTube creators in the world. Let's start by what's the video you're most proud of? I did a video with Mark Manson a while back.
I worked with him for about two months and I gave him a hundred ideas per month. But I knew I had one out of those like 200 ideas that I knew for sure was going to be as high as his video that year. I knew it for a fact.
And I never, you know, it normally doesn't happen like that, but that one I knew for sure. And I gave him this idea. It was called why intellectuals are fucking idiots.
And I pitched him this whole idea about this misunderstanding when it comes to like people who are well -educated and how it actually correlates to real intelligence. And he looked at me like I was crazy. And I'm like, no, Mark, trust me.
This is a real thing. I'm not making this up. This is a real thing.
And no one has talked about it. And your video is going to bane. And he was kind of like, OK.
But he didn't actually even post it that year. He posted the following year. And sure enough, it was it outperformed every other video he did that entire year.
I think it was right now 1 .3 million views. Why do you think that video outperformed like it did? There's a couple of factors.
A big one is like there is an ironic element to the title. Like normally, if you are super intelligent, you're not an idiot. Right.
That's how that's the idea. But here it's claiming the opposite. So not only is it there's an irony, there is a contrarian take here.
But on top of that, it's an aggressive contrarian take. Hence the word fuck is literally in it. Right.
I knew for sure that's going to work with. with Mark specifically because he wrote the book, The Subtle Art Not Giving a Fuck, and it works with his brand. He's very contrarian.
And I just, all those things combined, I was like, there is no way this is not as high as you video. There's just too many things working in our favor. And so literally just based on the title alone, and I think they left the title exactly the same.
I think there's one change instead of why I think it's just intellectuals are fucking idiots is the only difference. But that alone gave me everything I needed. But then they killed it with the thumbnail on top of that.
So after that, I was like, yeah, this is, yeah, they did everything right. When you're just getting started and you're working with a new creator, right? This is level one.
They have zero views, zero audience. Like, where do you start? What's the first piece of strategy advice you give a creator?
It usually starts with like, you know, what's the thing that you have that nobody else has? You know, I worked with a... a very niche creator he was a education violin expert and his videos were on teaching people how to play the violin and everyone i talked to said oh you can only get 25 000 views because that's what everyone else is getting and i just kind of thought that was and i was like no i think you can get a lot more and i told them verbatim i think you can actually get a hundred thousand views on one of these videos and sure enough the very first video we did he was three videos in each video was at 500.
views and that one right now is at 160 000 i think i knew it was going to work because he told me his experience and i said what's your experience and he's like i've been trained um in the violin for 30 years i played in these conferences i've been all over the world and i'm like okay this like it's i was shocked that you haven't gotten more views yet like that tells me you're just really bad at branding yourself on youtube and so all i knew is like cool All I got to do is brand you in the right way and you're going to get all the viewership.
And with that video specifically, all I did, I didn't touch the video. I did not write the script. I did not create the intro.
I just told him, use this thumbnail and use this title. And that was it. So that was so really that was packaging.
100%. Yeah. And what's funny is like we were arguing about it initially because he was kind of testing me to see if I knew what I was talking about.
But it's funny. It's like, how can you test me if you don't know what you're talking about here? Right.
But he was testing me saying like, oh, which thumbnails are the best? I had like nine I was looking at from nine different designers. They all sucked except for one.
And I was like, that one is the best one. And I can tell because you've, you know, you're throwing up somewhere. You can see like the background's all black.
And so you're going to have a super, super high focus on the things that matter because the background is gone, right? But it's black. And so at that time, there wasn't a lot of creators doing that kind of black background.
A lot of it was white, a lot of it was green, a lot of it was blue, et cetera, like very vibrant colors. So we're going to stand amongst our competition, right? And then on top of that, there was an arrow.
And this sounds funny, but if you put an arrow on your thumbnail, you're way more likely to get higher impressions. is if you don't. And for some reason, people don't really talk about it.
I don't know why, but it's like super evident. And when you do an A -B test, one with arrow, one without, you'll see just like a crazy difference just by adding a little tiny arrow. Again, focusing your attention on things that matter.
And then on top of that, you just put some kind of text that gives what I would call like guided. um intrigue and that guided intrigue is going to be the thing that tells them what they should be expecting without giving too much info in this case it was the title the video was how to master vibrato in 25 minutes and the video was 25 minutes long hence the title and in the thumbnail it was Literally, I think it was just perfect vibrato.
And I intentionally try to make sure that we didn't have perfect again or master again. So we're not like reusing the same real estate and our title and our thumbnail. And those two things combined.
Now it's when you're going to master it and it's going to be perfect. So now you're like, well, shoot, I mean. I got 25 minutes to spare and we're heavily reliant on the fact that people are lazy and they don't want to watch a long video.
And so if I say to master it in 25 minutes, it's not a long time versus like how to play it. And like, that's kind of a long time just to learn how to play it. But I know you're going to be a master by the time the video is over.
And that was pretty much it. That's like once you have all those elements at play, it's kind of hard for the video not to do well. I would honestly question heavily, why wouldn't it do well at that point?
So packaging title thumbnail for a creator just getting started is vital. It can make or break your success. Yeah, I think it's actually more important than the video itself, which is like that's a pretty I think it's a pretty strong take if you ask a lot of people.
But every single person I've ever talked to who has a channel and they're always complaining, like, how come not getting more views? And I say, like, as a litmus test, do you have a competitor you look at right now that's doing way better than you? and they go yeah like it's so frustrating i'm like uh -huh they understand stuff you don't and they're like well their videos suck compared to mine and i'm like i know and they're better at this than you still it's because it's not about like who has the highest quality video game when it comes to getting the views you're looking for it comes to who understands the youtube platform better than anyone else and that is entirely a packaging game like i have a weird analogy but you'll understand this i think like you have a business and you do a lot of marketing generally like with marketing if it's not brought in front of you you simply cannot interact with it right and so with youtube it's the same thing if the video is not shown in front of you you cannot click on it it can't happen and so when you ask like how do i get
on the right of youtube's like catalog well that comes down to best titles best thumbnails and also best intro and i consider the intro as part of the packaging with the video because of the hover play aspect um yeah and so once you have those three elements done that well youtube's kind of in a position like well how like why wouldn't we you know make sure everyone sees us if it's getting more views you know yeah what tell me about your background what is your background before youtube and how did you end up getting into youtube or youtube strategy Yeah, because it's funny.
You don't like, you know, someone asks you when you're eight, you're not like, I want to be a YouTube strategist. Like that didn't even exist, right? I think the job was literally made by Patti Galloway in, I want to say, 2019 with Jimmy.
But for me, I started in traditional media. Last thing I did was like a TV show. I was like post -production director.
And I kind of thought like, cool, like this is it. This is what I do. And after it was over, nothing happened.
I got no job. Like nobody cared. I was just overworked and underpaid.
And I was like, well, this sucks. What's this YouTube thing I've been watching my whole life? And I've been watching it since like, you know.
Like I want to say 2007 when like Smosh was coming out and like Nika Higa and all that stuff. I would like watch it with my friends and whatnot. So I was like fairly familiar with what was going on, but like, I didn't really see it as an industry, but I just kind of realized like, well, they're posting somehow.
So someone's filming, someone's editing. So why can't I just be that guy? And I was like, okay, whatever.
I'm just gonna start DMing some YouTubers. The first guy I DM, he's like, let's meet. And I was like, okay, new plan.
I'm not doing the TV. route anymore i'm just gonna go to youtube and from there i started uh working at a company called high five studios that was uh matthias's um company where at the time i mean even today it's kind of an impressive feat by the time no one had a company with 55 employees just on adsense alone was everyone's payroll it was really confusing to me because i was like how are we making money like who's paying us like do we have a product do we have a service like like no, just YouTube.
And I'm like, what do you mean just YouTube? I really couldn't figure this out. And it's so obvious now.
But at the time, I was really confused. How are we all getting paid? And I learned the back end of how YouTube works.
I learned we had 12 channels and I got to edit for, I think, six of them. And I started to realize like, oh, they're different. Like, even though it's under the same brand, like even though it is under the same company, we're still going to treat the audience differently.
There's a gaming channel. We don't edit gaming channels the way you would an unboxing channel. And they had like a parody unboxing channel called Dope or Nope.
When I realized like, oh, that's you treat these differently. And I started to realize like not no channel is the same as kind of what it took from that. And yeah, and then after that, it was just kind of like a slew of just editing, filming, and then from editing, filming, to pitching ideas, to writing scripts, and to creating thumbnails, and then starting to work with certain creators.
Like I worked with like Hudson Matter pretty closely. And I think this was the moment when stuff was starting to click because with him, I was pretty much just doing everything for him. And like I was editing, I was filming, I was creating, well.
i think he had you know he had a guy to create thumbnails but i was helping him with the packaged ideas i was helping him with uh the scripting ideation and then once we post we talk about analytics and then just get to it like the next week and we post weekly doing that and so after that i got into fully offering my services as youtube strategy but it was when someone reached out to me it was a big creator his name is eric the electric he had at the time four million subs and he was like hey i really need help with some strategy and i was just kind of like like at the time i was you know going through uh a season of my life where i was like kind of like sad about what i'm doing or whatever and so i was like asleep at the wheel like i don't care i'm like just do this do that fix this just do this stuff right and then like a week later the video is posted and he i wake up to him giving me a bonus in my payroll and i was kind of like hey did you send this on accident and he's like this was the highest opening retention i've ever had in the past 10 years and when i saw that i was like
Wait, what did I do? Like, wait, what? And I go back to even reverse engineer what I even did because I don't remember what I did.
But I realized like at that moment, like, I think I can do this. Like, I think I should offer this to people because I didn't realize one, this was valuable and two, this actually helps creators. And once I understood that, that's when I was like, okay, I am now YouTube strategist.
I'm going all in on that. I love that. What's the most viewed video?
you ever made and why did that video blow oh okay this was like i actually consider this to be the very first advice i ever gave to a creator so i was working with a cookie god and at the time i was an editor for him he was like sub a million views now he's like the top minecrafter on the planet uh you know really proud of him all of the successes come from him working really really hard so i don't feel like i'm taking anything away from it but that being said uh we work in this video and um i remember i gave him an hour long edit and he's normally he's posting like 30 minute videos and he just literally They text me like, no.
He's like, take it back. He's like, we are not making Marvel movies, dude. Like, cut it down.
And I fought him on this. Like, I almost never do this. But I was like, no, I'm telling you, like, if we upload this video, no one has hour long videos on Minecraft at the time.
Like, it was Luke the Notable was like almost the only one. It's like, if we do this an hour long, it's going to do better. And he was like, OK, I guess we'll just do it 55 minutes instead of, you know, an hour and 10.
And I made the intro very specifically. And I remember watching a bunch of Mr. Beast videos.
And what's funny is like he had these videos where. just like black and then text on screen where he's like, I did so -and -so. And I actually used that in the first five seconds to mimic exactly what he did and made the trailer for the video really cool.
And sure enough, we did all those things right. Right now it's this high speed video sitting at about 50 million views. Wow.
50 million. Okay. So we're at level one.
We're starting with just the very basics. And I think like you said, packaging is important, right? And packaging from what you said is title, thumbnail, and intro.
let's jump into thumbnail for a second because I feel like that's what catches your eye first when you're at least for me when I'm scrolling YouTube the thumbnail catches my eye then I might look at title and obviously if I click through it's intro so like to me it kind of starts with the thumbnail that's cool is like to make an original thumbnail is free like it doesn't cost money right um like It was really like the thing that helped us was one, a good team.
We had good skill sets, but a lot of it was good knowledge, good research. Right. And that's like the thing that's probably different from like hiring someone like me is I've done this for so long.
I just weed out like the 90 % of just noise of just this is not helpful. I already know that. And that's the difference between like someone who's been doing it for a while and someone who's like just starting off is like, you don't know what's noise yet.
So you're all kind of guessing. Right. But what's the reason why outlier theory is so helpful?
in this regard is because you don't have to do any of that you can just copy what someone else does but to make something truly original and that's like your own this is where you have to take risk you're gonna have to allow yourself to look dumb and like you know people might make fun of you on twitter be like wow look at this guy he can't make a good thing but the odds are no one's gonna see it so probably no one's gonna say that uh but once it gets views then all sudden they'll start making fun of you for some reason and to get there you really have to like just think about like Like, it's kind of a cliche at this point, but I think of like first principles thinking often where it's like, you know, what elements can you take out of an image before it is no longer functioning as a thumbnail?
And so we tried ones where it's like, what if it was just the biography photo? And it just didn't tell us enough to know why we should click on it. And you'll see this a lot in thumbnails.
It's kind of a fun game to play where it's like, look at a thumbnail with text, cover the text and ask yourself, what does this tell you? And what you find often is it doesn't tell you anything. Like it just tells you nothing.
And you realize like, oh, like 80 % of what's working in the thumbnail is the text we put in the thumbnail, right? And so if you took away the text, the thumbnail doesn't work. And you realize like, oh.
the words you put are really really important like super important you can have the exact same image exact same face and you change the juxtaposition based on what the text is and that changes the way people are gonna think how they should engage with that video and so number one here is like you want that text to be the absolute best it possibly can and think about like what is good copy like one like good copy is brief so like you know this is shakespeare but it's like brevity is the soul of wit like i try to preach that a lot like be as brief as possible because that's going to communicate the most amount with the you know communicate the most the most efficient way possible and so that would definitely be number one and then number two is think about like what's the image that you're trying to juxtapose right that image is going to be like you know the yin and yang to this text and once you start studying other thumbnails that are in a similar vein of what you want to do
That's really when you start to learn the patterns of what do the people that succeed the way you want to actually succeed. And then you can start applying that to you and see if it's true or not. Should a new creator do A -B testing on thumbnails and titles?
This is funny. Everyone I ever talk to says no. It's very rare I find someone that says you're supposed to do that.
And they tell me you're not supposed to do that all the time. They tell me not to. But the problem is I have the data.
I have the receipts that show me if I didn't test this, I would have got less views. And then people try to fight that and say, oh, imagine how many more views you would have got if you didn't test. Let me just roll it back a little bit to give context.
So a lot of times people say when you start a new channel, you're not supposed to split test. You're not supposed to A -B test. I don't think that's true.
really trying to do is figure out what is the right thumbnail, what is the right title. And people say, if you split it, you won't get enough data to know. The problem is every time I've done it right, you get the views, which tells you the data of which one's going to win.
And I've seen people go from, you know, zero to a hundred thousand to a million views on a single video because specifically because of how we split tested it. And when I see that and someone tries to tell me that's not true. The problem is like the data is literally telling me in the face it is.
And so I'm not going to believe someone's random opinion they heard on some podcast. I mean, no disrespect to podcasts, but I'm not going to try to like just base it on something that they heard, right? I really want to base it on what the data is actually trying to tell me.
