2-Hour YouTube Masterclass From the World's Highest-Paid Strategist
A 2 hour 45 minute sit-down on how virality gets engineered: ideas as the ceiling, 100 ideas for every video made, 10 titles and 3 thumbnails minimum, and a 45-second intro formula.
Posted
3 days ago
Duration
Format
Interview
educational
Views
44.3K
1.1K likes
57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Virality on YouTube is engineered, not lucky: the idea sets the ceiling, packaging decides whether anyone clicks, and a repeatable funnel of hundreds of ideas and multiple thumbnails beats creative instinct.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A creator averaging a few thousand views per video who suspects the problem is the ideas, not the editing.
A founder or marketing lead running a brand YouTube channel that currently works as a dumping ground for ads and event recaps.
A podcaster deciding how to pick guests, write titles, and structure the first 45 seconds of an episode.
Anyone in a small niche who has been told the audience is too small to grow on YouTube.
SKIP IF…
You want a Shorts, TikTok or Reels growth playbook. This is almost entirely about long-form YouTube.
You're looking for editing, camera or lighting technique. Production quality gets a few minutes out of nearly three hours.
You need a quick overview. The frameworks are spread across a long conversation with three sponsor reads.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
YouTube is a click-and-watch platform, so the idea and its packaging decide most of a video's outcome before it's filmed. The system: pick ideas that serve core, casual and new viewers at once, source them from your own past outliers, other channels' outliers (3x their average or more) and a minority of true experiments, and generate around 100 ideas for every one you make. Write at least 10 titles before designing at least 3 genuinely different thumbnails, brief the thumbnail before the shoot, predict performance before publishing, and change packaging fast when a video misses. Hold viewers with an intro under 45 seconds that confirms the promise, opens curiosity gaps, and flows straight into the story. Judge results on views and retention curves rather than CTR or average view duration.
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Cold-open sizzle: the 40x thumbnail story, 50 billion views, Red Bull, MrBeast, the Eagles.
01:00 – 04:09
02 · How Red Bull went from 400K to 9M views
Brands treat YouTube as video hosting. YouTube is a click-and-watch platform: ideas, clicks, watch time, satisfaction, repeat.
04:09 – 09:03
03 · Why every other business moat is dying
Attention is the new oil. A bedroom channel matched a national TV show's audience with one employee; media margins can hit 50 to 90 percent.
09:03 – 16:36
04 · Your idea caps your views before you film
Three circles: all reachable viewers, the idea's ceiling, and execution. Astrophotography and wildlife pond examples show niche channels breaking out with broad angles. Floor is what a throwaway video would get.
16:36 – 21:02
05 · What he learns from 100-subscriber channels
Look for small channels overperforming. Outlier score over subscriber count; subs are a vanity metric, roughly 20 percent of subs as views is normal.
21:02 – 29:17
06 · The three viewers every video has to hit
The CCN framework explained with three videos from one channel: a studio tour (core only), a challenge (core and casual), and five NBA games in 50 hours (14M views).
29:17 – 33:24
07 · Why your audience won't follow you anywhere
Topic overlap is overestimated. Red Bull's mixed sports lineup, Call of Duty vs Battlefield. Start narrow and expand outward.
33:24 – 40:11
08 · What every 100M-view video has in common
Understood in one second, universal appeal (the biggest YouTuber and your mother), no insider context, and a question you have to click to answer.
40:11 – 49:04
09 · The three places ideas actually come from
Internal (redo your winners), external (outliers at 3x or more in your niche and adjacent ones), and innovation (combine two formats, roughly 20 percent of output).
49:04 – 52:31
10 · The thumbnail everyone in business copied
The 'asking millionaires how to get rich' concept was Frankensteined from a Canadian door-knocking cooking video, a Hormozi title and a short-form format. 5M views.
52:31 – 1:02:42
11 · 100 ideas to make 1 video
The 100-10-1 funnel, the 80 percent overlap rule, elimination criteria (packageable, feasible, meets view target), one-page idea slides, and a gun-to-the-head pick.
1:02:42 – 1:13:18
12 · 20% better thumbnail, 40x the views
Nonlinear returns on algorithmic platforms. 10 to 20 percent of production time on packaging. Brand recognition means evolving thumbnail style incrementally. The F1 car vs camera drone thumbnail as click to unpause.
1:13:18 – 1:20:20
13 · Ten titles, three thumbnails, every video
Workflow: titles first, thumbnail brief before the shoot, hundreds of source photos, at least three fully designed thumbnails. The best operators are engineers more than artists.
1:20:20 – 1:27:42
14 · When to panic after you hit publish
Pick one title, A/B test three differentiated thumbnails, and have the team predict hour, day and week performance. Judge against expectation, not just the 1 of 10 rank.
1:27:42 – 1:37:28
15 · How to write a title people click
Fewest words, universal language (no D1 or Goodwill), complement the thumbnail, readable at a glance in title case, and human interest over SEO. The Porsche GT3 live rewrite.
1:37:28 – 1:43:08
16 · The only two metrics he trusts
Views and retention curves. CTR and AVD mislead: the lemonade stand in Times Square. Viewer drop-off behavior stays consistent as audiences broaden.
1:43:08 – 1:52:14
17 · The 45-second intro formula
Deliver on the promise, create intrigue with minimal context and drip-fed detail, then flow seamlessly into the story. Trailer vs cold-question podcast openings.
1:52:14 – 1:57:26
18 · The algorithm is always behind the audience
YouTube is evergreen and mirrors behavior. TV grew from 15 to 20 percent of traffic to 50 to 60 percent; longer videos win on TV because viewers want them there.
1:57:26 – 2:01:36
19 · Storytelling is useless without stakes
The paper-ball demo escalates stakes. Stakes can be an enemy, time limit, reward, punishment, or the cost of not paying attention, matched to the video's purpose.
2:01:36 – 2:10:12
20 · Don't start a channel you can't commit to
Half-built brand channels are worse than none. Hire a strategist or a proven YouTuber, commit 18 to 24 months, and treat the channel as controllable narrative. Cars as a YouTube-decided purchase.
2:10:12 – 2:16:09
21 · The pendulum between quality and packaging
First make videos watchable, then swing to ideas and packaging, then back to production. Red Bull won by empowering its YouTube team.
2:16:09 – 2:19:00
22 · The one thing AI still can't do
AI helps heavily in ideation (Claude connected to vidIQ for outlier research) and thumbnail concepts (Gemini), but writing still needs the last 20 percent from a human.
2:19:00 – 2:25:22
23 · Why YouTube is beating Netflix and Disney
YouTube is in its 1920s Hollywood moment: TV-first viewing, premium productions, creator-made box office hits, and a split between premium and raw content.
2:25:22 – 2:45:08
24 · Quickstrike questions
Ads and sponsors as the default creator model, MrBeast's scale of ambition, Mark Rober's squirrel obstacle course, study playlists, consistency as the hard part, and locking in at 30.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
A thumbnail swap on an already-published video took it from 1,000 views a day to 40,000 views a day within a day.
Algorithms multiply small edges, so a thumbnail that is 20 to 30 percent better can return 40 times the views.
Your idea sets the ceiling on views before you film anything, and execution only decides how close you get to it.
The floor of a channel is how many people would watch a video titled 'Video 1' with a picture of your face.
Every video with 10 million plus views can be explained in one second; if pitching it takes 30 seconds, it isn't an idea yet.
The best videos serve three viewers at once: the core who watch everything, the casuals who dip in, and people who've never seen you.
If you ask your comment section what to make, they'll ask for the old thing that no longer works.
Overlap between adjacent topics is far smaller than creators assume; roughly 20 percent of Call of Duty players also play Battlefield.
Channels that grow huge start narrow and expand outward; starting broad and narrowing almost never works.
An outlier is a video doing at least 3x its channel's average, and a 100-subscriber channel's outlier teaches as much as MrBeast.
Good data beats no data, but no data beats bad data, so an underperforming title should be swapped rather than given more time.
Simply asking 'can we put this in a good title and thumbnail?' eliminates about two thirds of brainstormed ideas.
Search drives only 5 to 10 percent of views for most channels, so optimizing titles for SEO scores sacrifices the human click for little gain.
All caps titles read slower than title case because every letter is the same height.
Many large channels have the lowest click-through rates because they're selling lemonade in Times Square, not on a quiet street.
Phrases like 'at the end of the day' cause measurable drop-off because viewers hear them as the video ending.
TV now accounts for 50 to 60 percent of traffic for some channels, up from 15 to 20 percent five years ago.
A structure without stakes is useless; stakes can be an enemy, a time limit, a reward, a punishment, or the cost of not paying attention.
Don't launch a brand YouTube channel unless you'll commit 18 to 24 months to it; a half-built channel does more harm than none.
Roughly 90 percent of car purchase decisions in America are now made primarily on YouTube, according to the guest.
Takeaway
Views are decided before the camera turns on.
WHAT TO LEARN
Treat every video as a funnel: hundreds of ideas filtered for broad appeal, packaged with many titles and thumbnails, opened with a tight promise-keeping intro, and judged against expectations.
02How Red Bull went from 400K to 9M views
Brands that treat YouTube as a hosting site stall; growth comes from better ideas, more clickable packaging, longer watch time, and satisfied viewers, repeated.
03Why every other business moat is dying
Owning distribution now outlasts most business moats, because a tiny team with an audience can match the reach of large traditional media operations.
04Your idea caps your views before you film
Pick ideas that could reach deep into your niche; a broad angle like 'phone vs pro camera vs 100 hours' can turn a 2,000-view niche into millions.
Your floor is the audience that would watch anything; everything above it depends on the idea's ceiling and your execution.
05What he learns from 100-subscriber channels
Study small channels whose videos beat their own average by 3x or more, since those outliers reveal what works before big channels copy it.