And that's really all this comes down to is like, you know, when you're trying to seek like what's true. all we have is the information that's kind of in front of us, or it's just someone else's opinion. And I don't really know where the opinion came from.
So for me, like, I'm not going to follow what someone else tells me I'm supposed to do if I'm seeing the results, you know, staring me in the face when I'm split testing, especially on like a new video on a new channel. I think if anything, if you're a new channel, if it's a new video, you should split test there more so than you would with a more prominent channel, if that makes sense.
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Let's talk about ideas because the people that I know and I've talked to in and around YouTube have told me like, look, the idea before you shoot the video is more important than shooting, than editing, than the thumbnail. So when someone's just getting started, right? They're just getting started from scratch.
How important are the ideas? How do they find winning ideas? What's your strategy around ideas and how important are they?
They're everything, man. Like the idea is literally everything. And, you know, I'm not the first person to beat this drum, nor am I beating it the hardest.
Really, Jimmy was the guy, Mr. Beast was the guy to beat this the hardest, right? And, you know, when I got started, that's what I first did was like, I was just trying to figure out how does YouTube even work?
And... he went on a whole like string of podcasts and what's funny is he says the same stuff and a lot of them and one of it was how important the idea was and he actually breaks it down to a way that makes sense a lot where um you could have an idea and it doesn't cost you more money it doesn't take more effort but it can get you 10x the viewership from that one idea right um so the idea is literally everything and what's funny is like people think it only applies to youtube i think it's actually like more of a broader sense it applies to pretty much everything when it comes to trying to get people in uh the public to interact with a certain thing whether it's a product whether it's a business whether it's a brand or youtube video the idea is everything.
And how you communicate the idea is pretty much, that's pretty much what the packaging does, is communicating a really good idea in a very good way. And so the idea is so crucial. And what's funny is the way that I come up with ideas is very unorthodox.
So if you go back to that Mark Manson video, like Why Intellectuals Are Idiots, I came up with the idea because I read Dostoevsky. And probably no one's going to say that if you're a strategist like Dostoevsky made this book called Crime and Punishment. And if you break it down to a nutshell, he's making an argument on intellectuals when left isolated will rationalize evil acts and they will act upon them in public.
And this is why he specifically seems like from what I read, he seems like he hates intellectuals with that. passion like he hates them and I thought that was kind of a weird like thing that he was trying to put in the viewers head or the readers head and when I read the idiot it was like the Inverse idea that he was trying to get a here is the answer to what I think you should do That's why he's called the idiot because in his mind the idiot is the way you're supposed to live And once I saw that I realized like I said out loud like oh he thinks intellectuals are idiots And once I said, I was like, that's a title.
I wrote it down and saved it later for when I was going to come up. But I would have never got there if I never read Dostoevsky. And the reason why I went to someone like him, he's one of the greatest writers to ever live in literature.
And what ends up happening is these guys have phenomenal ideas that are timeless, which is why they're so celebrated, right? When you think about like the concept of like, you know, what is an idea to begin with and like, let alone what is a good one. You only get there because like you have this like abstract language around it.
And that's what like fiction work does very well. It doesn't try to explain on the nose what you're supposed to learn. It kind of just like observes a thing from afar.
And then you get to take what you will from that. And that's why I think like, you know, you look at like the pros in writing and why they're so effective. It just does that so well.
I think philosophy is another one where it's like, it's not necessarily trying to teach you how to think verbatim. It's more so like trying to get a idea that is very abstract across. as a way to say, there is no way to fully grasp this.
Like there is no, like, you know, you never see like Schopenhauer trying to show you like, oh, here's how you grasp this idea. Done, one little one -liner, right? He's making these very long books on these very dense topics to show you, you really can't grasp this idea.
Like you just can't, but you know, they are trying to communicate that as a way to show. learning is this like really broad thing that never fully ends. And philosophy is like a thing that never fully ends.
And so I think like in that respect, like philosophy and fiction, like literature fiction, like work really well when it comes to coming up with ideas because it really just frees your mind in a way I think nothing else really does. That makes sense. And what about for the creator that's not going to read those fiction and nonfiction books and like, okay, I need an idea.
Like, you know, is a start using one of 10 or these, you know, You know, looking at getting inspiration from other people's ideas or YouTube videos. Is that a start for someone that's just getting started?
Yeah, if you're just getting started, 100 percent. But as far as like the way that I do it, it's just like I find more inspiration outside of YouTube than I do in YouTube these days. And I think like if you want to like because YouTube is, you know, a lot of people may not think this, but YouTube is kind of a zero sum game and it's very competitive.
And if you want to win, you got to ask yourself, what are the things your competitors not doing, right? And I can guarantee you they're not reading those books. Like they're not, like no one is doing that.
And even like when I find thumbnails, I go on Twitter a lot. Like I remember I saw this one thumbnail where it was like two stats next to each other. And I looked at it in one second, took a screenshot and just sent it to my team.
I'm like, let's make this thumbnail right now for this one client. And that video was an instant one out of 10. It got like 600 ,000 views when it normally...
for them i was the creator nicholas he normally got like 100 000 at the time um but that's if you want to like go high level where it's like you i want to like be better than my competition i would go outside of youtube but if you want to like just start off and learn how to play the game you really want to use one of ten shout out to one of ten richard's awesome uh best tool on the planet and you really want to use like their uh search engine to figure out like the correlations and what are the um constant consistencies you're finding in thumbnails and titles that are winning that's a great place to start for sure for the people out there that don't know one of ten what is one of ten is it you know can you explain to people what it is yeah one of ten is the way that i sell it it's basically a search engine to find the one of tens and on youtube and so to explain further a one attend on youtube you have your you know your rating system where you're gonna have a video from one to ten
ranking your last 10 uploads, 10 being last place, one being first place. And so people get it confused where it's like one is a scoreboard. It's actually you got first place out of the last 10.
So if you got a one out of 10, that video performed better than the last 10 uploads you just did. And so when you're looking at like outliers, that's what you're looking for. You're looking for who is someone's one out of 10.
And how do I take that and apply it to my video? And one out of 10 is a tool that essentially does all those things very well, as well as they do thumbnail generation, which I use it consistently. for the clients that I work with.
And I think it's just absolutely awesome when it comes to making thumbnails the way that you know they're gonna crush. And same thing with title generation and they have a bunch of other like research tools that are so helpful. And so I couldn't praise it more when it comes to especially starting off.
And I still use it to this day, even at a high level, in a high level field. For someone that's just starting, you said yourself, YouTube is a zero sum game. Very competitive.
Everyone and their mom and brother and uncle is on YouTube these days. You know, for someone that's just getting started, what are some of the things they need to think about before they start on YouTube? What do you want?
More specifically, what do you want to happen in the next six months? And most of the time, they don't really think about it in that way. They'll say things like, well, I just want to win.
And I'm like... It's not a KPI. I can't get that for you, right?
So I'm like, let me try this another way. Six months from now, you get an average of a million views per upload. Are you happy?
And they usually go, yes. Like, yes, I would love an average of a million views per video. I'm like, but the caveat is you made no money.
Are you okay with that? And they're like, then they kind of pause and take a step back. They're like, well, wait a minute.
No, I want money. I'm like, okay, you want to optimize for revenue. You don't want to optimize for views.
So we're going to change to that model instead. And they get kind of really confused because they were up to this point. we're sure if you got a lot of views you get a lot of money and i'm like yeah eventually not in the first year like in the first year you're probably going to be a net negative and people don't understand that like if you want to make money it's a very different game and so the only way you're going to make money on youtube is um you're going to sell someone else's product or service, or you're going to sell your product or service.
And so the question comes down to whose are we selling? Is it yours or is it somebody else's? And that's how YouTube pays you is through AdSense.
But AdSense is like the worst way to get payment. I see it more as like a bonus that you're really good at making YouTube videos that YouTube wants. And so that's the first question is what do you really want?
And once we get to, I'm like, you know, kind of like breaking it down for them. And so once we really get to what they actually want, then all of a sudden we can start talking about what does the strategy look like for you and how realistic is that? And so, yeah, that's number one.
Then after that, it's a matter of like, okay, what niche are you in? And what, you know, we go back to the wow factor. Like, what do you have to offer that nobody else has?
And if they say nothing. that's i'm kind of like all right uh best of luck it's not gonna work because you can't just come in here with nothing to offer anyone in a video and expect to get all these views from it and maybe there's people that are really good at that and like they can you know make an ai generated channel or whatever like or a faceless channel like that's just not really what i do and so i think i at that point i'd point them to another strategist that's like really good at that are there some certain things that creators get wrong the most in their first month when they're just getting started oh yeah oh yeah um Number one is like the videos aren't as good as they think they are.
Like always, like always. And it's funny because like when you put a lot of effort in a video, you think this video is good every time, every single time. No one posts a video like this video is shit.
Like they always like, this is such a good video. And then they're like, oh crap, I got no views. So then I get, you should see my DMs.
They're all like, Jake, my video is really good. How come I'm getting no views? Or it's usually just, why is YouTube not pushing it out?
That's what a lot of them say. And I say the same thing. I'm like, cause your videos suck and you think they're good.
Like always. um and i know i talk about how like um the quality of the video is not the most important metric but that's not to say the quality video doesn't matter at all it does actually matter it's just not the most important thing when it comes to getting views and so i'm always like make your videos better and then then they'll be like my videos are better but they think uh but they're still not getting views and like that's because your packaging sucks on top of that and so i kind of like do this um like reverse like engineering of how to like if i were to fix someone's video in that or someone's channel in that regard what i would do is like start with make your content better because your content sucks and once once it's i think it's good enough to serve your specific audience and that's really all you need is a video that's good enough to serve a specific audience you're trying to hit then it's like all right now let's make this packaging like 10 out of 10 rather than like the videos make maybe like a 5 out of 10 that's fine now let's make our packaging 10 out of 10 sort of thing okay so how long before like a new channel can like expect traction when we say traction i know what
like there's probably a number in people's heads that they haven't quite you know said out loud um people don't want to give expectations they don't want to be like oh i don't want like i hear a lot like i don't want a million views or anything and i'm like oh don't worry it won't happen on accident like don't worry like you probably it'd probably be hard to get there right um but You can, off the bat, get a million views on your first video.
It can absolutely happen. The question comes down to, one, did you do everything right? And two, how long are you willing to wait for that million views to get there?
Because if you're asking, is it going to get a million views in 24 hours? No. I'm very confident your first video will not do that.
But if you're saying, I want to get 100 ,000 views in the first month. Oh, absolutely. Like happens all the time.
I see it all the times with my clients. Like the moment I bring them on, I easily see our first video. And it's not like a promise.
I don't promise anyone or guarantee you're going to get this. But off the bat, you can get 100 ,000 views or 200 ,000, even 400 ,000 views in the first week or two. It really just comes down to like, did you do the stuff right when it comes to serving your specific audience or the audience you are trying to hit?
But as far as like, if you're, oh, I want to get a million, 10 million, 100 million views. That is not one probably not happening at all. Like statistically speaking.
And two, what's interesting with that is like the reason why I say 100 ,000 a month so easy is because there's like a thousand ways right now you can make a video that gets 100 ,000 views in long form. Right. If you're like, I want 100 million views, there's like one way you can get 100 million views.
And so I am like. I'm like, that's not going to happen because you're probably not willing to take the path it takes to get there. It's like the equivalent of, you know, when it's like, we're talking about like setting expectations, right?
It's the equivalent of if you're an entrepreneur and someone comes up to you and says, well, I just want to make a business that gets like $300 ,000 in revenue per year. You'd be like, dude, you could get a job that gets you $300 ,000 in revenue a year. That's not a high bar, right?
Even a million views, a million dollars in revenue, that's not a high bar to cross, right? What is a high bar is once you get to 10 mil, 100 mil, a bill, that's a really high bar. If I said, well, how do I get a billion dollars a year in revenue with my business?
You're like. you got like one way like there's like there's not like a hundred ways to get there so statistically it's just very unlikely but as far as like 100 000 mark like million view mark like that could happen in the first month to six months as long as you a served an audience that has that demand and b met the demand and obviously c package that you are meeting the demand very well and does that mean If you had to give the three most important factors, you've already said title, thumbnail, intro, which we're going to call packaging.
That's number one. If they don't click, it doesn't matter. Are the next two retention and something else?
What are those top three things? I'm putting together my first video. I have the title.
I have the packaging. I have the thumbnail. I think it's a strong intro to hook the viewer.
What are those other two things that are going to make or break me when, you know, that's going to give me zero views or ten views versus 100 ,000 or the million? Yeah. So to talk about like, let's say our package is perfect.
Now we're going to content. Yeah. And so I'm going to loop in the intro to our content for a second.
So let's say the video starts and people always like does this, you know, get people's attention. So with your intro, people misunderstand this. They think like, oh, it has to be really fast paced or it has to be really like quick cuts, really fancy editing or anything like that.
Now, don't get me wrong. This helps. Like I use these tricks all the time.
It helps. But don't be fooled to think that's what does it. Right.
Because I have a client where we posted a lecture of, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson. And so like the odds of it doing well are pretty high. But like.
with the packaging we we basically made it line up with that intro perfectly so we can get the views but if you look at the intro it's like a dark fade from black to Neil talking and he just he's talking very slow it's not very fancy it's not very fast -paced but this is a good intro for this audience and with intros specifically people think I hear a lot that people say like oh what wouldn't they be Borg's doesn't sound very interesting and I'm like maybe to us but not to 10 million people it's not Right.
And so if that's your goal is that you're trying to get like the 10 percent of a 10 million audience, like that's not that crazy now. Right. And so when it comes to like one, the intro, it's not about making it fast paced or make an impressive edit.
It's just about are you serving the audience you're trying to hit? And some audiences are like, you know, podcasts like they want it slow. They want the pacing to be long and they want it to be slow because they just want to get high level information.
In that case, that's. going to serve the audience with a killer intro because you're just giving them the thing that they want but statistically more often than not the faster pace and the high level editing tricks is going to be the thing that attracts the broadest audience possible.
And so if you want to leave like no chance on the table, your intro, you probably want it a little faster, not like the fastest thing possible where it's like impossible to ingest the information, but you do want it probably a little faster. And then on top of that, you want to make sure what you are giving them is like the.
highest quality info that's in this whole video is going to be in that first few seconds. And so, for example, if I'm, let's say, a big entertainer like Mr. Beast, I'm going to say the very point of the video in the first five seconds.
He does this very well. He's very good at this point where he's like, I captured 10 people and they're going to compete in hide and seek in this giant football stadium. And just goes from there, starting in five.
But we're in. We're just in the video. Content starts.