Subscriber counts mostly keep score; roughly 20 percent of subscribers as views is normal, and views beyond that signal an overperforming channel.
06The three viewers every video has to hit
Test each idea against core, casual and brand-new viewers, and avoid inside references that leave first-time viewers feeling lost.
Your comment section asks for yesterday's formula; strategy means finding topics that still serve the core while pulling in strangers.
07Why your audience won't follow you anywhere
Adjacent topics share far less audience than you assume, so jumping between sports, games or fitness styles fragments a channel.
Start in a tight sub-niche and expand outward gradually; channels that begin broad rarely find a foothold.
08What every 100M-view video has in common
An idea that takes more than a second to grasp won't reach tens of millions; compress it to a one-line log line or drop it.
Make videos that both an expert and your mother would enjoy, layered like the best kids' movies.
Winning packaging poses a question the viewer must click to answer, as if pausing a moment they need to see resolved.
09The three places ideas actually come from
Remake your own past winners with a twist, since audiences forget quickly and happily watch a proven idea again.
Mine outliers from your niche and adjacent hobbies, then Frankenstein titles, thumbnails and formats from different sources into something new.
Keep genuinely untested experiments to around 20 percent of output unless you already have strong data or rare instincts.
11100 ideas to make 1 video
Generate about 100 ideas per video you make, then filter to 10 with strict criteria such as packageable, feasible and able to hit your view target.
Keep most videos within roughly 80 percent audience overlap of each other, reserving the rest for experiments.
Before committing, sketch each finalist on one page with rough titles, thumbnail concept and log line, then pick the one you'd bet your career on.
1220% better thumbnail, 40x the views
Small packaging improvements compound through the algorithm, so a modestly better thumbnail can multiply daily views dozens of times.
Spend roughly 10 to 20 percent of total production time on titles and thumbnails, including research across your niche.
If viewers recognize your thumbnail style, change it incrementally so you keep the brand recognition while testing better layouts.
Thumbnails that freeze the instant before action, or a speaker mid-sentence, make the click feel like pressing play.
13Ten titles, three thumbnails, every video
Write at least 10 titles before any thumbnail work, because the thumbnail should complement the chosen title.
Write a thumbnail brief before filming and capture many angles and expressions so designers have real source material.
Design at least three genuinely different thumbnails per video; three shirt colors on one shot is not a test.
14When to panic after you hit publish
Predict hour, day and week performance before publishing, then judge the video against that expectation rather than its raw rank.
Keep packaging that beats expectation, but swap underperforming titles or thumbnails quickly, because untested options beat known losers.
Avoid constant title and thumbnail changes that make it impossible to tell which change actually moved views.
15How to write a title people click
Titles should use the fewest words that stay interesting and avoid regional jargon that shuts out international viewers.
Titles and thumbnail text should add to each other rather than repeat, and title case reads faster than all caps.
Search drives a small share of views for most channels, so write for human curiosity, such as adding a contradiction, instead of keyword scores.
16The only two metrics he trusts
Views are the one comprehensive metric; pair them with retention curves to see exactly where viewers leave.
Click-through rate falls as a video reaches wider audiences, so a low CTR can mean success, not failure.
Viewers across all audience types leave at the same kinds of moments, including phrases that sound like the video is ending.
17The 45-second intro formula
Keep intros under about 45 seconds and confirm the title's promise in the first 10 seconds, where most early drop-off happens.
Open curiosity gaps with minimal context and drip-feed backstory later instead of front-loading explanations.
The best intro flows directly into the story with a connecting sentence rather than a hard 'let's get into it' break.
18The algorithm is always behind the audience
The algorithm follows audience behavior; longer videos win on TV because people choose longer videos on TV.
YouTube stays close to a meritocracy, so a smaller creator who makes a better video can outperform big-budget teams.
19Storytelling is useless without stakes
A strong structure fails without stakes, so give viewers a reason to care through an enemy, a deadline, a reward or a punishment.
Match stakes to the video's purpose; in educational content the stake is the real cost of not understanding the information.
20Don't start a channel you can't commit to
A half-built brand channel is worse than none, so commit 18 to 24 months or don't start.
Brands grow faster by hiring someone already good at YouTube than by hiring polished traditional video talent.
Owned channels let companies control their own narrative in categories like cars, where buyers already research on YouTube.
21The pendulum between quality and packaging
New channels should first make videos watchable, then focus on ideas and packaging, and only later push production quality.
Brand channels succeed when leadership hands real control to YouTube specialists instead of committee edits.
22The one thing AI still can't do
AI is most useful in ideation, outlier research and thumbnail concepts, while final writing still needs human judgment.
23Why YouTube is beating Netflix and Disney
YouTube's growth on TV means long, premium episodes increasingly compete directly with streaming services and Hollywood.
24Quickstrike questions
For most creators, ads and sponsorships are the simplest first business model, since every other revenue stream still depends on views.
Consistent virality across many niches is the real skill; a single viral hit proves very little.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Outlier
A video that earns several times its channel's usual views, typically measured as a multiple of the channel average. Tools like 1of10, ViewStats and vidIQ surface them.
CCN framework
Core, casual, new. A test that a video idea can be enjoyed by loyal fans, occasional viewers, and people who have never seen the channel.
TAM
Total addressable market. On YouTube, the realistic number of viewers who could ever be interested in a niche or topic.
Packaging
Everything a viewer sees before clicking: the idea itself, the title, and the thumbnail, considered together.
CTR
Click-through rate. The share of people shown a video's thumbnail who click on it. It naturally drops as a video reaches broader audiences.
AVD
Average view duration. How long, on average, each viewer watches a video before leaving.
Retention curve
The graph in YouTube Studio showing what percentage of viewers are still watching at each moment of a video, revealing exactly where people leave.
Test and compare
YouTube's native A/B test that rotates up to three thumbnails on a live video and picks the one earning the most watch time.
1 of 10 ranking
YouTube Studio's rank of a new video's early performance against the channel's last ten uploads, where 1 of 10 means best.
Click to unpause
A thumbnail style that looks like a frozen moment just before something happens, so clicking feels like pressing play on the scene.
MCP
Model Context Protocol. A connector that lets an AI assistant such as Claude pull live data from outside tools, for example channel analytics.
“Don't have a YouTube channel unless you're willing to put in the time and effort to grow it.”
scorched-earth take aimed at brands→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
2:07:40
“The second biggest purchase Americans make is being made on YouTube.”
surprising stat for operators→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
Topic Map
Where the conversation goes.
01:00 – 09:03steadyWhy attention and YouTube matter now
09:03 – 21:02denseNiche size, idea ceilings and outliers
21:02 – 40:11denseViewer types and topic overlap
40:11 – 1:02:42denseIdeation system
1:02:42 – 1:37:28densePackaging, publishing and titles
1:37:28 – 2:01:36denseMetrics, intros, algorithm and stakes
2:01:36 – 2:25:22steadyBrands on YouTube, AI and the next decade
2:25:22 – 2:45:08sparseQuickstrike questions
The Script
Word for word.
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metaphoranalogystory
Within a day of changing the thumbnail, that video went from getting 1 ,000 views a day to 40 ,000 views a day. That's Paddy Galloway. He's responsible for over 50 billion YouTube views.
Red Bull, Mr. Beast, the Philadelphia Eagles, and he even made his own dog go viral. Videos that have 10, 50, 100 million views always pose a question that you have to click to answer.
The click power of the equation is 50 % of the game. He shows the exact systems behind the videos you can't stop watching and why attention is the only thing that matters. If you can consistently go viral, That is the most important skill.
It's so crucial you get this next product, which is... 50 billion views, the highest paid YouTube strategist in the world. Worked with Red Bull, Mr.
Beast, the Philadelphia Eagles. He claims he can make any channel, any account go viral. We're going to give you the full playbook today.
So you walked into Red Bull's YouTube channel. They're averaging 400 ,000 views of video. Today, over 9 million.
What did you find when you walked in? YouTube strategy. It just wasn't being applied.
So I think this is something you see all the time with YouTube channels, with big brands. They treat YouTube like it's just a place to host videos, right? I call them Vimeo creators because they're just like using it as like a video hosting platform.
And I think consistently when I look at the channels that we've managed to grow to be the biggest channels in the world, or, you know, in that case, like 10x, 20x viewership, It's just putting emphasis and putting time towards the things that actually matter. So, you know, a lot of people think YouTube is just, you know, make a video, shoot a video, put it up.
You know, if it goes viral, it goes viral. And I think, I believe this 10 years ago, and I've become more and more convinced of it, that virality can be engineered. It's actually a lot more predictable than people think.
So when we come into a channel like Rebel or any of the channels we've worked with, it's about like... How can we look at the data? How can we look at what they're doing and actually predict virality for their channel?
Yeah, it's not so much a strategy as much as it is a framework. And guys, this guy made his dog go viral. And even the Philadelphia Eagles, like you look at Red Bull, you look at a dog, you look at the Eagles.
And I mean, you're literally three, four, five X more views on the Philadelphia Eagles versus any other NFL team. So it really does kind of apply anywhere. When you kind of look at it from like a macro perspective, what are kind of those big buckets on how you just look at YouTube in general?
And then we'll kind of like double click on each. Yeah, so to me, I always like to say YouTube is a click and watch platform, right? And I think it's very different to how, again, people really perceive it.
They just think of it as like, oh, you just watch videos. But when you think about it, you're scrolling a platform, you're clicking. That's very different to other platforms like Instagram, Rails, TikTok.
You're being served things. You're watching things that are being served to you. YouTube, you still have that decision to make.
At least with long form, you have that choice to make. So I always think YouTube really boils down to a few things. It boils down to...
Can we come up with better ideas than anyone else? Can we come up with ideas that are going to travel and go viral? Can we make those ideas really clickable?