Now it's impossible for me to cook away because he gave me all the information I needed to start the video and the video just started. after that. And that is going to keep people watching for the next 30 seconds alone.
But then all he has to do is one more thing, right? If he just comes in like, but not only that, like now he just offers something that was not advertised in the thumbnail. It was not advertised in the title.
It's not set in the description. There's one more layer to the video you didn't expect. So not only did he deliver on everything the packaging said it would, he started over delivering after this moment.
And this is something anyone can take. You don't have to be Jimmy to do this. Like anyone can do this where you say like, this is the one thing that everyone going to get everyone's attention in the video with the packaging but now we just offered a new thing that's going to come in this video you didn't expect so now listen like well shoot i really like the fact that they paid off all the stuff i wanted but now they're giving me even more why would they leave at this point and that is like how you make a perfect 30 second intro because once you get them past the five seconds to the 30 seconds thus statistically likelihood you're going to get them to a minute is so much higher.
So now you're like, okay, now all you got to do is walk them to three minutes. Once you get them to a three minute mark and they're still watching, you did it. You won.
You got them. Now, statistically, you're going to have that 30 % still watching by the end of the video, just because you got them to three minutes. And so once you're there, like you give like the most high level type of content, the first five 30 and three minute segment, you pretty much have them for the rest of the video.
So what I'm hearing from you is title, thumbnail and intro. The packaging is number one. Number two.
you need those curiosity gaps you need to stick around past that 30 second minute so is that average view duration really or is that retention and and how and how does someone go about creating those curiosity gaps yeah so talk about the metrics that tell you you're doing it right so the things that i look for all the time i look at my apv my average percentage viewed and that's going to measure your first 30 seconds and so i do this all the time with like top 200 creators on the planet and people are just starting off your first 30 seconds i like that they measure this um and i i find it super helpful.
And so like, you'll see something where it's like the highest I've ever seen it for like a 20 million view video was at like 91%. And it's like, you're like this far away from perfection, right? 91 % 30 seconds in or the whole way?
91 % for APV, which is your average percentage view for the first 30 seconds specifically. And once you're there, you're like, okay. I love that because now I know for sure we're going to have a larger percentage of viewers for the rest of the video.
But what's interesting is like if this started at 75, you don't get 91 later, right? You only will see the drop up from 75 from this moment on. And so that's why I like this metric a lot because if this is high, the odds of your AVD being high are so much higher now, right?
And the second one is average viewer duration. And that's going to be the thing that tells you like how long they continue watching, right? These are the two ways that you're going to get.
more avd is either your watch time is up or your views are up right but what will happen over time is your avd will start to drop off which is technically a good thing like if you see all your metrics such a drop off over time that means essentially your video is being pushed out more but the goal is to like how do we keep these metrics as high as possible while they're being pushed out so every time they're pushed out that kind of keeps you know feeding the wave of being served by youtube that makes sense all right jake we're at level two we've made some videos we're getting a thousand views or maybe let's say between one and ten thousand views per video single digit thousands per video what are the next four steps now someone needs to take to get them closer to that hundred thousand view per video yeah well first off congratulations to the top twelve percent of all videos on the platform if you get past a thousand views uh you were in the top 12 because only 12 of all videos on youtube and long form get over a thousand views so first of all congratulations uh second of all now we want to take it from one to ten to say ten to a hundred right what's probably gonna happen is you're gonna get stuck in these loops of like oh awesome i'm doing stuff right and you're just gonna stay there like you'll just be like on this very low level you think you're killing it but you're gonna find very quickly you're like huh getting a 10 000 banner is harder for some reason i don't know what happened well
you have to start with this like um You have to start with a place where you don't have the data of a million view video yet. So you don't know what it takes to make that.
Or I guess in this case, you don't have what it takes to make a hundred thousand video because you haven't gotten there yet. And so you might think your thumbnails are good and maybe they are, but they're not so good. You got a hundred thousand views.
And so what you start, you need to start asking yourself is what are you doing wrong? That's not getting you the main result that you're looking for, right? And so I actually know a creator who went from an average of five to 10 ,000 to a hundred thousand.
And what's funny is like what he did was he started on his own, just making them from scratch, just kind of making it up. And they did okay. They were like, all right, you know, some interviews with Elon and trying to like break down what are the things that he does to run his companies, et cetera.
But then all of a sudden he found the founder's pod and was like, oh, maybe I should just copy what this guy does. And literally the first video got like 100 ,000 views in the first week just by taking that thumbnail and applying it to his videos. And what happened?
He accidentally did everything right just by copying someone else. who did it better than him. And that's what you're gonna need to do right now is like outlier theory here is gonna help you so much.
Like this is why everyone praises outlier theory because it will definitely take you from 10 ,000 to 100 ,000 views off the rip, right? And so what you wanna do now is like, look at the best in your field and look what they're doing. and then once you start applying and see it working the important thing here is not to rely on this like relying on outlier theory will kind of start to kill the growth over time you won't consistently get 100k per upload what you really want to do is learn why did this one work when i applied this thumbnail or why did this one work when i applied this thumbnail or title and once you start asking yourself those questions things are going to become apparently obvious that were you were like blissfully ignorant at your 1000 10 000 view video mark and so when everyone's stuck i hear time oh i'm stuck in i'm stuck in 5k jail and it's like what's funny here I think people don't really think about it this way, but like think of YouTube as like YouTube is a business.
They're not a charity and . I think people like accidentally look at YouTube as if it's like gambling and like YouTube wants you to be hooked on, oh, you got a thousand, but hey, maybe one day you'll get a hundred K. Like why?
That doesn't benefit them. It benefits them if you get a hundred thousand views. If like we want to take this to its farthest extreme possible, they're actually begging you to give them a million, 10 million view video.
They're like, dude, please, please give us this. And you think about. Why is that the case?
Well, they're just a distribution platform. They are not a content platform. In other words, they don't make content, right?
You make the content. And so they are highly relying on you to make them the content that's going to get 10 million views, or in this case, 100 ,000 views, because... That's how their advertisers get their products or services sold.
And that's how they get their cut, right? And that's how they're able to give you your cut because you did your job right. Congratulations.
You gave us the video we needed. But YouTube is actually benefiting from this far more than any creator on the platform. What they are getting is they're becoming the number one streaming service on.
earth and they're becoming the not just a competitor to the industry they're becoming a brand new industry that is like the gain they have is so high they are highly dependent on you to help them get there so when you think about it like that this is not like a you know someone dangling a carrot above you said hey maybe one day they're like knocking at your door saying please give us the video we need because we want to win and once you think about it like that you're starting to think of youtube as a partner not as like some, I don't know, giant corporation that's like far and distant.
It's not like, you know. working with you to make these banner videos. You know what I mean?
And so once you understand that YouTube wants you to see more than you do, you start to ask questions like, how do I better serve the platform over like, oh, how do I get, you know, 100 ,000 views sort of thing? But that will get you closer to 100 ,000 views. Yeah.
YouTube wants you to make amazing content because then people watch more of it and they can serve more ads and make more money and they can give you your cut from it. Right.
Do you consider YouTube like a skill -based game or a pay -to -win? Is there a way to game the system and get more views?
No. This is only a skill -based game. And I love skill -based games personally, but you think of chess as a very skill -based game.
If you ask me, Jake, how do I put enough money to win at chess? And I'm like, that doesn't exist. Like there's no amount of money you can pay to get a winner every single game, right?
How do you get a winner? Well, you get someone at five, you train them for 20 years and you put them in rigorous testing. You give them the best tutors.
You give them the best information. You test, you test, you test. You constantly like basically put them through the rainer until.
25 years later or so, you get one of the best chess players on the planet. And you think about like, what does that take to get there? Like, well, it takes a lot of resources and it takes a lot of willpower.
It takes a lot of dedication and really takes like, I want to win more than I have an ego. And that's hard. Like everyone on this earth has an ego, which holds them back because they think I'm already good.
I'm good where I am. I don't want to grow. and that's why you're not growing is because people just generally don't think they have to and that's a lot of reasons why you hear people complain about not getting the views that they want is because oh you know my video is so good it's like your video is good if you get views that's how you know it is good like you know you are doing what you're supposed to do as a creator is when you're getting the views you want but if you're not getting the views you want it's because you suck and you're not willing to look in the mirror and say that.
And I get it. Like, that's hard. That hurts my ego or it's everyone's ego, right?
And so when you want to win so bad, your ego doesn't matter anymore. That's when you start to see the fact that this is a skill -based game over a money game. I mean, I won't say who, I literally had a client that came to me and they said they spent $100 ,000 on this content that was like sketch comedy.
And I was like, why do you think this will get you views? Like, cause they're like, well, we spent money. I'm like, this is not, it's not how it works.
You don't spend money and win. Like this is, you know, only on skill. And unfortunately that did not go very well for them.
And they were very disappointed. And I was like, yeah, like, I really wish you just consulted me before you spent a hundred thousand dollars on this content. Cause I could have told you off the rip.
That's not a good idea that will not get you views. Like I know people that film on their iPhone and they're like, uninterrupted edit uninterrupted non -edited one takes of people talking and they get a million views off these videos and it's only just in their bedroom like how much money does that cost like nothing it's absolutely free but that person understands the audience they're trying to get more than the people who you know don't get a million views and they spend all this money on it how many views does someone need to get to make ten thousand dollars a month on youtube well so it comes down to um your rpms which is going to be like your average dollar per thousand views when it comes to adsense but you know i i think i already mentioned this but i do think like this is like the worst form of getting paid i think the best form of getting paid is going to be like affiliate links it's going to be like sponsors or it's going to be you having a product or service right and so once you put that in description you will get paid before youtube you know monetizes the channel right and so
If you're trying to get a $10 ,000, I would say like, hey, get an affiliate marketing partnership. Tell them not to pay you in a sponsor and just say, hey, just give me the affiliate link. And everyone who uses my code gets X amount of dollars or I get X amount of cut from it.
Like I got a buddy who did that with a single video, one video. And he got $30 ,000 from that one video because of that affiliate link. Way more than AdSense ever paid him, right?
And what's funny is the video was on how to blow up on YouTube. And so he's like putting the money where his mouth is literally, right? And so he made $30 ,000 in that one video in that one month.
And so I have a client where I worked with them. And within two months, he was making $10 ,000 a month on YouTube. But it was not from AdSense.
It was from his service, right? So if you're like, I want to make $10 ,000 a month as soon as possible, well, get someone else's products. or get your products and service and put it in front of those viewers, and you will get there a lot sooner versus waiting for YouTube to monetize you.
Okay, we talked about the thumbnail a little bit. Let's go into title. How do you develop a great title?
So irony, which we already talked about, there's going to be max loading, which I'll get into in a second. There's going to be rhythm, which is how the title is read. And then there's going to be just three focal points in your title.
And so we already talked about irony, but when it comes to max loading, This is a term that I just kind of decided on myself to coin where you'll see April Lin. She talks about like front loading titles, which is like basically you put the most critical information in the very first few words of your title, which is how she justifies it being cut off when it's past the 50 character mark.
Right. But I kind of looked at it and thought, well, what if instead of. You front load it.
What if you just max load it? What if like every single word was just that and nothing else? And it's essentially the smallest amount of words within a title while still.
giving all the information needed, right? So once you're there, then all of a sudden you're like, oh cool, there's no fat. Like this would theoretically be the best version of this title.
With rhythm, I actually read a lot of Shakespeare's sonnets a lot, which is very odd, right? Because no one really talks about that. But when you read his sonnets, they're not meant to be read out loud, right?
They're meant to be read internally. And when you read something internally, it's interesting because it's like you're hearing it and you're saying it in your brain at the same time. And you can tell when it flows in the way that it's supposed to, where it's like satisfying to the brain.
And with titles, you obviously don't have to do like iambic metameter or anything crazy like that. But there is a sense of rhythm that I tried to hit. that I think every title should do because when there's less resistance when reading the title internally, you automatically have a better title, right?
It's easy to ingest the information. So for example, when you have, you know, why intellectuals are fucking idiots. kind of just rolls off the tongue it's actually pretty easy to say when i look at like shakespeare's titles for his plays a lot like hamlet prince of denmark really easy to say um the tragedy of macbeth or much ado about nothing you just just roll off the tongue just so easy to say and that's something i try to do a lot with my titles it's like i want to make sure this feels like this is like you don't have a weird title where like i did this and this happened and then you're just like dude i can't even like get through this thing in one go the moment they have to like read it again and like, wait, hold on, what does that say?
That's when you really screwed up. And the third one that I like to follow is like the three points. Like you just want three things to point at in your title before it gets like overloaded, right?
I have a video I did with Eric the Electric. I let food companies control my diet for seven days. So we have food companies is one, and then we have controlled diet is three, and then we have seven days.
And then we actually just barely, I think. kind of crossed that three point mark, but I allowed it because I feel like the rest of it's simple enough to justify it. And when you know, those are the three things you have to know.
You have to know like the food company aspect. You have to know there's like. diet aspect which is the competition part of it right but then there's these seven days now we got time constraints so it has to do it within this certain time period and we were very specific on the wording too which is like seven and the number instead of like seven spelt out because it transcends language like mathematics is the language of the universe so it made it easy to be more broad of a title is there something you got wrong with packaging that you would go back and do differently when you're first starting maybe 100 I worked with Mark and when we first started, I really misunderstood like what you know there's so much i understood but there's a lot that i still was learning even to this day i'm still learning a lot but with that there was a video we did specifically where i believe it was about uh self -awareness like the self -awareness paradox i think was the title and if you look at the thumbnail it's like to me i i mean the video did okay it got like 400 000 views which was like about his average but i felt personally embarrassed but i was like ah like this felt more like an entertainment channel than it did a you know
uh, self help edgy education type channel. And I think like, I really didn't understand the audience effect. Like not all audiences are the same.
Like Alex Ramosi talks about this a lot when he figured it out. And ever since he talked about it, I was like, wow, I'm so dumb. I should have just known this from the beginning.
Right. With Alex, he started, you see his channel, he's going to a bunch of education stuff and then switches to. purely kids level type entertainment, his mouth wide open.
By the way, I don't know why everyone did that. I could just tell you, like, you're not getting a higher CTR because your mouth is open. It was the expression on the face, right, that was working.
It's like the white in the eyes specifically. But, you know, I digress. He realized that he's getting more views, but he's getting less sales.
And he's like, huh, I'm making less money, but more people are watching. Why is that? Oh, because I'm making videos for kids.
I'm making videos for people who value entertainment, not people who value high -level business advice. So he totally rolled it back. He said, we're going to go for less views, but more targeted views, which is just for people who want to be an entrepreneur, want to learn about the tools of the trade of being an entrepreneur.