So can a lot of people click those videos? And I do like to say that the click power of the equation is kind of 50 % of the game. And I always shock people when I say, you know, there's clients we work with where we'll make 50 thumbnails for a video.
And, you know, the person's just sort of standing there going, oh, I make one. I'm like, yeah, we make 50. And we have five designers working on different concepts for just one video.
you know i think the click is a really important part of the equation once you have the click well what's important well they need to watch for as long as possible the youtube algorithm values kind of three things people clicking people watching and people being satisfied so you need to make a satisfying video that keeps people watching for as long as possible and then it just becomes a game of doing it again long -term strategy like how can you actually build momentum into like a repeatable channel where you can keep making videos that go viral so i think if you take a step back the reality is is you know we're going to go through the frameworks and principles to first and foremost, just make people click.
Because if they don't click, you could create the greatest video of all time. But, you know, title, thumbnail, stuff like that, then you're out of the game. And then secondly, from a macro perspective, I would just say retention.
Just how do you keep them as long as possible to feed the algorithm and obviously just get more net new people to watching the video. You've said before that like virality is like the most important skill to have nowadays. That's like a fairly big claim.
Why would you say that? I think every other moat was dying. in in business in creative it's even interesting just driving through here driving through Hollywood Hills right and like you're seeing all these offices empty right all this traditional media you know companies and Hollywood and film production studios are just lying empty I think if you can own distribution you can build products in any niche and I always like to sort of view it through the lens of like it's a cliche but I think attention right now is what gas was or oil was to america in like 1885 it's like if you have the attention you have the power in the last three months i won't name the names but in the last three months i've had like huge politicians billionaires hall of fame athletes reach out to me and ask me about youtube and about making videos and it's like that wasn't happening five years ago that wasn't happening 10 years ago and i was even i was at dinner recently my friend i just he was like what's like a really bold claim you would stand by
And I was like, I think the next president of the United States is going to be who is the best at viral content in 2028. I said on episode, I don't even know what it was, like three, four with Nick Shackelford that, I mean, I think Mr. Beast is going to be the president if he wants to be in 2036, just under the notion that if a fraction of his followers vote for him, like he would win over the whole entire United States.
So I completely agree with that. And like, you also see. you know, people are buying these big media companies under the notion that they own distribution and attention and they just want to sway people to make decisions towards them.
Like you saw that with TVPN. I mean, it was purchased for nine figures plus. Yeah.
And you know, TVPN is a podcast that's doing what? A thousand, 2000 views an episode on YouTube. Do you think OpenAI paid a hundred million dollars for the podcast?
Or do you think they paid for the brain of understanding content and understanding virality and, you know? John and Jordy clearly have that brain. I think that's what they bought.
Yeah, clearly was like an acquihire for that. And I think that also speaks to the notion that they have, it's not even a big audience, but it's a very small, valuable audience, which we'll get into right now, that views aren't everything. It's a lot in the beginning, but owning a small, concentrated audience that has purchasing power or the ability to influence is everything.
Yeah. And I think on that point as well, something really interesting I bring up is maybe 10 years ago.
I've been doing this for 20 years. So I uploaded my first video in 2006. So 20 years this year.
I think it was July of 2006. So it's going to be 20 years next month. And every single year since then, I've posted videos on YouTube.
You know, I had multiple channels. I've had like 40, 50 channels. People know me from the channel, which is my own name.
But what's interesting is like, I think maybe eight, nine years ago, I was on this radio show in Ireland, which is my home country. And it's this radio show. They're also like a big like publisher in Ireland.
And they're like, How does this make sense? Like, how do you make money from this?
How could anyone make money from this? And this is like, you know, 10 years ago. And I'm like, oh, I'm doing 500 ,000 views every episode.
And they're like, yeah, how do you make money from that? I'm like, how many people tune into your biggest like show on TV? And they're like, 250 ,000, like 250 ,000 people or 350 ,000 people per episode.
I'm like, how many employees do you have for that episode? They go, 150. I'm like, it's me in my bedroom.
and i'm getting similar viewership and you think there's no way this can be valuable and back then it wasn't as obvious and now you know flash forward to today you know i have one of the highest grossing directors of all time has reached out to me one of uh you know these hollywood studios netflix all these different places are just seeing the value of organic content now yeah i also think too like you touched on it it's as a business You can have very, very low OPEX and scale this.
It might have been just you in your bedroom filming it. Obviously, you can have higher production and go deeper into that and it would be a little bit more expensive. But people are starting to see just inputs, outputs.
You could have a very, very small team and get tens of millions of views and then just build a business or a service on top of that. Yeah, I've seen some of the most disgusting profit margins ever with creator companies and some of the worst, to be fair. It can be a little bit of a barbell where some people are reinvesting every single penny.
And, you know, going all out, trying to go viral, trying to be the next Mr. Beast. But then there's other people on the end of the spectrum who you've never heard of that operate in a little niche.
And they have like two employees and they're doing 15 million a year from content. Like I know two people that do that. Yeah, I mean, I come from the e -commerce space where like EBITDA is as low as like 5, 10, 15%.
I feel like on media, it could be as high as like 90, 95%. I would say as low as like 50 % if you want to push the initiative on kind of other things. You could definitely run a 50 % EBITDA business in media.
It's fucking insane. 100%. I want to double click now and just start just overall into how you kind of come up with ideas because that's kind of obviously the first kind of touch point.
And we're going to pop up kind of here, guys, about this kind of what you call it is the ceiling problem. Most people think they have a content problem, but you think it's more of an idea kind of problem. So I'd love for you to walk through like how they should be looking at that.
Yeah, I always like this visual because I think there are these three circles. There are all the viewers you could reach. There's the ceiling that your idea imposes on the amount of viewers you can reach.
And then there's your execution. And you actually need to look at all three of those things at once because, you know, first looking at the actual, all viewers you could reach. Well, that's defined by the niche you're in, by the market you're operating in, you know, like lo and behold, like a knitting niche has a smaller time than like a Mr.
Beast type channel, right? So the actual market you're in has a huge impact on that. I always like to say that like, The bigger times are a lot more competitive, but there's obviously more potential upside.
Smaller times where you have like, you know, smaller niches, you can sort of build more momentum, but then you do reach that ceiling. But regardless of the niche, your actual idea itself can just set a ceiling. And people often just pick ideas that when I look at them, I'm just like, why did you think most people in your niche would watch this?
And they're like, I didn't, I just thought it was interesting. And I'm like, I understand that. But if you're trying to build a great YouTube channel, like.
you need to look at videos that you think can reach as far into your niche as possible and take up as much of that circle as possible. So going back even to your earlier question about what do you do when you go into channels, I think so much of it is saying like, how do we make the market we're operating in bigger? And then how do we come up with ideas that reach further into that market?
And then how do we make sure our execution is good enough so our idea travels as far as it should? I'd love for you to give any type of kind of simple idea where maybe... it was like a catastrophically low kind of idea but someone was very talented and then you opened it up into kind of a new format or a bigger idea anything you can kind of point to there to kind of have people visualize big ideas versus small ideas so there was this channel that we worked with through our training program a couple years ago astrophotography and astrophotography is kind of niche right taking photos of like the milky way right it's pretty niche he was doing like a thousand two thousand views of video and you know it was like shoot his videos would be like reviewing the new telescope that he bought for astrophotography or like teaching people how to shoot you know the Milky Way or whatever and it's all like super small and technical to a small town yeah like no one really cares and during our training he uploaded a video which was like shooting a Milky Way at like different with different cameras so like with an iPhone versus an expensive camera or at different time horizons like in 10 minutes versus an hour versus 100 hours you know there was this video on YouTube that went viral which was like
10 second haircut versus 10 minute haircut versus 10 hour haircut, something like that. And, you know, you can take an idea like that and say, well, what would that look like in astrophotography? And it turns out it looked like something really interesting.
And that video got, I think, two or three million views. So it is amazing how many small niche channels that we have worked with that you would think the time is like a few thousand viewers. But when you actually make it broadly appealing, you can go a lot further.
One of the most viral videos on YouTube over the last few years was. I built a wildlife pond in my backyard. It has like 25 million views, 30 million views or something.
And, you know, the niche technically is wildlife ponds. But like, imagine you were like a full guide on how to build a wildlife pond or how to like install your pond lining for your wildlife pond. It's like 10 ,000 views, maybe, Tam.
But when you go with that bigger, broader angle, you can unlock so much more views. Guys, we're going to go through all different ways to kind of ideate ideas and formats and all different ways to kind of... remix different things.
So if the ideas are the ceiling, what would you say is kind of the floor? Like what is, how do you look kind of through that lens? I think floor is, it's an interesting word.
I think like, I kind of think that the floor is basically like your audience. If the way I like to think about floor is if you posted a trash video, how many of your viewers would watch? So when I work with, channels and I'm trying to figure out ceiling and floor, it's like, let's think about the worst video we could possibly post.
Like if we literally, this is a bit dramatic, but if we literally just posted like a video that was titled video one and a picture of our face, how many viewers would that get? To me, that's the floor. That's like the, the most dedicated viewers that would watch you no matter what is kind of the floor.
And then everything above that is like our execution determines how far we can go. So you would say idea is kind of the ceiling and then the floor would be. kind of the lowest execution versus your a thousand drew fans like the stickiest fans that no matter what you put up with would watch it exactly makes a lot of sense um tam is a word that we talk about a lot we have a lot of you know ecom operators on here now i feel like a lot of people look at a niche and they're just like hey this is a niche it's a small tam it can't hit a lot of people are you basically saying that No matter what, if you just think of a big idea, you can kind of outgrow a small niche.
You're basically saying any niche you can blow up. You know, I just have so much confirmation bias that has like informed me of that belief where like there's been so many niches where they're like, there's no way I can make a knitting channel go viral. There's no way I can make an astrophotography channel go viral.
There's no way I can make a horticulture niche go viral. And we have just seen those examples like time and time again, where like when you do go broader, when you do look for those bigger ideas. you can reach more people so i yeah i do think there's there's a limit to how many views you can get in those niches but like you know an example of i have a friend who does like reviews on like website builders and just like covers different like like wix versus squarespace all these things and it's like well that's that's a pretty small niche in itself but if you have a hundred thousand viewers watching those pieces of content those are really high value viewers you know so i think there is a limit to how far niches can go but in theory you know I just haven't seen an example yet where I look at a niche and I'm like, so long as there's some level of interest there, like sure, if you're like, my niche is Irish guys who live in Austin, Texas and like pickleball only.
It's like, oh, okay, well, you just have Paddy. That's your only viewer. But I think generally speaking, so long as there's some level of interest in the thing you're doing, you know, whether it be golf, like I remember when people said like golf doesn't work on YouTube.
Golf's huge on YouTube now. It's like one of the biggest like niches on YouTube right now. The reality is, is I think anybody out there, you know, the bigger the TAM, the better I feel like, but it's also like, how do they find that sweet spot with a big TAM, but it's kind of underexposed and not a lot of people are building there.
So how do you look at TAM in general? Like how do people go out there and find kind of these markets where hopefully they're medium to big size and like a little competition? Like how do you find out what the volume is and the competition is from a TAM perspective?
Well, I think that the first thing is, at least for me, is We have to understand like the intersection between our skill, what we're good at and what there's demand for before even getting to the time question. Because like I do sometimes see people just chasing these niches where they're like, oh, this goes really viral.
Minecraft goes really viral. Roblox goes really viral. Or this is the latest viral thing in business or whatever it might be.
I always like to think of it as like these two circles, you know, intersecting. And it's like you have your passions, your skills, your maybe your competitive advantages as a person, what you're best at. And then you have what is in demand on YouTube right now or what, you know, do you think there is going to be demand for?
That intersection is usually where I like to live. Like, where is that intersection? To me, though, it's like one of the best ways to find evidence of if there is something working is just are there small channels in a niche that are overperforming?
So, so much of my career has just been built on studying how do small channels grow? Like everyone's like, oh, how does... How does Mr.
Beast grow? You can learn a lot from Mr. Beast.
I learn a lot from this tiny channel with 100 subscribers that just posted a video that got 3000 views. It's like that to me is like it's the equivalent of if you're like a VC fund seeing a company that is tiny and you know, but it's grown from like 10k a month in revenue to 30k a month in revenue in a month. And it's like, Oh, okay, that's kind of interesting.
So I look at I look for really small channels that are starting to see some traction. And I started to sort of reverse engineer like is there something about their niche is there something about their execution like why is that working yeah i think for people out there too we have a lot of creators but also operators what you're basically saying ironically is the name of your company is outliers where if the base average is 100 views and it gets 3000 it's basically a 30x outlier so you want to look for those ones that kind of get disproportionately more views what are like the tools that you're using we're big one of 10 guys what do you use to kind of see those outliers i think one of 10 view stats vid iq like the tool doesn't matter that much.
It's just like, so long as it shows you videos on YouTube and it shows you the average score. So like average views of the channel and then the outlier score. So the outlier score being 30 X average views or 50 X average views.
Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Like for us out there, guys, to give you guys more context, like from a guest perspective, we like to, you know, we would look at you on other channels and are you an outlier?
Are you not? Patty is an outlier. He's got that.
He's got that sauce. So definitely, I think. If anybody is going to go invest in any idea, any person, any guest, they should see how those ideas, concepts, or people have performed on other channels.
Do you want to know something funny? What? That's how I found you too.
Are you serious? I saw you flash up on one of my tools. And I was like, oh shit, this guy's started a podcast.
I think one of your first guests got like maybe 50, 60 ,000 views, right? But then you had Samir on, it did well. And I was like, you're overperforming.
Like you're overperforming your expectation. If I looked, how many subscribers you on right now? probably by the time this comes out, I'd say 60 ,000 subscribers.
60 ,000 subscribers. So if I looked at a 60 ,000 subscriber channel, I would sort of assume the viewership would be like five to 10 ,000 views. We smash it over that.
And you're probably averaging. Combined video and audio, 100 ,000. 100 ,000.
Yeah. So it's like, you're an outlier. So speaking back to that, like I did, like, you know, you saw me, you saw that on other podcasts I've been on, it's overperformed their channel's average.
I saw that you were overperforming, you know, other podcasts. Interesting. Really quick, just to do the math, because I know that you're like very formulaic in nature.
How do you look at subscribers versus average views and kind of like the benchmark? I mean, it seems as though you just benchmarked 60 ,000 subs to 10 ,000 views. Are you saying what, like five, 10 % of subs should be viewing?
Like what are those, what's that ratio that you're looking at? So what's interesting is like subscribers in 2026, to be honest, I don't really care about. They're kind of dead.
They're a little bit of a vanity metric. look, it's still like the score. It's still what people use to keep score.
Like, you know, Mr. Beast doesn't go, oh, I just hit 150 million views on average video. Next milestone, it's like, I just hit 500K subscribers or 500 million subscribers.
So it's still the thing that keeps score, but it's not overly important from an algorithmic perspective. I just use it as like a rough like idea. If a channel is like 50, 60 ,000 subscribers, where would I in my mind generally think the viewership would be?
Probably like... you typically see maybe 20 % of their subscriber count would be quite normal. But if you're overperforming, it's very common to see a channel that's like, you know, way above that.
When I had my, when I did my channel, I had 200, 300 ,000 subscribers and I was hitting a million, 2 million views every episode on my channel. And it was like overperforming that subscriber count. More views and subs.
That's a winner. Completely agree there. Guys, this episode is sponsored by Ketone IQ.
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keep diving into principles and frameworks. We've talked a lot about you can win in a niche. What are ways to kind of look at TAMs and kind of find outliers?
We're going to get way more into the outliers. I love this CCN framework that you talk about. We're going to pop up right here, a visual on that too.
Why don't you kind of walk us through the three types of viewers and how people should approach kind of positioning and packaging their videos? Yeah, I came up with this framework probably four years, four or five years ago. And it's one of those moments where it's so simple.
But then I was like, oh, this actually sums up content as a whole and content strategy as a whole. So the idea here is most channels, and I think this goes for different platforms as well, whether it's Instagram, TikTok, you know, whatever. You have these three main groups of viewers.
Your core viewers are the people that basically are ride or die, like the 1000 true fans. These are the people who like will kind of tune in no matter what for you. If you're starting out, you probably don't have much of a core.
If you're at zero, obviously you don't have a core. But even for you right now on the podcast, you probably know that there's like out of the 100 ,000 viewers you're getting across the episodes, it's probably like three, four or 5 ,000 people that are like, I'll watch every episode. This is great.
I'm there. And that's your core. And they're very valuable.
But that's the core. The casual are the people who dip in and dip out. They maybe watch one in every three, one in every four videos or episodes.
And they're very valuable because if you can capture more of them, you can start to turn them into core viewers. But that's your casual audience. And then you have new viewers.
New viewers are all the potential viewers you could reach every time you upload. Now, this can be overwhelming because if you think about it, like, you know, there are over a billion viewers on YouTube. So that can be like overwhelming.
I said, well, could I reach a billion viewers? No. But in your niche, you know, with the idea of what your time might be, like how many viewers do you think there is?
So for like a business operator podcast, it's probably like 500K to a million viewers out there. So you're like, well, there's all these new viewers I'm still not reaching with my videos. And the idea of the core casual new viewer framework, the CCN framework, is you want videos that your core viewer can watch and enjoy, your casual viewer can watch and enjoy, and a new viewer can watch and enjoy.
So hit all three. Hit all three. And it sounds so basic, but it actually starts to make it really difficult.
Because if you think about it, the kind of idea that your core wants, the kind of videos your core wants the most, might be very different to the videos that attract new viewers and vice versa. the videos that maybe attract the most new viewers that might completely alienate the core. So, so many mistakes in YouTube strategy come from tailoring too much to the core and just making these videos that are just like super niche.
Like if you, I always like to say like, you know, I think it was, was a Henry Ford that said, if I asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse, you know, instead of a car. I think about what YouTube is like, if you ask your comment section what they want, they'll just say more of the old thing you used to do that no longer works.
Cause they're like, I missed that. Do that again. It's like, you're not a good strategist.
You just want what, you know, you want to watch as a viewer. So I don't really listen to my comment section that much. I'll pay attention, but like, you know, looking at the core can really sort of, you know, make you focus too much on small, narrow topics.
Even think about the creators you like the most. Like, you know, let's just say someone like a Hermosi, who's like a huge business creator. Like I think if me or you, as people who own companies, wanted Hermosi to make a video, we'd tell him the video we want him to make.
He'd be like, okay, I could make that. It's going to get 10 ,000 viewers because there's very few people. at your level that want to watch that video, right?
So I think the core is a really hard one to hit, but it's super important. And then on the flip side, you know, your new viewers, like I see these channels all the time that just like, you can tell they're just chasing these new viewers. They're like, oh, come over here, come over here.
And we're trying to grab them. They're like, come over here, grab, I'm going to grab you here with this idea. I'm going to grab you with this idea.
And there's no like through line. There's no reason to keep watching the channel. It's just like, you're just making whatever goes viral in a given moment.
And you're just trying to attract new viewers. So to me, the best videos on YouTube, they can be watched by people who have watched every video in your channel, that have watched a couple of videos in your channel and have never watched your channel before. And I like to use that framework to help with that.
Yeah, I think for people out there listening is obviously you need some sort of kind of through line that kind of filters in all three of those buckets. For us, it's business. And to hit the new, like you really have to basically take a swing.
and to kind of try something completely new. Like for us, you know, Dave Grutman, who's a big hospitality guy in Miami, like he was a kind of different type of episode. We had had on basically only operators and creators, and we brought on this kind of hospitality guy, but it was through the lens of business.