Seeing all that, and I look back at Marks, I was like, oh, that was what I did wrong. I should have really focused on people who want edgy self -help content in the education vein, not purely entertainment around that same niche, if that makes sense. Yeah, because it seems like going back to talking about what your goals are, you're starting a new channel.
you know, is your goal views? Is your goal money? What's your goal?
Because if your goal is views, you probably want to go broad or more broad than you would. Cause if I'm not mistaken, Alex Ramosi has a second channel, like more Mosey where it's like his, it's like his clips channel from his in -person stuff, which is highly valuable, but it's very targeted and he gets no views, but I think makes way more money from that than the broad stuff.
where he's getting maybe millions of views, but it's just general business advice. Yeah, I think like even with his clips, I think you could do him a lot better personally. Like I think right now I'm looking at him like, these aren't doing as well as I think they even should.
But to his credit, yes, that is correct. And yeah, I think like when you think of it in terms of like, cause I know people, like I've spoken to people directly where they get a thousand views on a video, but they're selling a $10 ,000 offer and they get 10 sales from that one video. So literally a...
1 ,000 views equals $100 ,000, which if you say that, you're like, how is that even possible? It's like, well, he made a video really long. It was very boring.
It was not very well edited. Just a little him with a marker on a dry erase board. And that's it.
That equaled a bunch of sales because they believed him. And he only targeted the people who wanted the service and nobody else. Is there a channel outside of your own work that you think is brilliant?
yeah this is cheating uh because i just started working with them but his name is mac uh he worked with a rack back in the day helped him build his channel from like nothing to you know what it ended up being when he left and then he worked with uh jimmy mr beast on his channel he was like their post -production director and i remember the day i remember like i was talking with hudson i was like why are these videos all of a sudden amazing?
And he was like, oh, they just hired Mac. And I was like, ah, got it. Like these, like the production, or sorry, the post -production, specifically the editing were phenomenal.
And I like really took note of that. And then he goes from that to working on Beast Games. And then from there to making his own channel with Harry.
And they're just like. They made a video, this one video that really caught my attention because they had a couple that were out. They were pretty good.
Don't get me wrong. They were well executed and everything. But I saw this one video that was I convinced a stranger to rob a bank.
I think I've seen that. alan was crazy yeah i was floored by how well this video was done um and it starts off like any other video where it's just like oh yeah like cool like you know the type of mr beast -esque type challenge thing but then it just really goes deep into the narrative like i think maybe five minutes in the video where you learn uh spoilers i guess but you learn like he's not actually um you know uh being tricked because he wants money he's being tricked because they hired fbi agents to pose as if they want him to spy on mac to figure out uh what his plan is to rob the bank and that moment that happened i was like dude this is just like a movie this doesn't even feel like a youtube video and i was like the way it goes from there just gets deeper and more layered and like the way it ends i think is perfect like this it literally by the time you're at the last like five minutes you're like this is literally just a movie how many views did that get
Right now, I think it's at 21 million. 21 million. Yeah.
And if I'm not mistaken, it's a newer channel. Yeah. So he, well, he started it a while back, but, you know, he got busy working with Beast.
And so, like, I think, I think, like, you know, he posted a video about AI helping him with his life or something, like an AI helping him like that. And then immediately just, like, started working for Beast and had, like, put the pause in the channel. But he just started coming back.
So recently just reamped it. Yeah. And just started reposting it maybe a couple months ago, maybe.
four months ago a few months and he's already had 21 million views yeah yeah it's crazy yeah yeah and i i just i was so impressed and i saw it at the time when i had like eight million but i just knew it was gonna bang like i was like dude i i never do this but i immediately reached out and i was like i have to work with you guys like this is i think you guys are making some of the best videos on the you think that'll end up even getting 30 40 50 100 million views or something oh yeah oh yeah i think it'll it'll probably it'll probably get 50 for sure but like depending upon the next rounds of uploads they do how consistent are they uploading uh it's they're they're hard to make man they're really hard it's like a movie right yeah a lot of people i'm sure yeah uh well yeah i mean you know i'm under india i can't really talk about how they're made or anything yeah they just put a lot of time and effort into the edit and production because they just really care to make sure like these things are the best they can possibly be so is that the kind of stuff you watch for fun
Yeah, yeah, it is. Yeah, I, you know, I watch like a lot of films, like, like, weirdly enough, and I get actually a lot of inspiration from movies and TV. And so when I see something that feels like it's at that quality, it's at that level, then I get a lot of inspiration when it comes to what I do.
What are some maybe thumbnails that you admire most right now? It's interesting, because there are a lot of people that are making really good, like designs that aren't necessarily the type of niches or ideation that would attract the biggest audience possible.
But they're still absolutely crushing it, right? And when it comes to what they do. I think like Michelle Carre is really good at thumbnails.
Like she has a pretty hard job where you have to succeed and trailblaze in a niche that really isn't defined yet. And so you're kind of just like, it's like the Jimmy problem where you're like. like literally like really try to think about like where they are like how do you make a thumbnail you are confident will get 100 million views right like where do you go to who do you talk to there's like no one right you so you're just kind of like oh okay you realize you are the trailblazer so you have to bring things down to first principles to be like how do i make the best possible thumbnail possible within my niche and within my audience right and so with michelle like they're not like getting you know 30 million views or anything like that but like they're so well executed they're so excellent and when it comes to what she's trying to do i remember one specifically where she did one on magicians and there's one where she's like in the you know the container box that you'd see like you know houdini or something and she's trying to break out she's like in the middle of drowning or something and i just like when you do fear -based packaging i know it crushes um and you think of like statistically what are the biggest fears that people have well
drowning consistently amongst all human beings is the number one fear every single person has on planet earth right and it doesn't matter you know what life experience you have or what you know thing happened to you when you're five or whatever like this is the one thing that everyone will be afraid of for even if they have never experienced drowning before and so when she had the one of her drowning i was like this is the highest level of fear -based packaging you can possibly get and i think it got like eight million if i remember correctly uh so it's still like a high performer for her um even though it may not like you know oh it didn't get 30 million I think that's like, well, it doesn't necessarily make it like a bad thumbnail.
It just means like, you know, she is in a niche where it's harder to succeed like you would and maybe more kid creator type content. That makes sense. Where you're at right now, before you start going and working with a creator, right, as their strategist, what are the things you look for?
You know, are you picky with who you choose to work with? Yeah. Yeah, very.
Like for me, like I just want to see that you are taking this as seriously as I am, you know, because I. I was just telling this to a buddy of mine where he said like, oh, I want to be the best. And I'm like, dude, everyone says that.
Like everyone I talk to says that. I don't know about like, you know, everyone on earth, but everyone within my sphere who's like, I asked them what they want. They say, I want to be the best, right?
The problem is they're not the best, right? They can't all possibly be the best, statistically speaking, right? And so when...
When I hear that, to me, I tell him like, that's just a high level NPC behavior to say, I want to be the best. And he was like, well, frick. I was like, what does it take?
What does it actually take? And I'm like, if you look at like LeBron, he didn't go around all day telling every person, I want to be the best, I want to be the best, I want to be the best, right? He just went back to doing more reps.
And you do that for a decade, then you're like, wow, that guy's the best. And that's that's really what happens. And so the truth is, like people who say that they it's like they want to get around to having to do the reps for a long time.
I promise you, most people that say that give them five years, they probably won't even say it anymore. And so. when i see something like that i see someone's like i'm putting skin in the game like i am you know like the violin expert anth anthony morales like he was doing this for 30 years and i'm like okay i can work with that i can see like you're taking this seriously or um when there's someone who's like i'm putting you know x amount of money in this because i i really mean it and it's like okay cool like i can see you're taking this seriously but i have someone who's like a kid and they're like i want to be famous and i'm like dude no, like this is never going to work, right?
Do you have kids approach you like, well, blow me up on YouTube. I mean, yeah, it has happened. And for them, it's like, look, like proud, like that's what you want.
That's awesome. But like, you have to really understand this is not like a get rich quick type of thing. It's not like a get clout instantly type of thing.
Like this is something that's going to cost you a lot, right? Because like I said, this is one of the most competitive platforms on earth, right? And so to win here, you have to, have something that most people don't have or you are so determined like i'm gonna do this no matter what and the truth is like if that's the case i'm like dude like i would say like i point people to the right direction all the time like look like have you done patty galloway's accelerator accelerator program and if they say no i'm like okay go do that and then come back and talk to me like oh i don't have the money and i'm like go make the money And once you make the money, then go take the program.
And they say, I'm not willing to do that. I'm like, you're not serious. You don't really want to do this.
Right. And so once someone comes to me and says, like, I've had clients like this, like, OK, I've taken Patty Galloway's Accelerator program. I have worked with this one strategist that I know personally.
Right. And I've spent X amount of money. I have these employees, I have this team in place.
I'm just missing the best strategist. And I'm like, OK. perfect.
I can totally work with all this stuff. Like even if we don't have our big wow factor, everything else is there where we can find it, you know? And so as long as they're willing to kind of like go along with that journey and have that sweat equity, then I'm like, yeah, like, let's go.
Like, I'm excited to do this. All right. Let's go to level three.
Let's go. Level three is a hundred thousand views. So a creator at this level, right?
maybe they're stuck in this level they're stuck on a hundred thousand up to three hundred thousand they're in the hundreds of thousands of views right per video how do they get to the next level right what's the what's what's the next step yeah so now we're going from 100 000 to a million views yep okay this is cool because this is where you get into like like some pretty decent like competitive uh this is where you get to a pretty decent competitive field here so if you're like in kids entertainment or you're just entertainment in general regardless of age that's going to be the most competitive possible the reason why is because it actually is the easiest to get a million views on the problem is like the most amount of people on youtube are trying to do this so that's the reason why they're all trying to do is because it's that easy right and so but now there's so many people here the competition is so high winning is hard um the way that i like to do it where it's like let's say we're at a hundred thousand um
Let's pretend we're in a niche that's like not so dominated yet where I'm like, OK, so so far, let's say no one in this niche gets a million views per episode. What is it going to take for us to get there? And it's to say, like, we got a decent team because we're at 100K.
We probably got a couple of people. um we're probably doing decent on thumbnails probably decent content so the things like what do we need to elevate to put in the 20 effort that gets us the 80 return this is going to be entirely on um our ideas we need to up them like no matter where we think we are no matter how good we think we are they're not good enough right so these ideation sessions we're having they're not good like what we're coming up with is not good so what's wrong is it the process of what we think a good idea is is it the way we're getting our information like is it um someone on the team is holding us back by saying every idea we have is a banner like there's some there's some bottleneck in the process that's not getting us the best results yet and that's really what i look at more if we're not hitting results at this level i'm not like going to my team cracking the web being like you need to get this client 100 like doesn't do anything right like we can't be results based that's how it works we just got to be heavily process orientated so i go back to the process and like what's wrong in our process what's not working here and you know it's with me and my team it's usually not a teammate issue um it's usually like okay there's something going on with our way of thinking and we'll
go back to who are we getting our inspiration from when we're trying to make our own thumbnails and we'll be like oh turns out they are doing something wrong we didn't figure out yet right um and so once we figure out like that one bottleneck and it's usually it's almost always it's in packaging it's in ideation and it's in the angle of our packaging and to walk that through i don't know if i went through that fully let me just do that here um with packaging there are like three steps to it um everyone thinks it's just design but that's like the least important part right you think of like like a cake, right?
If you see a cake without frosting, it probably won't look very appetizing to you. But the moment you put frosting on it, you're like, whoa, that cake looks great. But we changed like nothing.
Like we just put like, you know, 10 % of frosting to make the layers of the cake look good, right? And so in this case, the design is the 10 % frosting to make the rest of it look appealing. And so it's not that it matters.
Like it's like the 10 % effort. What really matters is that 90 % underneath is the thing that matters. And that's going to come to your concept.
And that's going to come to the angle of said concept. concept. Right.
So let's say like I make up a video like, you know, let's say I have a knitting channel. Right. People say like, oh, knitting is a niche.
You can't get a million views. And I'm like, I love that so much. I'm like, yes, you can.
So let's say I have a knitting channel. Right. And I want to go broad entertainment as broad as freaking possible with this knitting niche.
Right. So I'll come up with a video that's like I knitted medieval armor is the title. And in the thumbnail, there's like an arrow hitting.
the knit armor and the text that says it actually works, right? Now you're like, no freaking way. You got to click on that video, but there's no freaking way you really did this, right?
And then you're like, no, for real, I really did. And this guy's gonna shoot me with an arrow. And you're like, oh my God, like, dude, are you gonna be okay, right?
And so you do all that and you're like, how does it not get a million views, right? Knitting as you jump out of an airplane or something. Yeah.
You got to go crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because the concept, you know, knitting, it's a boring topic for many people, let's say.
So, you have to add some element of what the... Yeah. And what's funny is like you're using that against them.
They're like, oh, knitting is boring. Like, good. Like, I'm going to use that against you.
Right. And so anyway, so all to say is like what I did there with angle and concept is very specific where let's say I had the exact same title, but my thumbnail sucks. Like, how does it work?
Like, it's just a guy actually knitting, like literally knitting a thing of armor. That's not as impactful as seeing someone get hit by an arrow. Right.
Because the idea is knit like the thing that you have knitted. I'm not even sure I'm using the terminology correctly. But the thing that you have knitted is like soft and it's not going to stop an arrow.
You know that just from anyone who's interacted with anything like this. And so now all of a sudden we put someone in a high stress scenario with a very unlikely hit of them coming out okay, telling them no, they came out perfectly like okay in this video. So we're playing against their expectations with the angle.
And the concept is like, you know, you think like what goes with, like what goes with the medieval armor is an arrow is a perfect example. But I could have, done something dumb that's like off topic where it's like he gets hit by a bull like a like a bull with horns or whatever you're like wait what the hell does that have to do with midi like you realize it's so confusing to try to figure out what i'm trying to say and that's the example of the a bad angle on a good concept, right?
So a good angle is like, we stayed on brand, which is like, you know, what goes with medieval armor? Like, well, an arrow, that's what it's supposed to do. So let's put it to test, see if our knitting did the exact same thing.
So like, there's like the quick work ends when it comes to like, what is good concept and what is good angle on that concept? And design is like the 10 % that makes the cake look attractive. What's the biggest problem with YouTube right now?
I've heard some people say, it's the algorithm or I mean, they're maybe just blaming it on YouTube because they can't get their views. But is there a piece of advice like in everyone's mind that's just holding them back?
Yeah. Mindset is a big one. If you think YouTube is rigged, you'll find a self -fulfilling prophecy, right?
Like it's the same thing with life. Like if you think like nothing's going to work out, like you'll find yourself in a position where nothing works out. It's interesting how that happens because it's like when you believe something, your mind looks for subconsciously, not even consciously.