So you had the core people, they want to hear about business, the casual people, maybe they've been to Miami, and then the new people, maybe it's hospitality people. So I think you need to... you have to be big and bold.
You have to try new things to hit the new audience or else you're going to stay kind of stagnant and not grow and stick with the core. Exactly. And I love this example that we have here from one of our previous clients, Jesser, who is, I think, the biggest, one of the biggest sports channels in the world.
Guys, if you're on audio, make sure you get on video right now because we're popping up right now a great example that you can walk through. Yeah, why don't you walk us through right now how and why it hits these different three. So this is a great example.
I love using this because these three videos were all posted within the same month on the same channel, right? So these were all posted on a big channel. They were all like, you know, thought out, planned.
They had their own thumbnail, all these different things, right? You see on the far left, official reveal of my new YouTube studio, Full Tour. So if you don't know who that is, why do you give a shit about that video?
official reveal of your new you know who likes that video like youtube nerds like production nerds like we're like oh that's cool let's watch that but really the only people that would watch that is his core audience 400 000 people so it's actually a pretty easy way to see what is your core audience it's probably 400 000 people because you made a video that's not very interesting and only 400 000 people watch that's almost like a day in the life type thing like where it's very kind of intimate and specific to the one person and there is still sometimes a value to trying those videos but if you're trying to grow a channel if you're going to build the biggest possible audience they do hold you back you look at the right core casual right insane make the shot i'll buy you anything challenge why do i think that's core casual well it's core because again the core just like the creator they like jesser it's casual because most of his casual viewers have watched previous videos like this on his channel like it's it's a decent idea there's some level of stakes but it's kind of basic there's nothing that special or unique about that idea and if you look at the the one on the far right here core casual new i'm interested
Going to five NBA games in 50 hours. It's difficult. It's a challenge.
It feels he's kind of like signaling effort to you. Like we all have this effort bias as humans that if we see someone doing something that feels high effort, we look at it and go, oh, wow, like that's impressive. Like, how did he do that?
Or I want to see that. So going to five NBA games in 50 hours, 14 million views. And I think it's a great, beautiful example of these things.
His core audience is 400 ,000 viewers. So that video got 400 ,000 views. his casual is maybe closer to a million at least at the time so you know that one got just under a million views and then the new viewer well the time for basketball on youtube might be like 10 to 20 million views and he got 14 million views on that video and three videos one video has just dramatically bigger outcome because it is reaching to new viewers as well I use Whisperflow for hours every single day.
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If you guys want to get one month free of Whisper Flow Pro, click the link below and use code OPENRESIDENCY. Where do you see people going wrong with this kind of CCN network? Like what are those big mistakes that people are making?
I would say one big mistake is not understanding the importance of a through line. And actually just in general, especially when I talk to actually entrepreneurs, this is really interesting. I think entrepreneurs generally have like a ton of interests and they try to do a ton of different things.
And what they'll do that's wrong, in my opinion, when it comes to this framework and just ideation in general is they'll, they assume that there's too much overlap or there's more overlap than actually exists between different topics. Yeah. Right.
So I always like to think of this thing where like, actually, speaking of Red Bull, our client Red Bull, when I started working at Red Bull in 2022, on their channel, they had like, you know, this parkour, this snowboarding athlete, you know, this rock climbing, then F1, and then soccer, and then all these different things.
And it's like, great, okay. But who are the people who actually like all these different sports at the same time and care about all these different sports at the same time and all these different athletes? Because I was just like, you know, I didn't get the time, like she's much bigger now, but Aileen Gu, who's like the skater or something.
And I remember going, who's Aileen Gu? And they're like, you don't know who Aileen Gu is? And I'm like, no.
And it's like, I think very few people in the world know who all these people are and care about all these people. And the people that do, they work for Rebel, right? They're like you.
So I love to think of that idea of like, there isn't that much overlap between topics. Like even video games, right? If I said like Battlefield and Call of Duty, they're both first person shooters.
They're both very popular, like huge AAA games, right? The overlap between those two games, 20%, in my opinion. If I had to guess right now, like 20 % of people that play college regularly also pay battlefield regularly.
So you'll see these channels and like, oh, I'm a gaming channel. I do first person shooter content. And I'm like, okay, let's see.
Oh, I do Counter -Strike. I do battlefield and I do college. It's like, bro, like these are like completely different things.
And then you can take the exact same thing into like, you know, a business channel or like, you know, if you're like a health channel, let's just say you're a health and fitness channel. It's like, well. There's a big difference between bodybuilding and yoga and stretching.
And these are all different niches with different audience profiles. And people are so dialed in on what they like that you can't jump around as much as you think. Yeah, I think any of the kind of new categories need to be somewhat adjacent.
You don't want these like crazy contrasts. And I also feel like it's like for us, it's a maniacal focus on looking through a business lens. And like, I obviously have other passions, but I know that we need a certain amount of kind of escape velocity.
where I can start going deep with like health and wellness type people, or, you know, in a perfect world, like Joe Rogan can bring on MMA and comedy, like I love all that random stuff. But you just you have to stay super deep and narrow and then incrementally bring on more categories. You agree with that?
I 100 % agree with that. And the thing is, it kind of goes back to our time discussion, which is like, there are sometimes you're attracted to like going after the biggest, broadest thing, but that is the most competitive, right? You can't go that way.
So what I mean by that is you can't really start broad, and go narrow just doesn't really work you can start narrow and just gradually expand and grow outwards and grow outwards and grow outwards like i think nearly every channel i've ever worked on that has grown to become a massive channel they've started in something very small and then they've just expanded expanded expanded so forrest galante is right now the most viewed wildlife channel on youtube and he's our client we signed him at 20 20 to 30 000 views a video back in 2023 we realized that his kind of niche within a niche, so wildlife is a niche, right?
But his niche within a niche is like extinct animals. So back then, most of our videos, most of our topics were around extinct animals. They were around like, you know, lizards, dangerous animals, things that went extinct, like the Pylosenes, which are like the Tasmanian tiger or something.
And if you look at the channel now, it's like we're doing private tours of big zoos. We're doing like videos with big cats. We're getting millions of views per video, but we didn't start like that.
We expanded out over time. Deep and narrow start there. I mean, we started with e -com operators, then we kind of brought in CPG operators, and now we're expanding to operators in business and kind of different categories.
So I completely agree. I want to kind of, from a pattern recognition perspective, let the audience know, like, what are those true, you know, we keep talking about views. What are those true kind of hallmarks and things that need to be consistent for these videos to get one, five, 10 million views?
Like, what are those key things that you kind of look for there? So yeah, CCM fit. They have CCM fit.
I always like to think that they can be understood in a second. So a really interesting thing about us as humans is I think when we're actually making something, we assume that people are going to give it a lot more consideration than they do. I'm sure you see that all the time in, you know, e -commerce and whatnot.
It's like, you think people are going to look at it and be like, oh yeah, I see the way he made that label like that. That's going to make me buy. Whereas it's really usually much more impulsive than that.
i always invite people if you have like you know a partner or just a friend and they're watching youtube pay attention see how they're watching youtube right let's just say you know you're with your friend and they're watching youtube on the tv they're just they're just they're scrolling like history videos they're clicking clicking clicking things are getting a second of time they're getting a second that's it they're getting a second and on your phone you're scrolling by videos like this right and yet when we're making a video an idea we're like you know sometimes I'll have people come up to me in the street, you know, very rarely, but sometimes get recognized.
And then someone's like, Oh my God, I've got a crazy viral idea. I want to pitch to you. And I'm like, okay.
And then they go, so what's going to happen is it's going to be like this. And then this person is going to come in and we're, and I'm like, dude, can you explain that again? And then they explain it again.
I'm like, you've taken like 30 or 40 seconds to explain what this video is. Every video I've worked on that's had 10 million views. I've even worked on videos with over a hundred million views.
You can always just say them in one second and people are like, I get it. I get it right away. So I always like to think one of the biggest hallmarks of our ideas is like, can it pass the glance test?
Can someone just look at it and be like, oh, I get that. I want to watch that. And a big problem new creators make, a big problem entrepreneurs make on YouTube is they just make these very complicated titles, too long, too many things happening.
And I'm like, if you can't put your idea into a sentence that is just one line that I can understand, a log line, it's not a good idea. I don't care.
They're like, it's the best video idea ever. I just need a way to package it. I'm like, well, then it's not a good idea.
It's just a random thought. Simple, not complex words. You can't do anything.
You just need to increase the absorption rate. Anybody, quick glance can see it real quick and understand and know where you're going to go. So CCN, I would just say simplicity is another big one.
What else do you have here? I would say big thing for me is like universal appeal. So it kind of goes a bit back to the core casual new, but basically when I was making videos on my channel, I went into the niche and it was, you know, YouTube education content and lots of great creators in YouTube education space.
But it was all like, you know, five packaging tips or 10 ways to grow a YouTube channel in 2018, you know, this sort of stuff. And it was getting five, 10, 15 ,000 views a video. I went in and I said, I think I can get a million views a video in this space, which no one was doing.
And I went in and, you know, flash forward five or six years of doing that. I was doing a million views an episode in that space. And what I used was this idea that like, I want to make videos that are interesting to the biggest YouTuber in the world and my mother at the same time.
And I wanted to make ideas that like. You know, my mother would watch me like, this is really interesting. Biggest issue in the world would be like, this is really interesting.
I'm still getting stuff. And if you ever go back, I think this is interesting. Go back and watch like kids' movies, the best kids' movies.
You watch them as a kid, they were great. You're like, this is amazing. You watch them as an adult and you're like, this is still great.
This is even better than I thought. It's layered and there's like multiple things for every person. So I think a big thing I look for as well is just that universal appeal.
Like this can be watched by a large number of people, you know, and not be alienating. Like there's this... little example I give all the time, which is so small, but like I have this friend in Dallas, he had, you know, big YouTube channel over a million subscribers.
I was reviewing one of his videos with him and he introduced his, in the video, he just sort of like had this character, let's just call, let's say her name was like Casey, right? And Katie came in and he's like, okay, today, Katie, you're going to go do this. And she's like, okay.
And she goes and starts doing it. And then flash forward, like five minutes later, he goes, Katie, come over here. And Katie comes over and he kisses her.
And I'm like, what? They're romantically involved?
I didn't know that, right? And I said on the call, I'm like, what's this? And he goes, that's my girlfriend.
And I'm like, well, I didn't know it was your girlfriend and you just kissed her in the video. And he's like, oh, my audience knows. It's like, okay, your audience that watches you know, but do the new viewers know?
And now they feel in it. And he's like, oh, so then should I like set it up every video and be like, she's my girlfriend? And I'm like, no, because then that also is annoying to the core viewers because then they're having to be constantly reintroduced.
So how do you do it? Well, instead of being like, hey, everyone, this is my girlfriend, Katie, you might say something like, Katie, look, I know you're my girlfriend, but can you go do this really quickly?
Now you've sown that seed into the viewer's head that they know, oh, that's his girlfriend. So when you kiss her later, it doesn't feel like, why did you do that? That's, you know, a kind of a gap or a plot hole.
And I think that comes back to the same principle of making videos that as many people can watch without feeling like they're losing something or missing something. I always hate when people say, you probably saw my last video. No, I didn't.
I didn't watch your last video. You know? Oh, like.
As we discussed last week, what do you mean discussed last week? This is the first time I've been here. So I always like look at my video and put it through the lens of can someone who has never watched me before watch this video and enjoy it?
I think the big takeaway here is all roads lead to CCN. You have to look, you have to filter through that in every single level. Title, thumbnail, the actual core of the video to make sure everybody has full context and just get creative.
Like how you just mentioned. 100%. Any other big ones do you think there that we need to touch on?
So. Another one that I see, which is, you know, we're going to talk more about packaging as we go through the episode together. But I think when I look at these videos that have 10, 50, 100 million views, they always pose a question that you have to click to answer.
So not only are like from a pure like objective point of view, they're appealing to lots of people, they've got universal appeal, the CCN fit, all this stuff. They put something in front of you that you look at and you say, I need to click this to get the answer, right? Going to five NBA games in 50 hours, it's like, I need to click this to see if he actually did it.
Like, what games did he go to? Like, did he like, how did he get there? How is this even possible?
So the best videos on YouTube, I think they create this like dynamic where like, you're almost feeling like you're having to like unpause a moment, like you're having to click unpause to watch it. And I always like to say that, like, you know, if you put an idea in front of someone, like, and they're just about to go do something really important, is it good enough where they're like, I need to watch this first?
Curiosity gap is the big thing there. Just open it up and make people clip in. So I feel like a lot of people get confused between like novel ideas and original ideas.
How do you look at just ideas in general? And how do you kind of like ideate all of these ideas? There's three main sources of great YouTube ideas, in my opinion.
You have internal, external, and innovation. Internal ideas are ideas that have like worked for you previously. And it's so funny, like, you know, quite often, look, we're really good at what we do, but quite often people expect us to kind of like come in with some like crazy, fresh, unique idea that's never been done before.
One of the first things we do when we work on a channel is we go through and we look at what are videos they have done in the past that have worked well? Can we put a twist on this? Can we adapt it?
Can we improve it? Can we do something different with this idea? And so often it is just like, oh, do that again.
And they're like, but my viewers, they would already have seen that. It's like content moves fast. People forgot about it.
Do it again, right? I used to run one of the biggest travel pages on Instagram for Ireland. It was called Discovering Ireland.
And what I noticed really quickly is I would just basically have five or six photos that I would post every year, the same photos. And like at the time, I was like, oh, I can't post this. My followers have already seen that photo of the beautiful cliffs.
It's like they want to see it again, right? So internal ideas to me are all about like, what has performed well for you in the past? Is there ways you can do it again?
Can you repeat it? Can you double down? And I think what's interesting in 2026 is YouTube strategy has become more common.
When I started this, YouTube strategy wasn't even a thing. A YouTube strategist wasn't a thing. I would tell people I'm a YouTube strategist, they'd be like, what's that?
And I was being paid $50 an hour. It was just not a skill that was valued or anyone knew about. But nowadays, it's so commonplace that people know what outlier ideation is or what doubling down is.
So if you make an idea that does well, someone else is going to copy that pretty quickly. I want to be my own person to copy myself. I want to like double down quick.
So those are internal ideas. External ideas are basically this idea of outlier ideation. So what are ideas that have overperformed for other channels in my niche and in adjacent niches?
So I will use the tools like we mentioned earlier, these outlier tools, one of 10, view stats, vidIQ, they all do these different things. And I will go through and I will look for ideas that have overperformed the channel average, usually by three or four X. So at least three X the channel's average.
So if a channel is doing like 100 ,000 views a video, if they have a video that gets three, 400 ,000 views, that's interesting to me. There's something about that, whether they meant it or not, they stumbled across something that worked. So me as a creator, I want to go in and figure out like, is there a way I can adapt that?
So how does your brain kind of filter all these? One of them is obviously the topic. I would say title is one, thumbnail is one.
Like what are the big things that you're looking for to find those kind of similarities that you could bring to your videos? I would say usually when I'm using Outlaw Radiation and you do see a video that has three, four hundred thousand views, it's kind of rarely something about the editing or the intro. Not that retention isn't really important.
It is. But it is usually just like the title, the thumbnail, just something about that, whether it's like how they package it different to their other videos. Like quite often I'll look at it and say.
I won't just look at the video that got 400 ,000 views. I'll look at the videos that got 100 ,000 views and say, what is different about these videos? Like, did they try different formats?
Did they try a different style? Did they try a different title? And really what I'm doing with external ideation is I am not just looking at what worked and copying it.
I'm looking at what worked. I'm taking lots of them, almost like, imagine you just have this big pile of ideas that worked in other niches. So if I'm a golf channel, what am I looking at?
I'm looking at every other golf channel in the last, let's say, Three, six, five days. What are the videos that have three or four X the average views on their channel?
I'm taking all those ideas. I'm putting them in my brain. Then I'm saying, well, what's adjacent to golf?
What are other hobbies or niches that are kind of similar to golf? I'm going to say fishing. It seems very different, but like technically it's enjoyed by a very similar demographic to golf.
You know, it involves a lot of equipment like rods and you've got your clubs. It's a pursuit. It's a hobby.
It's a pastime. Okay. I'm also going to look at all the fishing channels.
What were outliers for fishing channels? Oh, someone. made a video where they you know fished with wooden fishing rods maybe i play around a golf with wooden golf clubs right like there's you know definitely ways you can take adjacent niches and combine them what i'm doing there is i'm taking all my internal ideas all the ideas that work for us all the ideas that have worked for other people and other niches similar to mine i'm kind of putting them all together like they're at the top of this funnel which we can probably visualize in some way and just thinking like okay let's put those all into my brainstorming funnel and then the last one is innovation That's the one that you really started this question with, which is like this idea of novel, new, completely fresh and different.
I'm going to make a somewhat controversial statement, which is I think for a lot of small creators at the start, coming up with completely fresh new ideas is quite challenging. And you should do it, but it should probably be something that's like a percentage of your strategy. Maybe it's like 20 % of your videos are, you know, things that you're trying that have never been done before.
And you know, how do you come up with those ideas? I mean, that's the hardest thing to actually sort of create a system around.
It's like, what has never been done before? Something I like to do is like, what if I combine two different things to create something new? That's how I created my channel.
No one was doing video essay breakdowns on YouTube channels before I did in 2016 was when I posted my first one. I saw people doing video essay breakdowns on Hollywood. I saw people doing like detailed business sort of whiteboard videos about business.
And I said, what if I did that for YouTube? Just took the format and just brought it to your topic. Yeah.
I blended them together to create something new. So innovation is still like a powerful, like tactic with this, with this funnel. But the idea for me is I think a lot of smaller creators, you know, even like entrepreneurs and people that come into this space, every idea they make is just like, I have no evidence this is going to work.
I just think it's cool and I'll make it. And if your goal is to make YouTube a fun hobby, that's great. But if your goal is to grow the biggest channel on YouTube, which is my goal in every niche I'm in, if I work with a finance channel, which we have, I say, I want to build this to be the biggest finance channel in the world.
If I work with a wildlife channel, biggest wildlife channel in the world, that is my goal with every niche. There's got to be like a fair amount of emphasis put on like data, what's working, what's worked for us, what's worked for other people. Guys, this podcast is not for hobbyists here.
We're here to go deep. So I completely agree with you there. So I think taking a step back again.
I think there's a lot of operators on here that their YouTube is a corporate dumping ground and we want to get them kind of on the right track. So looking at kind of those three prongs, if you have nothing, start external, see what's working, test some stuff on your side. Once you have X amount of videos, then maybe look inward, internal, use what's working, kind of re -innovate.
And then once you have like a little bit of scale, that's when you can start innovating and kind of taking new shots on that. That's beautifully put. Yeah.
Like spot on. if you start with that like what actually happens is like you know because when i when i say the word internal to someone they're like well i have no videos that have worked yet at the same time you know on that point i do sometimes think like if you're averaging a thousand views a video and you have a video with 5 000 views still data it's still an over performer it might seem small but it's still an over performer but like at the start you might not have that so yeah it is just a case of like let me go and find if i was just starting a completely new channel in any niche you know let's just say it's health and wellness let's just say it's beverages let's just say it's like finance, website builders.