It's looking for stuff to prove what your belief system is correct. And that's why your mindset is so damn important because if you said, I'm going to win no matter what, guess what happens? Your mind starts looking for it.
Right. So I was looking for like, where are the avenues, where are the pathways that make sure this happens? Right.
Then all of a sudden you like run into someone who's like a cracked like YouTube guy, but no one knows them yet. You're like, oh, perfect. This is how I win.
And like, I'm going to, you're going to be on my team and I'm going to help you with like, you know, getting exposure, et cetera. And so then all of a sudden, like you just start looking for ways to win and then all of a sudden just starts happening. But now what, what happens if that person who did it comes to someone, someone else will be like, oh, well, you're, you just got lucky.
YouTube's rigged. Like that person's like, dude, you. like i didn't get here because it was rigged like i was intentionally like playing all this stuff and doing all this work and put all this effort to get it to the point here and if it truly was if it truly was rigged YouTube would stop growing as a business model.
Like to kind of run it back a bit, like back in the days in 2015, YouTube was actually a hard landscape to get a million views on. Like if you got a million views, it's like you'd be on Ellen, right? Like that was like a big deal, right?
Unless you were Casey Neistat, you ain't getting a million views on your video, right? And the reason why is because YouTube was like doubling down on their winners. And honestly, business -wise made a lot of sense.
Like if you have a basketball team and you got like LeBron, you're like, you get all the time. Like you're gonna be on the court the whole time. You're gonna get all the attention.
to make sure you are like our branding, right? And technically, it makes sense. But all of a sudden, you realize you're not growing.
Like, why aren't we going? Oh, but maybe because we just put all of our money in this one guy when we have a whole team of players that can kill it, right? And so YouTube started to get really smart and like, hey, what if we got the new people that are coming on?
They're uploading their first video. What if we got those people to find an audience? What would it take for that to happen?
I remember the day I learned this was the case. There was a creator. He was like a philosophy creator.
And I remember seeing his first upload get 20 ,000 views. And the video was very poorly edited. It was not very well filmed.
The audio was good. Luckily, the audio was good. And I could just see him, right?
It was like the bare minimum, 20 minutes, him talking about Schopenhauer. Super niche stuff. And yet I just saw him get 20 ,000 views.
And I remember just seeing that. And this was in 2022. And I saw that.
I was like, I've never seen that happen before. And I just subscribed to his channel. I followed him.
And he ended up like getting... he ended up getting like millions of views down the road. He ended up becoming like the, you know, one of the one percenters in his niche over time.
And I just, I liked looking at him as a case study to be like, okay, his niche is small. Like his videos aren't very good, especially at first they weren't very good, but they got a lot better over time. And everything I'm seeing tells me this video, this channel shouldn't work and it is working.
And when I realized that, I was like, oh, YouTube has changed the way they distribute viewership to creators. And then all of a sudden it just like taught me, like, if you're brand new, you can kill it. And I never had that feeling before where there was a time when that wasn't actually the case.
Like you will only get views if you are favored by YouTube. But these days, like YouTube knows, if you want to grow, you have to give new creators, the next generation of people making YouTube videos, their fair attempt on getting the viewership they want as well. Otherwise.
you just will stop growing as a business. So that's a plus for new creators because you're saying the algorithm now is giving them more of a chance or in some cases, intentionally trying to push them so they can start on their YouTube journey. But is that hurting those older creators that have been creating for five, 10 years because they're just like, we're not going to give you as many views anymore.
We're going to work with the new people only. Well, it's funny because it's like what ends up happening is you just get new people want to jump on the platform. right so let's say like let's say you got a buddy let's say they come and tell you like dude i just got a hundred thousand views on my video you're like what you did what does that make you do they make you go like oh i don't like youtube right you're like Oh shoot, really?
And like you watch the video, you're like, dang, what do you do? You're thinking about it, right? You think, how do I make a channel, right?
And all of a sudden you just found yourself in 10 hours of the YouTube algorithm watching all these videos on how to kill it on YouTube, right? What just happened? They just got a brand new fan, right?
And that's what happens when you get new creators making videos that are crushing, you created a whole new audience doing this. And at the beginning, it might be really short. It might be, or sorry, at the beginning, it might be a really small audience, right?
But over time, this is gonna start to compound. super heavily to the point where you go from only giving your creators $30 billion per year to now, last I checked, I think it was like $70 billion they distribute to their creators every year. And to put that in perspective, Netflix's budget, I think last I heard was $17 billion per year.
And they're making content as well as distributing it. YouTube is smart. They just have to distribute it and give them the cut and then they're done.
What are the three metrics that matter most for long form YouTube videos? So we talked about a few of these, but we'll go over them. It's going to be your AVD, average viewer duration, and it's going to be your impressions.
These are the three things I look at more than anything. The reason why I look at these pretty heavily is because the APV is only going to, you know, we're going to see a high AVD if our APV is high. And so that's why I look at that first to see, like, is our intro crushing?
And a lot of times, like, a bad intro can be an issue of correlating the good packaging with the intro. excuse me, that's going to tell us all those things, right? And when it comes to our AVD, that's going to be like long -term growth.
So if our AVD is high, then we know for sure long -term we have something here. It's just maybe it's not going to work right off the bat. And impressions, like the only way, the only way we are getting views is impressions.
And a lot of people are going to point to click -through rate all the time. And the problem is like click -through rate is dependent upon another metric. You know, I hear people ask me, Jake, what's good click -through rate?
What is good click -through rate? i don't know what that means uh to be completely honest like good click -through rate is like, people will say like 20%, right?
I got 20 % click -through rate, which is cool, except look at your impressions. It's like a hundred impressions, right? Now we got no views with our high click -through rate.
That was no longer a good metric because it didn't get us the thing we wanted, right? And so once you see another video, we'll get like 1 % click -through rate, right? That's physically impossible.
Let's just say we did, right? Oh no, only got 1 % click -through rate. Man, what a bummer.
But like, look at your impressions. We just got like a billion impressions. Now all of a sudden that 1 % is a real good metric because it correlated to viewership, right?
And so that's the thing I ignore a lot. Like it can be an indicator that we're doing something right, but it's not the indicator that we're necessarily getting views. Like I use it more as a guide to, okay, we probably have a decent angle.
We probably have a decent packaging. But if our impressions were down, that'd be like, oh no, nevermind. Like clearly it does not matter.
Our packaging sucks, whatever. How much money does a video with a hundred million views make? Well, it's going to be on our RPMs and RPMs are going to be high and low depending upon the content we're making, which is going to be dependent upon the audience we get.
So let's say you are in software, right? And you have a channel that's talking about software. Well, guess what happens when you talk about software and you got.
I mean, 100 million views would be insane. But let's pretend that we did. We got 100 million views.
Well, guess who those 100 million people are listening to software? They are entrepreneurs. They are people with money.
They are people who want to be productive. They're people who have like disposable income. They're willing to put on a subscription -based model to buy a digital product that you can essentially sell to everyone on planet Earth, right?
Well, that is going to correlate to a whole lot of money for the people who advertise their service or product on there, right? And so guess who is fighting for the space to get on that 100 million view video? It's only the A players.
It's only the people with all the money in the world. And so they'll go, no, no, no, I'll pay way more money to get my ad in front of that video, right? So then what happens to that creator?
Well, their RPMs go from like maybe, you know, $5, right? To... literally like, I mean, that would be insane.
That'd be like a hundred dollars or something like RPMs. And people think that's impossible, but I won't say who, I won't say who, but I've literally seen a creator show me they had RPMs of $95 on videos. And just so everyone's clear, what is RPM exactly?
It's a French term that I can't pronounce because I'm not French, but essentially it's like revenue per thousand is pretty much what it's saying. And so you're... Revenue per thousand is just like the amount of money you make every thousand views.
So if your RPMs are like $1, that's really low. What's the general range of RPM? Yeah, so what's like average is like any one creator should expect to get RPMs.
Low would be like $1 to $4 is pretty low. $5 to $10 is like... around your average, a little slightly above average.
Once you're around anywhere between $15 or higher, you're looking really good. Like you're making $15 per thousand views like that. Now you're looking really freaking good now.
And so it's interesting because like you can see a video, two different videos, both got 100 ,000 views, but one makes 10 times more than the other based upon the content. And what's funny is like if you're in a talking head educational video, which most statistically most videos are. All you changed was the words that you said.
And so if you say different words on this video versus this one, you can make 10 times more money, which... The same talking head. Yeah.
Okay, yeah. It's interesting because I thought, and I'm not a YouTube expert, but I thought, okay, like maybe children's thing or certain niches would have a certain RPM, maybe certain... you know luxury niches maybe you had a higher rpm yeah which is true that's all true okay that's all true yeah okay and so but like you think about like you know um the difference between like a watch collector and like someone who's like specifically about rolexes like who's gonna have higher rpms here right or someone's like i am a car channel i like to work on like mechanical car stuff versus luxury cars yeah the advertisers are willing to pay more to get in front of those higher end buyers it's not just that they're willing to pay more it's that these are um these are higher uh higher priced products or services and so in order to you know get in the door you're already you have more money right higher competition yeah teach me about the retention graph right what are you looking for when you see a retention graph because i feel like at this stage at this level retention is so important yes yeah like once you're at 100 000 views like that's when you really want to start looking at content because this is where like you know
Like what I said before, where it's like your content game can be OK, it can be average, like to below 100 views, 100 ,000 views to get above 100 ,000 views. Now you're in heavy competition space. But what's interesting here is like you can only make a video so good before you pretty much like tapped out the like the highest polish it could possibly be.
And I'm going to walk us through an analogy to help explain this a little further. um so a lot of people when they talk about youtube they're trying to figure out like what is the angle i'm supposed to see this at and i think a lot of people mistakenly see it as like an artistic platform and don't get me wrong like i love the art that's on youtube like gox is a great example of an artist on youtube and he makes like phenomenal videos and so it's not to discredit people who are artists on youtube but it is to say youtube is not necessarily an artistic blaze uh artistic uh platform right and so for me like what i really see often is youtube has way more correlators with consumable products more so than something that's like an artistic merit right and i think about this often with like candy bars specifically because you know the beast team has feastables and i think about that a lot when they talk about it a lot when i think about like how does that industry work right you probably have like an entrepreneur right now who sells candy and they're like what the hell how come hershey's revenue every year is so much higher than mine don't they know my quality is so much better than theirs and they're probably right but you know me not being this industry me just approaching as a strategist i could just
go back to the far aisle look at their candy bar look at the wrapper look at the branding look at what they called it and go oh i know exactly why you're not getting sales you want and they'll be like what the hell jack you didn't even try it like how do you know and like because you're not in a quality based game like chocolate can only taste so good unless you're like getting chocolate from switzerland or something right and so um when it comes to like the quality of your candy it's the reason why like you know i think elon musk tried to get in that industry but when he tasted all the flavors he was like oh it tastes the same it can only be so good and you just left right because you can't really improve that anymore and so when it comes to like the quality of the content i do agree with the philosophy that jimmy says there's no such thing as a perfect video that being said when you decide on a video it can only be so good now right and so we talked about our knitting video right with the knight and the armor like that can only be so good before we have like you know done the assignment properly and after that it's just like now it's just polished and it's like how entertaining can this video be before it's just nothing but you know dope
dopamine maxing at this point, where it's just a bunch of loud noises and color. And I really try to like avoid all that when it comes to content. It's just like, how do you make a good story?
How do you make sure the script's good? How do you make sure it's like paced well? And then it's just, you know, editing after that.
So anyways, all this to say is like this, the quality here matters, but it can only be so good before we start to realize like, oh, the problem is actually our idea. Like this idea is just not very good. Like maybe we try that video and we think it's a banner.
You and me are like, yes, it's a banner. It gets a thousand views. We're like.
Maybe the idea wasn't as good as we thought it was, right? Because if you have a good idea, like even with like, you know, decent content, good idea, good packaging, you're going to get 100 ,000 views. But now we want to get to a million.
You can't just be like a good idea. It has to be like a great idea. And the only way we're going to know for sure is we ask the question like in that consumable idea is like, am I truly?
advertising the best idea possible in the best way possible and that's really like you know probably you'll overshoot it if you do that properly you probably won't get a million views if you do that right probably get like eight million views if you do that right and when you're reading that retention graph what are you looking for in that retention graph the thing i'm looking for is like where's fall off that's the first thing and when i'm looking at the fall off is like you'll see there's the line and people will say this all the time like you want this to be as flat as possible so you have drop at the beginning because that is how it is and let's say you get your drop to apvs now at 80 and now you want this to be as close to 80 by the time this is over but statistically speaking you're probably gonna get to like 30, 40 % by the time you're at the end.
But if you're like really freaking good, it's like by the time you get the end, it's like above 40. But you also like that very last stretch. It's just like as flat as freaking possible.
And I've done this before with some creators like Hudson Matter, like famously. has some of the best flat graphs I've ever seen by the end of his videos. And it's because we got really smart by the end where we would have these videos where we do these like gift giving away videos to other big like kids creators.
So we did one with the Royalty family. We do a bunch with the sister Salish. And what we would get here is like.
You have like, you know, she's going to get five gifts, wrap, she has to wrap all of them. But by the end, she can only pick one to keep was like the thing that we'd say in the beginning of the video. So by the time we get there, we all know the drill.
Like, oh, she's going to open each one. So there's like a value to see her open each gift, see her reaction. But now it's like, all right, you can only pick one.
Which one is it? And so now it's like the whole video has been built up to this one moment, this one decision. And when you have that tension of like, oh no, what's the outcome?
What's she gonna get, right? It's as flat as freaking, it doesn't get flatter than that. And so what we're doing instead of fast paced cutting, we're doing the opposite.
We're like drawing it out, right? We're making it like as tense as possible. and adding that music, adding some like heartbeat sounds and stuff to just like really get the tension going.
And that's how it gets really, really flat. It's just like that anticipation of how is this going to resolve, especially the more stress and conflict you put on the video. Let's talk about cadence and consistency, right?
I've heard from some people how consistency is so important. You have to upload every Sunday and Tuesday and you have to stay consistent. How important is having a cadence, staying consistent?
Is that helpful with YouTube's algorithm? This is going to come down to what we want to get out of it. And also, let's bring it back to the level.
Let's say you're at 100K, and you're like, I want to get a million views per upload. Cadence is so damn important. Like, oh, yeah, you've got to be posting once a week for sure.
And I like to tell everyone that you want once a week or biweekly, depending upon how heavy of production are your videos. So if you're like, you know, I worked with one creator where he's much higher than 100K. His average is like 8 to 12 million per upload.
But he uploads once a quarter, right? And most people are like, yeah, they do that. Most people are like, what?
Like, you can't do that. You can't upload once a quarter. But I'm like, well, we do and we get what we want.