First thing I'm doing from scratch is I am going, I'm using these tools. I'm finding every single outlier in this niche and adjacent niches over the last two years. Maybe there's like a thousand and I'm taking them and I'm saying, what is my spin on that?
What is my spin on that? What is my twist on that? On each one of them.
Yeah. For people out there listening, the best YouTube pages are doing this. Like it's so funny, man.
Cause you just see, I remember we actually used one of the titles for it. It was like someone. I think it was maybe Hormosa or My First Million.
They talked about like the gold rush of something. It was an outlier. It performed well.
And then you start seeing all of these kind of business channels that are ahead and understand YouTube using gold rush. It has its time. It does well.
And then it's kind of on to the next one. So it's really about finding it and then just squeezing as much juice out of it while the juice is still good. And then maybe you revisit it years down the line.
Yeah. And the thing about doing it, and this is why I love that you said that. And I think this is why.
at a certain point, it just becomes around surrounding yourself with like outliers. Just like if, I don't know, if you want to be like really fit, like you surround yourself with like loads of guys that have 10 % body fat and you're like, okay, I'm going to start, maybe I'm going to skip that burger. I'm going to start dieting and, you know, trying to get better.
I think with YouTube, if you're just surrounding yourself with videos, like I like to think of my brain as just like, I am just putting things through my eyes all the time that have worked for other people to try to like, then when I have a problem or when I have an idea I need to come up with, think about, oh, that went viral for that channel.
I can pull videos from my brain that were like, viral on the channel six years ago and be like that could work for this channel or that could work for this thing and it comes from surrounding yourself and one idea i i really like which we came up with with a client that used to work with noah kagan i'm not sure if you know noah before i know crazy noah in austin yeah yeah absolutely legend but i remember i came into his channel he was doing like maybe like five or ten thousand views a video at the time and i worked with his creative director the guy named jeremy great guy and the sort of goal for them was simple it was like we want to build bigger videos.
We want to go more viral. So they came up with this idea with us, which was like asking millionaires how to make a million dollars. Now, if you look on YouTube right now, that is like everywhere, right?
There's like a million people doing it. But what's interesting, you might've even seen this thumbnail. I'm sure we can show examples of this, but this like concept of like someone with their hands outstretched, someone answering a door and then some yellow text in the middle.
It's like, how did you get rich or whatever? That actually came from, from me and from us, from my team back in 2000, I think 21. And I've seen videos of him like knocking on people's doors and just big houses and being like, how'd you get rich?
Exactly. And what happened was, was interesting is this idea was in front of us. We were thinking about it and I was just like, oh, there was a video that went viral, a cooking video that went viral three years ago, which was titled asking Canadians to cook them dinner in their kitchen.
And it was a guy who went and knocked on doors and he had this, in the thumbnail, he had this piece of text which said, can I cook in your kitchen? And I had someone answering the door kind of like shocked, right? that got like 9 million views at the time in on a very small channel i saw it because i've been tracking videos for decades right so i saw it and i was like huh someday i'm gonna use that sitting there with noah he's averaging five to ten thousand views a video with his team and it's like there's this video which is like asking millionaires how to make a million dollars we're gonna go and knock on people's doors and ask them how they got rich and i'm like oh my god i've got the thumb up concept like let's put Noah here with his hands outstretched, put a backwards cap on him.
If you actually go look, we can show the references I'll send to you afterwards. But the actual reference from the Canadian cooking channel had like a backwards cap on and he's asking like this, put text in the middle, put the person there, have the person like sort of shocked and staring right at him, make it not too posed.
Let's make that thumbnail. That video got five million views and created one of the biggest like trends in the whole business space on YouTube. And it was just from like combining multiple things together and the actual title itself, right?
Hermosi had made a title, which was something like, I asked a billionaire how to make a billion dollars. So when we were making the title, we were like, you know, asking millionaires how to get rich. I knocked on millionaires doors to ask them how to make more money.
Hmm, let's think about this. I asked them, I asked millionaires how to make a million dollars. So that kind of came from the Hermosi title, right?
So you see how like, you're almost like Frankensteining, like this thumbnail idea from this video and this title from this video. And you're combining these all together to try to get like something new and fresh. And then The actual concept for the video kind of came from like Daniel Mack, like asking supercar owners how they got rich and, you know, what do you do for a living, that kind of stuff.
So you've kind of got this idea where you're taking short form, a short form idea and making it long form. You're taking a title from Hermosi here and adapting it. You're taking a thumbnail concept from this random Canadian cooking channel and you're combining it all together to get something that got five million views and became like the most viral business video of 2022.
That's insane the amount of touch points that lead up to one video. I mean, people just see the end concept and they don't know kind of what goes into it. Guys, I love the guys at 1of10.
We're going to pop down below some like link or coupon code or something for them. We've been using them since the beginning. And yeah, I just think it's put a folder, all the outliers and mix and match topics, formats, styles, anything and everything and just create your kind of own new thing.
I want to get into just ideation in general, kind of like your ideation system. How many ideas are you doing per video? And is there any like principles or frameworks that you could share?
Yeah, I think the way I think about it, and I got this from Steve Jobs. which is not that he told me personally which is 110 .1 so really when you think about it you start you have zero so you start at zero then you decide well like roughly what are the guiding principles of what I want to make videos around so at that point like you start to think about like well what's a core casual new viewer for my channel what are the videos that serve me the most what are the videos that like I think are going to bring in the most correct viewers for my channel.
It's not always about total viewers. It's also about like, you know, I want to make sure I get the right viewers for my channel. So you kind of start to inform yourself a little bit about like what sort of viewers you're looking for.
Then you think about this framework, which I like to use, which is the 80 % strategy rule. And it's not the Pareto principle. It's very different.
It's this idea that the best channels, they are looking for videos that have 80 % overlap with each other. So I talked about this earlier, but overlap is one of those things that people really overestimate. They think there's more overlap between things than there actually is.
So the 80 % strategy rule is basically saying we need to look for videos that have 80 % overlap with each other, topics that have 80 % overlap with each other. And we should do that 80 % of the time. So we have this kind of 20 % of the time where we can try something different, try something new.
I've been accused in my career of like kind of creating too many like boundaries for creators. Like, oh, they can't experiment. They can't be creative.
I'm like, you can experiment. You can be creative. Do it one every four times or one every five times.
If you're being creative and experimenting and trying something completely new, you either have to be a genius, you know, and great, Casey Neistat. I mean, I'm not gonna tell him what to do. He's a genius.
But if you are like mere mortals like me, and like most people, you've got to think through the lens of like, is there overlap between these topics? So the 80 % strategy overlap rule, it's like, are these topics overlapping? And the simple question to me is just like, Can 80 % of people who watch this video, watch this video, watch this video.
And that's really how I think about that. Guys, we've been doing that wrong. Sorry for the, for the listeners out there.
It's definitely not 80%. It's a little bit lower. Yeah.
We try and kind of blend out on a per guest perspective. It's not 80%. It's a bit lower, but from a topic perspective.
So let's go through, you said 110, one, you start with the one idea under kind of this thesis. And then how do you kind of ladder up? And are you saying a hundred ideas?
So easily. Yeah.
right now like at any given time we have about five to ten clients like we are we take the approach of like we are like almost like a boutique law firm that will win the case but our case is like growing your youtube channel so we i've just assembled the team of the smartest people on youtube like my lead youtube strategist right now actually had his own channel with over a million subscribers and averaged like three million views a video he quit it to come work with me like we just have this team of killers that just get youtube better than anyone else And what we will basically do is we will take each client and we do the ideation.
So they outsource the ideation to us. So for each client, we're usually ideating anywhere between two, three, maybe even 500 ideas for them every month. Now, those are ideas that we ideate.
They don't see that many. They see five, right? So generally, we look at it like if we want to come up with five ideas, we're probably going to have to come up with 500.
So that's where the 110 won comes from. If you want to come up with a great idea. you start by coming up with 100 ideas.
And this is the sort of concept from Apple, which is like, if we want to launch a great product or a great feature, like we've got to like brainstorm 100 products and features and then whittle them down to be left with the one that is actually going to be the thing that moves the lever. So for me with ideation, going back to that idea we talked about of internal external innovation, to me, that's all about just getting this big group and source of ideas that we can put into a funnel.
When I say come up with a hundred ideas, I am literally talking about, we have a spreadsheet month over month for each clients where four or five different people are coming up with hundreds of ideas, like every month in the spreadsheet, most of which will never see the light of day. They're just like, what about this? What about that?
Like, what if we try this idea or we've tried that idea? So 110 .1 to me is you come up with a hundred ideas, then you eliminate them down to like your best 10 using an elimination criteria. Now that can be a simple thing like.
I actually suggest every channel has elimination criteria. You should have elimination criteria for guests. If it's like.
We have our own skill on cloud. It's a guest vetting system where we have like a blended average based on distribution, communication skills. Does it fit the ICP?
100%. There you go. There you go.
So like maybe you're a YouTube channel. Maybe your elimination criteria is like, you know, is this feasible? Can we easily title thumbnail it?
That you wouldn't believe. Like when I say we come up with 500 ideas for a client in a month, people might be like, that's overkill. It's over the top.
Just by applying that one criteria of can we put it into a good title thumbnail, that could get rid of like two thirds of them. Because you can come up with great ideas and it's like, there's not really an easy way to package that. So many times, like I have like a younger team member, they come to me, they're like, Paddy, I'm so bullish on this idea.
It's amazing. It's amazing. I'm like, okay, okay.
And they're like, it's so good. I'm like, how do we put this in a thumbnail? And it's like, okay, we're getting rid of that idea.
It doesn't work, right? So guys, we're about to turn the corner and get into packaging soon. I completely agree.