Like he gets 12 million videos, views per upload and gets a lot of money from it. And he's fine. Like he's like, life's great.
Right. And so once you're getting what you want, you can do whatever you want after that. But if you're like, I need to get a million per upload, I'm at 100K per upload.
yeah every freaking week dude we cannot miss a week right now because we need data we need reps and we need to learn what is our audience vibing with right so every upload is like a test and Everyone has the goal of getting views. And I like getting views, but not for the same reason as everyone else.
I like data. And that's what views are. Views are data to show me, okay, this thumbnail specifically crushes.
We should do this way more. Or, oh, this intro is absolutely dominating. Let's make sure we follow this intro to a T next time, right?
Or this idea, holy crap, we can make a whole bucket of content out of this. So now every week or every other week, we have a new video based on this type of formatting, right? And so weekly uploads or bi -weekly, I'd say bi -weekly would be like a minimum at, this rate because at that moment we're just now losing opportunity to get data, losing opportunity to get growth and losing opportunity to get reps.
And so, yeah, if you're at 100K, you absolutely have to. But if you're like, you know, you're getting an average of one to five mil per upload and you're like, I'm happy, I'm good. I'm profitable.
Yeah, do it. Like some people do that and they upload once a month. Some people do it every week and just like capitalize on it.
It just comes down to like, what's the thing you want to get out of the channel? What do you think about quality? versus the consistency, right?
Let's say someone's up, let's say someone's at this level, they're uploading once a week. Should they shoot for quality on those once a week or maybe go twice a week? Even if maybe you're giving away a little quality or the second one each week isn't as high quality as the first one because you don't have the time and, you know, to get it to put into it.
Yeah. You know, should they double down on quantity or should they double down on quality? Yeah.
So that's a really good question. Everyone asks me that.
I am very big on you don't want to, like very rarely do I suggest someone to upload more than once a week. It really depends on what's your niche that you're in and what does the lift look like to do that, right? So if you're making like, you know, like ARAC level quality productions.
no way in hell are you doing that twice a week like it makes no sense right um even if you batch shot even if you like optimize for the most amount of productivity possible and getting a video done the end result won't be worth it right you know i think like that's just really like what it comes down to you'll just get diminishing returns at that level but if you are like a gaming channel and your lift is pretty low and you're like well shoot i just filmed one video might as well film another my editor can edit both in a single day and it's like okay well maybe two may not hurt um but statistically speaking it's probably going to hurt the channel um that's just what i've seen in the past so it's like you know you can upload five five times a week you can upload every single day you're probably statistically unless you're like a high level reaction channel or like streaming channel and you're clipping you know your streams you're probably not getting a hundred thousand or million views per upload at that point um the only way i can
say from the way that i've done it you can get a million views per upload is if you are you are uploading once twice or yeah once a week uh or twice a month or one time a month is like that's the only way it's gonna happen for you and that's usually just because the videos that you're making that get a million views are way harder to make they take way more time and wear money in fact i was working with the royalty family and i suggested to them like you know hey if we want to get more views per month we should upload less not more and that's what i really try to tell everybody when you're at a really high level is like you don't want to upload more you want to upload less and they've done that and I'm not trying to take the credit or anything, but when I started working with them, we were getting 100 million views per month.
100 million views per month? Which was a fall off. That was them not performing at peak.
What was their peak? It was like 150, I think, in the summer of the year before, if I remember correctly, 160, somewhere around there. And when I left, it was at 200 million per month.
Was a big part of that change uploading less? Yes. Yeah.
150 million views per month they went down to 100 million views per month and then they started working with you and then you told them to upload less they uploaded less and then they went back up to 200 million views per month yeah it seems so counterintuitive yeah and i think like you know like ollie he's like really great like a really hard worker he's the guy that runs and owns the channel Uh, and he was, he was like, he has this like, you know, like LeBron type energy where he's like, I want to kill him.
I want to be the best. I want like, you know, like no excuses type of thing. And I love that energy so much.
And I was, I was just like, you know, I think we can get there more with less. I just really think so. And I think like, you know, was that the only change or were there other things too?
We changed a bunch. Okay. But that, but is it, do you think that was the big driver?
Like, cause there was a lot he's really good at, you know, he's been doing this for a long time. Right. And so he is really good at making, like telling a great story.
really going to come up with a good idea. Like he, he knows like how to play the game really well. Right.
There was just certain things that were just like stuff that like you just miss when you're just like, you know, in the weeds for a long time. And that's something I think it's super valuable to strategists is like, they're not really in the weeds like you are. So not really like, you know, head buried with all this work and all this stress.
And I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing anymore. Like you just start questioning everything at that point, I imagine. And then I just able to come in and be like, Hey, like we should make our intros like this.
Like, Hey, we should make a thumbnails like this. We should do these type of ideas. And then it was just like, you know, it's funny because it's like the same thing like people point out to me as well like i mentioned like mario you know points out stuff that i do ron and it becomes blatantly obvious where i'm just like oh like yeah of course like of course like why didn't i see it that way right and i get those same aha moments with people like that i work with and it's not because like anything that they've done wrong it's just the nature of doing something for so long and being so in it it's easy to like not see stuff that's like right in front of you Who are the strategists that you look up to?
Because you mentioned Mario just now. I think you mentioned Patty Galloway earlier. Who are the top strategists that you look up to and you draw from?
You got Leroy. He's just absolutely... He crushes at starting people from zero.
He takes people that most people don't want because they... tell like his clients, you can't get views on this type of topic. Like there was one, uh, creator, uh, man, I'm blanking on the name, but they, uh, make a dog rescue content and literally strategies told them you can't get a million views doing this.
They said that I think verbatim. And then Leroy came on and like, they got a video at like, I think 8 million views. Right.
Uh, he's just, I absolutely goaded. He lives in my city and we talk sometimes. He's just like, absolutely awesome.
Uh, vaccine is another one. He's super smart, super good at what he does. Um, like.
like absolutely crushes it with the clients that he has. Yeah, I think like there's honestly a bunch. My buddy Dylan, he's like a strategist that works with real estate clients.
And he's like the best. There's literally, there's no way there's anyone better than him at this. So it's just cool to kind of like, you know, like talk to all of them and learn from them and figure out like, you know, where did they screw up?
And I throw my stuff and they tell me where I screw up. And it's just kind of cool to see like, you know, us like sharing the knowledge. We just kind of get better, like, you know.
like talking discord and whatnot it's the underground whatsapp community strategist yeah yeah it's a called a wi -fi money mafia vexian started it and he was cool enough to let me in wow let's talk about testing so at this level i'm guessing testing is a big part of it right you're at 100k or hundreds of thousands of views you're trying to get to a million you're trying to go even further how how important is testing at this stage Yeah.
Like, so I, like I said, like from the very beginning, you got to be testing heavily, I think. And people misunderstand that. I think like you can, you know, download the tools, like view stats, you can download the tools, like one to 10 or like vidIQ.
And you can see like how people test their thumbnails, like live. Right. And I actually like these tools because they show you some stuff that like, even like YT studio doesn't even show you, which I think is why they're super necessary.
But you'll see sometimes people will just like max test, like a hundred thumbnails and like a couple. hours of when they launch and i think like that could be a really big mistake depending on who you are so like let's say we're at 100k that's a really big mistake like you do not how do you test the hundred thumbnails doesn't youtube have like a b c test can you test more than three thumbnails no you can't you will they'll do is they'll just cut them off early okay they're just quickly throwing it out there, getting some views.
And then is there an automated software that does that or they're manually having to go back in and continue to upload new thumbnails? Yeah, there's some like native stuff that people use or people can probably like with AI, like make their own version of it, right? But ultimately, I kind of advise people not to do this that often.
My biggest advice, like I see it a lot, like you can look at probably for like this podcast where you'll see like the... like retention or not you can look at your own podcast and even see like uh how the views are coming in and you see like the first five days are like dormant like nothing nothing's happening and a big mistake would be like oh shoot it's not working maybe we should change the thumbnail maybe we should do but i'm like you might just kill the biggest growth spurt you're about to have because you didn't realize you you actually did it right it just needed to you know, take a few days before it really popped off, right?
And so when you're at 100K, that's probably a big mistake I see people make because they have a winning thumbnail, but they kill it early because they didn't see the views they wanted in the first like 24, 48 hours. And I'm like, dude, you're at 100K per average, like calm down. Like you really want just to like make a bet on a thumbnail you know is going to crush and just wait, just see what happens.
And if the only way like I would actually change something early is because we just made a mistake. Like you just did it wrong. Like I had a buddy who he, He uploaded a video where it was...
like how to be an autodidact. The problem is nobody knows what an autodidact is, right? And so that video was from, you know, immediate eight out of 10.
And I was literally gonna suggest like, hey, maybe just change this wording. And he already did it. Like he changed it to like a, how to work like a genius does.
And I'm like, okay, like that is way more broad, more people understand that versus autodidact. And the video went from an eight to a six just instantly. And that would be the only time I changed it.
It's like, oh wait, we actually screwed up. We did something wrong. But outside of that, I'm like, if you're confident you put all the time, effort and research, like you don't, you shouldn't change it now.
Just let it go and then learn from it. Like, okay, either this was a bomb and we're not going to do it again or as a mega banner and we're going to learn to do it again, you know? So you just get to learn from it.
All right, Jake, we're at level four, a million views. Let's go. I feel like this is many people's kind of goal.
Yeah. To hit a million views, right?
So let's say a creator's there. They're at a million views, but they're kind of stuck in that range. They're stuck in that single digit, 1 million, 2 million.
They're stuck in that range, which look, maybe it's a good problem to have. Okay. But they want to grow from there, right?
What are the next steps they need to take to grow from there? Okay. So now we're at like...
now we're at real high level now now it's like okay you probably have enough money to pay your team you have a legitimate business now you probably have sponsors you have your great affiliate marketing you're probably like if you're you know making a million views in your niche like dude you're doing pretty good right now so if you're like i know but i'm not happy here i don't just want a million views per upload i want to get 10 right like okay So now we're gonna have to bring out some big guns.
Now we're gonna have to be like, okay, now what needs to happen is like, we should be changing a lot of stuff here. The big one is gonna be like, we're gonna come back to ideation again, but like, okay, I know we think this is good because we're getting a million views from it, but it's not 10 million views good. So our ideation compared to that sucks, right?
And so we ask ourselves, why does it suck? Even though it's at a million views, a normal person would be like, what are you talking about? That's crazy.
Like, but we want 10 million. So for us, it sucks. So we go, okay.
What's wrong with our ideation? Why is it not broad enough? Let's say we come up with, let's just say like, I don't know, we're like, let's just make something up.
We're in like a niche where staplers is our niche for some reason, right? Like, okay, so how many people on earth know what a stapler is? Like we can figure out pretty quickly, okay, if you're in a first world country, you probably are aware of this.
Like if you're in America, if you're in the UK, et cetera, Europe, you probably know what this is. But like, we're pretty confident people outside of that, like maybe they're not as familiar with this, right? And so we go, okay.
What can we do to get the people who have no clue what a stapler is to click on our video? How can we do that, right? the easiest way to do this would be like niche integration.
So like, okay, so we have a stapler. Let's say like, I wonder how much a staple really costs, right? So we start like messing around with like, maybe like we mix stapling with money.
Cause I guarantee you more people on earth are familiar with the concept of money than they are familiar with the concept of a stapler. And so we start asking like, how do we like integrate money type content into staplers? So like there's channels that do this right now where like, you'll see like a thumbnail where it's like, you know, uh talking about how um we're all living on this like buy now pay later type mentality and it'll use the example of a chipotle burrito about like it costing like you know you know installment payments of like $2.
And you can tell where it's like, okay, that's like making more of a meta commentary on how ridiculous the state of the economy is right now. And that's not just going to get people who care about burritos and not just get people who care about financial content. It's going to get everyone who is feeling the pressure of the economic state of where things are, right?
that is going to be way more views than just this burrito cost this much or how come everything's by now pay later what we just did is like we just did a integration uh niche integration of two different uh aisles where one's food and one's money and put them together in our thumbnail so already we're gonna get more than we got before because now we're getting a new audience that we normally never get and if we do that right it's not gonna get a million or you know it could probably that could probably get us like eight million just from there and so we're like oof but we're not quite at ten they're like shoot okay so What does it take now to go from eight to 10?
This will be like, we feel like we maxed our idea to get more, but now we need to max like, okay, what's the best possible angle? We're like, I, you know, I'm just gonna do a Mr. Beast parody where it's like, you know.
um buying one like little tiny staple versus like a billion and let's say the title is like i bought staplers until i went broke is the video and it's like one of those like bro kid parody channels right there's like this is a stapler cost x amount of money i'm about to buy all this until i'm out of money sort of thing and just watching this dude like run his bank account down but we keep track of the bank account throughout the video so it's like you know like now my bank account goes from a hundred thousand i got or i got two hundred fifty thousand dollars we're gonna see how many statements i can buy with that sort of thing We just watched this dude blow through this stuff, right?
And so now we're like, now we're not just noticing, we're not just talking about money. We're not just talking about the stapler stuff. We're now just trying to get into like mass broad entertainment.
A really good version of this, like how to go from X, like from a million to 10 is Johnny Harris made a video. And I don't think it quite hit 10, but it probably will in its lifetime was like, he goes from the wealth brackets. And you see him starting from like, you know, here's someone who's making like, you know, $30 ,000 a year all the way up to someone making like, I think it was like $25 million a year.
And you just see like, he walks you through the lifestyles of what their day looks like. And this is just beyond like journalism. This is beyond like financial content.
This is like a meta commentary on the different lifestyles between those who have very little money and those who have so much money. It's like unconceivable sort of thing. And people who don't care about money.
financial content or journalism are very interested in that type of video. And so really what it takes now is, you know, that was a long way to say what it takes now is you got to ask, how do I get people that don't give a shit about my niche? They don't give a shit about my content.
How do I get those people to watch? And that's like the question to answer. Cause that's why it's so damn hard to get to like 10 million views at this point.
Interesting because we're at a million views. We're trying to get to 10. What I thought you would say is we're going to look at the retention graphs.
We're going to look at stats. We're going to see where the fall off is and we're going to optimize it. But what you're saying is the real work comes before you even shoot a video, before you even think of a title or thumbnail.
It's none of that. To get to the very next level, it's really about the idea and the angle. Yeah.
And if you don't have those. you're not going to go from, if you're stuck in an area, whether it's 1 million, like we're talking about now, or even 100K or 10K, if you're stuck here, if you don't have the right idea and angle before you even shoot your video, you're never going to get to the next level. 100%.
Yeah. I mean, because what's happening is like when you're looking at data, you're really trying to make corrections, right? You're like, oh, we had a fall off here.
Let's fix that. Right. And that correction is good.
But like the correction won't get you from one mil to 10. The correction will correct, you know, oh, we only got 800 ,000 views. Why?
Right. And so you might accidentally shoot to two mil, maybe three mil, but like 10 is not an accident. That was like really intentional.
What about that channel that's plateaued, right? They've just plateaued. They've been at it for a year.
They call you up, Jake, we're at a million views per video, which is amazing, but we've plateaued. Like we've tested new angles, new ideas, new thumbnails. We've done everything we can.
We look at retention graph. We're still stuck at a million views per video. Like, you know, how do you turn that channel around from a plateau to like, nope, now we're growing again.
How hard is that? If they've been stuck for a minute and they call me, it's probably going to be a lot easier because I'm on the outside. So like, it'll be like that, the, you know, the royalty situation where it's like, stuff will be blatantly obvious to me that because I'm on the outside of it, that won't be obvious to someone who's stuck in the weeds.
So that alone is going to be like super helpful. Just like, oh, this will, that alone will probably bring us from like, oh, we're stuck at three and I'm like, or stuck at one mil. It'll probably take us to like three just by making these few adjustments.
It's always the important stuff, right? I'm always like, oh, this thumbnail wasn't very good. And you thought it was, oh, this intro.
We're not like, look at our APV. It's lower than it should be. And I look at like correlators where like, you know, I actually did this with Ali where like, I looked at correlators to videos that were getting 25 million views when they're currently getting like 12.
And the big one was like, I saw their APV was at 91%, was like a constant big one. And I was like, oh, like, and I wonder why. And I look at it, it's so obvious.
I was like, to me, like when I like just took a look at it, where it's like, oh, his thumbnail was, it was Ferran holding a, he was holding out a piece of paper about his homework. And then the intro was him talking, holding that piece of paper with was his homework. I was like, oh.
We paid off the intro instantly in what we did in these ones. So I was like, the next one was like, okay, next one, this is what we're going to do. We're going to do this.
And that one, that video was, I think it was a video. It was like, um, the police at my house, asterisk 2am. And that one was, I think a instant two or one out of 10 when we did it.
And what's funny is they already shot that video. They're about to upload it. But I was like, no, we gotta, we gotta do the intro better.
We gotta make sure it matches with our thumbnail. How important is that? So what they see in the thumbnail, they end up seeing right away in the intro.
Is that like paying off the intro, as you call it? Is that really important? It can help for sure.
It's important to know, like, this isn't like, oh, once everyone does this, then all of a sudden it's all going to work, right? But for this specific instance, I just saw there was a good correlator. So I was like, if we want a quick win right now, we want to correct stuff right now, this is a good start, right?
And so it's not like the moment we did that, boom, everything's fixed. It's like, it was way harder than that to like fix everything, right? It was just like, there's...
you know, this one thing I just saw instantly will get us to where we want. And that's the first thing I look for is like, what's the easy, you know, obvious things to me that can like get us from, you know, A to B. And once I know we hit it, then all of a sudden it's like, cool, that worked.
Now we really want to step it up from here and be like, because we can't just do that every single video. But for these videos, we can just quickly pivot, go great. Now we're making some progress.
We're helping make, you know, high level progress, which comes from like ideation and stuff. At this level, what's the metric people overvalue and what's the one they overlook? CTR is always overvalued every single time.
Yeah. Some of the big top 200 creators on the planet asked me the same thing. Jake, what's good CTR?
I don't know what that means. I don't know what good CTR is. I really don't.
I know what good impressions are because good impressions lead to good views. But good CTR, like the reality is you want your CTR to drop. You want the thing to drop heavily.
You don't want it to start low. Like that's what you don't want. And so I can say like, you know, what's a low number?
It's like 2 % is low. Like that shouldn't, you know, if you're 48 hours into your video and it's a 2 % click -through rate, okay. that's probably an indicator we really up our packaging like that's probably what that means um but if you're telling me like oh i got 20 it should be getting a lot of you i'm like 20 is not good if the if the uh impressions are low but if we got a lot of impressions and now we're at two percent wonderful quickly rate that's wonderful because we got the thing we wanted we got views what's the one they overlook i honestly think average percentage viewed is overlooked a lot Because I've even heard people they say like they actually kind of ignore that which is like cool Like you know to each their own sort of thing, but from my experience like I always see like that That average percentage view tells me how well we did, not just from the opening five seconds, but also tell me what we did with the 30 seconds and how well did it connect with the packaging?
Because you'll see like, you know, what wins your A -B test is based on watch time. And so the ones that don't win don't make it past the 30 seconds. And so it's also an indicator of how well did our packaging match our intro expectations.
So for me, it's like APV. I'm like, I look at that all the time. Is there a best practice that everyone repeats that you think is wrong?
when it comes to titles a lot of people try to make their titles as if it's like a summary of the video i have a you can see this on my twitter right now this is anthony morales where I show people like just in case, you know, title, you think titles don't matter. There's two titles.
One is like a summary of the video. I think it's verbatim. I think it's in the lines of like top 10 exercises for violin players.
And the other one was only 2 % of violinists understand this. And I think that one had like 70. four percent more watch time than the first one the only two percent that's the one that won yeah by a long shot actually and why do you think that is it just is it because of the curiosity aspect yeah because you can see how like you don't you don't even care about violin but the odds of you clicking on that are a lot higher because you're like i wonder what is the two percent of violinists now i wonder what that is like and so the first one will we will only get the people who have that violin out right now.
I'm like, oh, cool, perfect. That's the video I want to watch, right? But most people do not have that.
And most people who watch these videos don't even care that much about the violin to begin with. But once we watch the video, they're probably convinced like, shoot, maybe I do want to learn the violin. And what are we doing?
We're creating fans that didn't exist before. And that's why I'm so big on pushing metrics higher than what everyone thinks they are. So because you don't realize your video can actually win a viewer if you do it right.
Same with your thumbnails. They can win a viewer you wouldn't have had if you do it right. It seems like what I hear you say is thinking about people that aren't directly in your niche.
Like, for example, the violin player that you have, you know, who are his who's his general audience or his usual audience? People that play the violin that want to play the violin better. But.
thinking when you're packaging thinking about the people that have never even held a violin how do i get those people to come watch is that is that an important part of the strategy when you're packaging to get more views absolutely yeah like that's the thing i think about all the time yeah because um i think you know when you make a video on like ai like ai is evil or whatever right that yeah i'm already i already know who's gonna watch if i like you know make a make a fear -based um journalistic type of like takedown piece on sam altman whatever right like i already know who's gonna watch people who don't like this person is already gonna watch i already know that right so the question i would ask is like if i'm making a video on like ai bad i'd be like okay how do i get the people that don't give a about any of that?
How do I get the people that don't even know what that is or people who don't know what's going on with any of that stuff? How do I get them to watch this video? And really like, you know, this is kind of what good journalism is.
It's like trying to get people who aren't interested in a headline or aren't interested in an article to get them interested into that, you know, article to read it. Right. And so ultimately, like I think about that.
often when it comes to the broadness of a title and the broadness of a video is we're going to get people who don't normally watch these types of videos or don't watch this kind of niche if we package it the right way and like it's you know earned by packaging and they stay because of content and so that's why i'm like the packaging i will like die on this hill this is more important than the video itself which is like you know it could be like a hot take but i'm just like honestly like if they don't freaking watch this thing to begin with it doesn't matter how good it is what's your take on ai content do you think ai content will end up taking over youtube so when ai was having like a really big boom i think it was beginning of this year in 2026 um i remember uh i think it was blocks uh like fired what like it was like 20 000 people or something like that it was it was such a high number like not heard of and they try to make it where there's some articles being like it's all about ai or it's not it's all about them replacing people whatever but i kind of like i had like an existential crisis a little bit like i literally couldn't sleep um like the the day i saw the article i was up all night just like
thinking about the implications because i had to break down like what youtube strategy really is it's about like um following um pattern recognition and pattern recognition helps you kind of see where things are going statistically um but when i saw that i just kind of like my brain couldn't stop just like where is that going and like the implications were so big i couldn't like focus on anything else and it comes back into entertainment it comes back in the heart of entertainment i think like me you know as a purist like i think it's art right and when i think about that i thought like dude is Is that cooked forever?
Is art just done now from this moment on when AI gets good enough? I really think the backbone of human society is the ability to write down language. What's the first thing we saw a chat to be do?
It's working in language. And I was like, if this can really do this better than we can, it can communicate better than we can in this form, we are done as a society. And that comes back to YouTube, and that comes back to creators, and that gets scary to think about.
Um, but I started sleeping well at night because I finally got to a conclusion where I realized I actually don't think that's a problem in like the super, super long term. Um, and not to say it's not a problem at all. Yeah.
Oh yeah. Problems are coming for sure. But it's not like people say things like it's gonna take everybody's jobs and it's gonna replace everyone.
It actually, I don't think it can replace everyone. And I don't think it can replace creators entirely. So think about like, there are certain jobs that are fully like in the artistic area.
And I think of like, we take this as far as extreme, who's the greatest, you know, artist, writer to ever live? In my opinion, it's Shakespeare, right? And I remember asking a neuroscientist this to help see if there's any credibility to my thought.
And I asked her, I was like, hey, so AI right now, can it write like Shakespeare does? Can it like imitate his voice and write in the style of biopic potameter and stuff like that? And she was like, Yeah, yeah, I could do that right now.
I'm like, okay, so let's say we are at the peak of AI. It is as smart as it can possibly be. Would it be able to write the very play Shakespeare would write today if he was still alive word for word?
And she thought about that for a while. And she was like, no, no, I can't. And I was like, but why?
Isn't it smarter than every human being on earth? Isn't it the smartest thing it could ever be? How come?
If it's so smart, why can't it do that? And when I said that, she really understood what I was getting at. What I was trying to say is like, this isn't an intelligent problem when it comes to making art that relates to humans.
What it really is, it's really a three -layered problem where it comes down to, one, it comes down to taste. Two, it comes down to experience. And three, it comes down to soul.
And yes, it has its own taste, but it doesn't have your taste specifically, right? Now, even if you gave it all of your information, right? It might imitate your taste.
You might sound like me, try to sound like me to the closest degree possible. It might do that. But then if you're like, say the next words I'm going to say, how could it possibly do that?
There's no amount of data it'll have to know the person that you currently are with the taste that you have verbatim. It just can't. And the second is experience.
We can say whatever we want about the experience element here, but we know for a fact it definitely doesn't have your experience, right? And certainly not experiencing things as you are. And that makes your voice unique.
That makes what you have to say is a unique element to this. And the third, I think I take very seriously, which I think like Eastern philosophy talks about soul like it's nothing. They kind of just move past it as a thing that exists that we don't understand.
But here in the West, we don't really do that very often. And I think this is a real factor. It's like this thing does not have the whatever we want to call soul that you have.
it definitely doesn't have that and this is like the beating heart of what makes an artist an artist is like they are expressing something deep within them they don't even understand and so when you really break it down to that degree it's really like sure it can look just like will canon it can say whatever you're going to say maybe it can sit across me and do this just as good as you can right but it's not going to have those three things attached to it and so no matter what no matter how good it is at fooling you people will probably be like i preferred it when it wasn't ai generated i preferred it when it was real people and you think of like even like stage actors in a play sure, maybe a robot can be a human better than we can.
Maybe it can emote emotions and say the lines perfectly better than we can. Is there really a demand for that? Like, do people really like, yes, I'm so glad we finally got robots in here instead of humans.
Like, I think the only point is to exchange human values and exchange human experiences from one person to the other, whether it's a podcast, to play a movie, et cetera. I think at the end of the day, art is about expressing my... taste, my experience, and my soul to you.
And you having that shared moment, even though we are, you know, distance apart, years apart, et cetera, we still feel like we connected on some degree. And that's just a human thing. It's not an AI machine thing.
So no matter how smart it gets, I just don't think it'll at the end of the day, we'll be able to do that. AI is not going to come take over all the creators. Oh, don't get me wrong.
There's going to be heavy. uh heavy issues and heavy infrastructure issues like don't get me wrong so i ain't like you know max ai doomer mentality but yeah like like i want to say there's going to be some heavy like industrial revolution type vibes when it comes to ai when it comes to creators where it's going to heavily disrupt and there's gonna be an ai version of mr beast at some point there will and people will hate it and they'll be like oh our bad we'll go back that's gonna happen all the time like right now i just hired someone who is like you know, AI replace them.
And then they were like, shit, this doesn't do everything. We need to hire them back. That's going to happen all the time.
And because we're kind of pushing and pulling, where does it work and where does it not? But I think this is going to be the biggest mistakes are made is like, oh, look, I don't have to be in front of the camera. This can do it for me.
And we'll be like, oh, it turns out nobody freaking likes that. Let's just go back. Even when it's undistinguishable, I think still people won't like it.
All right, Jake, we're on level five, 10 million views. Let's go. We're at the top of the food chain now.
So at this level, Right. What are the things you're thinking about?
What are the steps you're taking to turn someone that's getting 10 million views per video to 15 million to 20 million? Because you've done it before. Yeah.
This is as hard as it gets. Absolutely. So, yeah.
So it's, you know, I have done it before, but it's, you know, it's there's like I want to say maybe I have three channels where I was like, I got them to this moment and it's hard. Like it is, you know. you come up with an idea and immediately it's shut down immediately like no because of x y and z you're like oh like okay hang on and so you're like okay uh what if you did like this so like no no every idea is wrong every single one because like this is to the point where i'm like i'm like you know pushing myself to the max here like okay like i gotta really dig down for this ideation stuff and you're trying to get feedback you're trying to ask everybody you're like is this good is this good what's wrong with it what's wrong like that's all you're asking she's like what's wrong with it every day what's wrong with it what's wrong with it what's wrong with it because everyone and their mom's trying to get 10 million views right and so when you are stuck at 10 like it feels like you know um you're like alex mosey break down the having this uh sense of lack that a hundred million dollar
uh person has compared to a billion dollar person like their sense of lack is like this tenfold they're making 90 less than what this person's making and their friends they feel this lack harder than anyone else because like i don't have a billion i only have 100 million right um and it's funny because it's like that's true here this would be the same problem where it's like oh i got 10 i don't got 15, I don't got 20.
And you feel that lack because you're friends with like Ben Asler. He's getting like 30, 50 million every freaking upload. And you're just like, oh my gosh, like how do I do it?
How do I get there? You just feel like you're, you know, banging your head against the wall until good ideas show. One day, like it's crazy, but one day it happens.
You're just like, oh my God, that's it. That's a 20 million view idea. I have it.
I finally have it. And it's fun with Ali. Like we were like, I remember us doing that.
It was like playing like tennis or something where it's like, I have an idea. He's like. no, it sucks.
Like, what about this? Like, no, it's like, we're just going back and forth. Right.
And then eventually we can see both of us come together to like, really like make some kind of, um, consensus of a good idea where he came up with one, just like, I remember him saying it and I was like, that's it. He said, um, I secretly hid in my parents' room. Uh, and I secretly hid in my parents' bedroom.
And we might've had an X amount of time and got rid of the title eventually where it's just, I secretly hid in my parents' bedroom. And we got that from Arak, uh, where he's like, I secretly, uh, in a grocery store.
And we're like, oh, what if we just did something similar, but for a younger audience, just kind of like made the age lower. And once we did that, we were both like, yes, like we know exactly what we're doing. And so we got a bunch of thumbnails together.
We got a bunch of ones that were similar to that. A couple of, obviously we were inspired by ARAC stuff. We're like, okay, how do we make this same kind of angle?
And with thumbnails, we're trying to tell a story. Cause this is what like, you're just like as high as you get, you can't just like copy a call of a day. Now you're like, okay, how do we tell a story?
So we're doing like the rule of thirds where we have like our, dividing lines between each section of the thumbnail but we also are playing with depth of field like fron is in the very foreground of the left side of the thumbnail which is really important because people are reading from left to right like they're reading a book if you're trying to get an English -speaking audience.
But with the thumbnail, they don't really know how to guide, right? So imagine like if they have an eye tracker on the thumbnail, they're just going to go all over the place unless you guide them properly. And so we have Ferran guide right to his eyes because the first thing humans see, we look for the white in people's eyes.
Boom, got the eyes. And that leads us down this like. diagonal line to his parents in bed asleep.
And there's I think we have one more detail somewhere here that you can look at, like an arrow in text that says like parents or says like asleep. And this literally feels like you're looking at a three dimensional image, even though the image is only 2D. And this gives you so much context, the idea of conflict.
It's he's in mid action, which a big one. So he's like shushing, like in mid action, like something's happening. So we try to give the still image motion and we try to make sure our color coordinating is correct.
Like what's color of his shirt what's the color of the walls it's the color of the bed what is the ims they're wearing and is there red in the in the thumbnail because that's going to affect the red arrow right so like we want to make sure this arrow is the only red thing this whole thumbnail so that way that's the only thing they see and what's the text is it parents question mark is it asleep is it like what like what are we doing why are we doing it and then we look at the title and we compare like what did we leave out of the title where it's like you know if we have uh i uh secretly lived in my parents room we don't have sleeping we don't have we we do have parents we don't have sleeping so we'll switch it let's try one with sleeping let's try one with parents to see what happens right and so this is like when we're at the high level we're just like no thing can be left up to chance every single thing and so what's our opening sentence you bet your ass it's i secretly lived in my parents room like that
is the opener because if it's anything else, that APV is dropping. So we know for sure we have to say verbatim what our title is. And here's what's funny.
We can't really change the title too much now. Cause we baked it into the video. Same thing with the thumbnail.
So like, we want to make sure we match. So like, what's he doing? He's hiding an event.
So we can't really get him an event in real life, but we can get him in the place that he stayed at, which is like a secret wall. Right. And so he's like, I'm going to hide here in my parents' room.
And this is how I'm going to do it. And they would just go straight into the building phase. He's just building something's happening.
And then we try to keep this super short. We try to really knock this like building phase down as fast as possible to get to the conflict of his parents being in the room and him trying to hide, et cetera, et cetera. And eventually we're just there.
And we're like, now we're like. in it right we're in the content and so anyways all that to say was like this was yeah like to get here took a lot and once we're like finally there we're just like okay what do we what do we miss like what's not here what is not in this video you know what i mean and so They're just like, all right, let's upload it.
I hope for the best. I hope we did it all right. Because like, we can't think of anything else.
And that's just what it comes down to is like, you can't think of anything else. It seems like at this level, there's like, there's so much that goes into it. People aren't, people don't probably don't realize, you know, everything you just said, like, that's like, you know, there's hundreds of little, little tiny things that go into.
perfecting and trying to get from 10 to 20. And obviously idea is the core part of it. It's really important.
But then it's like all these other little things that people probably look at a thumbnail and they don't even realize. They're not realizing where the eye is looking or reading left to right or these different things. How many views did that video get?
Do you know? I think it's at 26 million right now. And how many impressions have you generated in total?
Billions? Man, it's hard to say for sure. I mean, I would say...
Over a billion? Well, views, I know I stopped counting around 2 .5 billion. 2 .5 billion views?
Yeah. And so I just call it three and just call it a day because I just don't want to keep adding to this. I don't know.
I don't know how anyone else is keeping track. I don't know if they're throwing this in some kind of like... So it's probably tens or hundreds of billions of impressions.
Yeah, it would have to be, yeah. Jeez. And you work with some of the top YouTubers in the game.
Yeah. How much did the biggest YouTuber you work with make in a month without saying the name? Yeah, I can't really.
Can you say the amount? Is it six figures, seven figures, eight figures? What are we talking in one month?
So I won't say who or what we're talking about. And it's probably no one I mentioned thus far, right? So we don't really know.
But let's just say if you're a high view. channel and you're in the top 200 you are definitely making over a million dollars per month over a million per month if you're the top 200 like i if you're not you're doing something very wrong in my opinion yeah and it's like where is that coming from i'm like the truth is dude a lot of it's from adsense like wow yeah it's so like when you add sponsors and stuff on top of that um yeah it can be pretty nuts so yeah any any vague person in the top 200 can make anything like that okay what's something that you do that no other youtube strategist does i think a lot of them i talked about where it's like the big one is i i try to find ideation outside of youtube um because i remember chucky one day he's uh at the time was jimmy's like main packaging guy i know he's like probably higher up at the company at this point um but he he had this guy god's eye view idea of a thumbnail that he saw from the show severance and i remember being like wait a minute like if you're gonna innovate
out like youtube you can't look at youtube anymore you got to look outside of youtube now that's what that taught me and i was like okay so that's what i do now like now i'm like i you really use youtube as my last resource like i have to be really like scraping the bail barrel if i'm coming back to youtube for inspiration i like to really find like like i said like i like movies like tv shows like books i like just all forms of information outside of youtube Because I'm like, no one has done that, for sure.
Because most of the time, they're just scrolling on YouTube all day to find ideas. And Twitter is actually a big one. There's a lot of images that people post that I'm like, oh, wait a minute.
That could be a thumbnail if you just change a few things. So I have yet to hear anyone say anything like that. Usually, they just take inspiration from other videos, which is great.
It works. But especially if you're trying to get 10 million. you're at 10 million per episode and you're trying to get higher than that.
Yeah. You kind of, now you got to start like really like, you know, getting, getting deep in the weeds outside of YouTube to get there. Cause I mean, I remember like some people on certain teams I was working on where I was like, um, they were saying like, we literally can't use normal tools that everyone uses because it like, we're not going to get, you know, 10 million views plus doing that.
I heard Mr. Beast team tried to hire you. Yeah.
So yeah, I mean, you know, they, um, I forgot like where it started because I sent a couple of applications a while back. And so one day I got an email from them and we met, we had an interview, went really good.
Then I met with Tyler and he was like, cool, let's get you a vibe check. And I got to fly out there. It was awesome.
And it was like getting to meet their team was really great. And I talked to so many people that were just so smart. It was just like, I mean, I spent like literally at one point, I think six hours talking to one person.
Yeah, it was wonderful. It was awesome. All those guys are really great, really hardworking people.
And it was just like free. like, man, I really had to like decide, like, do I want to keep going the direction I'm going or do I want to go here? Because I was just like, it was tempting.
But once I kind of thought. over it like i think i i had one more interview i had to do and i really just botched it like i really didn't do a good job or try at all uh which is why they didn't call me back or anything which is like yeah totally because at that point i just i think i just decided like i don't know if i don't think i really want this like as much as i love what they do i think like such a good company and everything about them is just freaking awesome um but i think at the end of the day i just like i just think i'd just rather have done my own thing um because it's a huge commitment i got a family and i have to like fly out to uh north carolina to work with them They require you to fly out and live there.
Yeah, yeah, because the job title was creative director for the main channel. In person. Yeah, yeah.
Oh, yeah, because you're literally directing the videos they're uploading, right? And so, yeah, and it's a lot of work, even for me, because I think I'm a hard worker. And I meet them, and I'm like, jeez, this is - Are they putting in 16 -hour days or something?
Or what are they doing? I don't know if they take days off. Really?
Like, I don't really know. Like, but just from what I hear, what I'm seeing, it's like, it just looks like this is all they do. Like, I remember even Tyler said in an interview, like, he's like, I skipped like six Christmases to be here.
Right. And it's like, damn, like that's, those are people that are super dedicated to what they do. And so like when they're number one, it's like, I meant props to them.
Like they deserve it, you know? But I think at the end of the day, I was just like, I just wanted to have something that was mine that I did. And just like, that was 25 and I was single.
I'd be like, fuck yeah. Like, let's do it. Like, I don't care.
Like, hell yeah. That sounds great. But this is the place that I was in my life.
It just really didn't make sense for me. Is that what's required at this level? If you're at 10 million views and you want to get to 20, once you get to 30, does it require that obsessiveness like from the clients that you've worked with?
Or do you see some that have their family life, life with friends, life outside of work, or are they just obsessed at this level? Yeah, no way, dude. Like you do not.
Like work life balance is nonexistent. If you were at 10 million plus, like you do this almost only or you are like a genius and you got a great team who does it for you. But I guarantee you, though, those people with a great team, they're plateauing right now.
Like they're getting 15 mil, but they're stuck at 15. Because no matter, I don't care how good your team is. I don't care how good they are.
They don't want this to succeed as badly as you do, right? Because at the end of the day, this is their job. But for you, this is your life.
And so like, you know, you're an entrepreneur, right? It's like no one in no employee you hire is like, I'm going to make sure you make, you know, 100 million in revenue. It's like no one gives a shit, right?
You're the one that's like, why are we not getting here? Why are we not getting to this goal? And if you don't have that person forefronting the standard, then you're not, you know, you're not growing.
to be plateaued at one of these very high numbers but you will plateau i think you've said there's not a single job you haven't done on a youtube channel yeah what are the five biggest lessons most people miss without that experience there's a lot of micro stuff that people miss all the time um like a lot of people don't understand like how hard a job is until they've done it themselves right so it's easy to like you know be higher up in demand like i want this x y and z at this time or whatever but you don't realize like what you're asking for is gonna cost a lot um and that's something that i've like i've edited so often and so i know when i'm like i'm asking a lot of someone and i'll try to be like hey look like i know like literally this week i was like look we the client needs the edit we need it by friday like we just need it by that time and i'm aware that's like a lot and so like i try to like give them some grace give them some like room right but like the truth is it sometimes just like you know you just that's just something you need and i that's probably the difference is like i'm not gonna be like cool like this is the feature we do these crazy timelines good luck you know i don't try to do that because i'm aware of how hard this is um that being said though you also know when someone is not an a player right um and the truth is like
A players are hard to find because most people don't want to be A players. Like it's as simple as that. And it might sound harsh to anyone who's like, you know, no, I'm different, whatever.
But like, the truth is like, you know, if you're an A player, like, you know, work hours, like work life balance, that stuff is like, that's like, you know, optional, right? You're just like, I can, I can do that. Or I could just go back to work and just like get more reps in, right?
And so no one in the right mind wants to work that hard. That's just crazy. And so I think when you've done all those jobs, you know an A player immediately when you see one.
And that's the thing that I've been really lucky with is when I get one, I'm like, what do you need? I will get you whatever you need because I want you that bad. Versus like, oh, the video looks pretty good.
Let's pay them X amount and see how it does and be like, huh, they're not delivering stuff on time or there's all these mistakes I have to fix. And I can just see that a mile away. And I just like, yeah, when I bring people on, I don't have to.
for it sort of thing what wins more often a great idea packaged okay or an okay idea but package great it depends on your view count if you're trying to get to 10 mil um i mean better idea is gonna probably get you there sooner but if you're trying to get 100k like decent idea great packaging we'll get you there um and yeah because like at the end of the day like the idea is baked in the video so like they'll click um and they'll watch but like 100k type watch which means like five minutes they drop off.
But 10 million, like they're watching 80 to 90 % of that video. And like, that's - That's all idea. Yeah, yeah.
And that's all in the idea, right? And so, shoot, it's hard to see a world where you have not very good packaging and get 10 million views with a good idea to me. I imagine like you must have done something accidentally right in your packaging or the idea is just literally that good, you know?
Where do you think YouTube's heading in the next five years? Who's going to be the next Mr. Beast?
The next Mr. Beast, man. Oh, yeah, I know exactly who that is.
They're actually going to be an animation. So you'll see this with like a lot of animation channels right now. They're like, I mean, you know, their numbers are absolutely like Digital Circus is a great example.
Numbers are freaking crushing, like absolutely dominate. So I think it's why Beast actually made a animation channel. um and i talked to that producer about it and we're kind of like thinking the same thing where it's like this could be like as big as any main channel there or the company you know um and that's really like like the reason why is not as complicated as it might seem like animation is incredibly universal there's a reason why pixar is one of the biggest companies steve jobs made even though he's freaking steve jobs right it's because like if you're a kid you love animation if you're adult You do it right.
You also love animation. There's animation that are just strictly for adults that kids watch. There's animation strictly for kids that adults watch.
Like the broadness and the appeal is so high. the hard part was the ability to make animation is so expensive but as you know tools are getting cheaper ai is getting better all of a sudden hey i can i know a buddy of mine who's making an animation channel right now and he's like crushing it like he's crushing it with views crushing the money and it's just purely animated videos he makes like once a month and the animation is good it's not like them like it's not like pixar level like most impressive thing like digital circus or anything but it's good and all of a sudden you're like huh i wonder if he got really good like could it get 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 million views?
And I'm like, oh, absolutely. Like, you get 100 million views on an animation, like, no problem. It's just the most appealing.
It's just understanding, like, there will be caps on the types of audiences you get. So, like, I know a guy who makes these, like, horror -type animations, and they could cap anywhere between, like, 20 to 50 mil per episode. They do pretty good.
And the other guy is, like, one, he's, like, made a video called, I think it was, like, I made... a sentient robot in my lab or something like that. And that video at the gate got 10 million views, I think in like two months maybe.
And so the next Mr. Beast is the person who cracks the animation code. Like no question about it.
Like your ideas, any crazy idea you have can come to life with nothing more than a computer and a render. Jake, Brian, thank you so much for coming on to Code of Genius. Thanks, man.
Appreciate being here.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The cold open promises a million views on a first upload, then the interview earns that claim slowly. It climbs a five-rung ladder of views per video, and at almost every rung the answer comes back to the same two things: the idea, and how it's packaged.
How they asked for the click.
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PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
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