I want to tell you this because you're going to be proud of me. So looking at guests, like one of my buddies who's, you know, nine figure entrepreneur, I was just with him in New York and I want to have him on. Our main conversation when we were getting a drink last week in New York is what's the packaging concept is like, I can sit and have an interview, but if we can't package it up into something, then it's just, it's not going to travel and it's not worth our time.
Yeah. It's about packaging first. A hundred percent.
So like. Your elimination criteria might be like, is it easy to package? Is it feasible?
You know, because like quite often, like, especially when we're ideating for clients like Red Bull, like my team come up with ideas. I'm like, I don't think it's possible to put a car on the moon. You know, like it's great, but it's not feasible.
So like feasible could be different. It's like, I mean, you know, I'm sure you'd love to have Elon Musk on the pod. I'm not going to say you can't, but maybe right now it's less feasible than other guests, right?
So I think I always look at like feasibility. I look at aspiration of view target. that can eliminate a lot down as well.
So setting a view target for your channel, like if I was you, and you know, I know that I'm averaging 100 ,000 views an episode between YouTube and downloads, I would look at it and be like, huh, like what is my aspirational target? Well, I probably want to get to like 150, 200 ,000 views an episode. So now if you have a guest that comes along and you're like, I think they're a good guest, but I think they're probably gonna get like 20, 30 ,000 views.
I don't think there's quite enough evidence that they can get out there and get the views that I want. You probably shouldn't do that episode. as harsh and strict as that sounds.
If your goal is pure growth, I'm saying everything through the lens of like growing the biggest possible audience, which is not always the goal, but you know, but basically you have this kind of criteria. I usually suggest it being like four or five different points. This idea, your ideas have to tick off those before getting down.
If you have a hundred ideas, you put them through your funnel, you put them through the elimination criteria and you're left with 30, your elimination criteria is probably garbage. It's probably just easy to get through. It needs to be more rigorous, harder to get through it.
Yeah. If you're putting 100 ideas through and you're left with like one or two, it's probably too strict. So, you know, I like to look at the criteria of like, can we just give ourselves these five things that a video needs for our channel?
You know, if it doesn't have this, we shouldn't make it. An example for my channel was like, my view target was always a million views. So it's very simple.
Like I would analyze these YouTubers and how they grew. Well, it's kind of interesting if like the YouTuber themselves aren't averaging over a million views a video, it's kind of unlikely that they're going to get over a million views a video when I do a meta analysis on their channel. So I'm not going to make videos on creators who aren't getting over a million views a video.
Like that's kind of the lens of through I look through strategy back then. So yeah, you've got your criteria. Hopefully that takes 100 ideas, maybe leaves you with the 10 ones that you're looking at of like, okay, these are the strongest.
We've ideated them. They've gone through the funnel. They've came down.
They've, you know, we've left with these 10 ideas. From there, with each of those 10 ideas, I'll usually do like a one page like idea slide is what I call them. And it's this idea of like a rough film sketch, a rough title or titles.
Jesus. A rough skeleton, a rough kind of like log line of the video. And these are for these 10 ideas.
Again, probably nine of these 10 videos will never see the light of day. This is just to get to a point where now we have like, imagine we have this beautiful wall and we're putting the 10 ideas and now we have these 10 different like potential directions to go or different ideas to come through. then we have those 10 all if we have a team even if i'm a solo creator but let's just say we have a team i just go okay everyone let's get in the meeting which one do we think if we had to put our career on one of these videos which one do we think is the best that's the one we'll make so to make a video on a channel i think most people just think it just sort of goes like oh i came up with this idea let's do it it's like we're bleeding for ideas you know we're hurting ourselves.
For everybody out there listening, we're not doing enough either, clearly. So to tie a bow in it, it's kind of, you start with just like knowing your audience, your ICP, ladder up as many ideas as possible, 100, 200, 300, 400, filter it down through the elimination criteria. And then ultimately you go through this kind of one page thing where it has title, thumbnail, rough sketch.
Guys, we're going to put that one pager down below in a PDF. And then subjectively, everybody in the room is kind of picking. What are you most excited about?
And you subjectively pick one and you let it go. Yeah. And if you're a solo creator, it's just like out of these 10, if I had to pick one to put my career on it, like which would I pick?
Gun to the head. I like that. Most creators are just duct taping together a bunch of different tools to run their podcast and their newsletter.
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We talked about it being a click and watch platform. YouTube, if they don't click, they don't watch. You've said a 20 % better title can earn 100 times more views.
not 20 times more views. Why is that true? And why do people really not act on it?
So there's this idea, it's kind of like the nonlinear returns idea I have for content, which is basically algorithms are multipliers, right? The YouTube algorithm has like this multiplication effect where essentially if something is a little bit better, it might be enough better to then reach, you know, so much of a wider audience because of how broad and exponential YouTube algorithm is.
And it's kind of like this in a lot of, disciplines right like the the best the player that makes in the nba they're usually not like five times better than the player that doesn't right but they're like maybe 10 better in all the right ways they're a little bit faster they're a little bit stronger they're a little bit more consistent the player that doesn't make it or they make it semi -pro playing in thailand you know close yeah it's close maybe they're making 50k a year the player that makes the nba maybe they're making 10 million a year and it's like well he's only 10 or 20 better than the other guy But he's 10 or 20 % better in a sort of exponential game with nonlinear returns.
And I think the beautiful thing about YouTube is it isn't predictable linear. It's not like, oh, if we make it 10 % better, it gets 10 % more views. It's like, no, it can actually occur where you make something a little bit better and it gets 100 times more views.
We have this real example where we had someone in our training program and he was this like web designer channel. His name was Gabe. And I'm sure we can show an example of it in the pod.
And he had a video that was doing about a thousand views a day. And it had like a decent thumbnail, like a pretty good thumbnail. My team sat down with him, brainstormed a new idea.
He came up with a new thumbnail, changed the thumbnail. So this isn't even on a new video. This is on a video that already existed, that was already out there and was getting a thousand views a day.
Within a day of changing the thumbnail, that video went from getting a thousand views a day to 40 ,000 views a day. And it's like... 40 times more views, basically with one change.
And like, if you look at the thumbnail side by side, I think if you just ask people on the street, they would say, yeah, the new one's like a bit better. Like it's like, you know, it's reasonably better. It's like maybe 20, 30 % better, but it led to, you know, 40 times more views.
And I think it's just the fact that the YouTube algorithm is this multiplier. Like Jimmy, Mr. Beast is the biggest creator in the world.
He puts more effort and time in than anyone else. But I wouldn't say you'd look at his video and say it's like 100 times better than this creator or that creator. It's like, no, he's just understanding that he's playing an exponential game, a nonlinear game.
What percent of time on packaging? So I like to say packaging is 50 % of the game. I don't think it should be 50 % of the time because that's kind of insane.
But I would say, let's just say, let's just say you have 100 hours to make a YouTube video, right? Where should you put that time? If I was like, if I was a time allocator and I have 100 hours, where would I put it?
I think I would put 10 to 20 hours of that time towards packaging. And the interesting thing about that is like, people will say, well, how, like, how? Like, how do you spend 20 hours making one image?
It's like, okay, well, we don't make one image. We're making 50, right? Or we don't just make the image.
We research every other, you know. title or thumbnail in our niche and see what we can take from them. We're spending hours researching.
We're hiring a designer to come in and like come up with other ideas. We're like studying movie posters from the 80s. You know, it's like, it's not just as simple as like making images for a thumbnail or writing titles for a title.
But yeah, I think anywhere between 10 or 20 % of the total time we spend on clients is on the packaging. We'll often write, like I say this, this actually frustrates me. I'll say like we write 50 titles for a video sometimes.
People are like, you're insane. You're clinically insane. What's wrong with you?
I'm like, It doesn't take that long to write 50 titles. It doesn't.
We're good with that. We're titles and thumbnails. We go pretty hard on that.
Good. I feel like the big thing, and we're talking about packaging, please add, if I'm missing any, title, thumbnail, and idea. And I feel like idea is the one that we don't spend enough time on.
Is there anything else kind of big under title, thumbnail, idea, under prepackaging? Yeah, that's spot on. The one thing I would add that's actually kind of interesting is it's not only your idea, title, thumbnail, it's...
how people enjoyed your last video. You know, that's, that's quite important. Like think about it from your behavior.
If you really enjoy the person's last video, then you see them again, you click it. Cause you're like, Oh, I really liked their last video. And this actually creates sometimes quite interesting things for me because like, I always talk about these, like, you know, how much time we're putting into thumbnails, how like, you know, Oh, we're spending like 10 grand on this thumbnail.
We're like doing all this crazy stuff. And then someone's like, look at the outdoor boys. He's just posting a screenshot or look at this channel.
They're not even trying to get so many views. And it's like, Sometimes like the content is so good and the creator is so good that the brand of the thumbnail, even if it's a bad thumbnail, just becomes recognizable.
And the person's just like, I want to click that. So that's like an interesting thing. Sometimes you might contend with this at a certain point.
You might realize that like, oh, wow, like people have become used to clicking our style of thumbnail. And now we're sort of assessing it and saying there's probably a more optimal style of thumbnail for the podcast. But if we do it, then people won't know it's us.
And then that becomes like this difficult game where you start to A -B test and play around with different options. We're actually there right now. And it's about just kind of incrementally changing things.
So we'll keep kind of the POV of the guests in the same color theme, but now like on the left, as opposed to it being very kind of clean and brand from a typography perspective, we're now adding like images. Like we'll pop up right now, the Peter Rahal thumbnail with like David Protein. They went through this whole entire lawsuit that got resolved.
And that thumbnail, among other reasons, I mean, it's going nuclear right now. And that was like, we tested, 80 % of it was the same. The one thing we changed was like, Hey, let's put images on the left side.
So yeah, I think you have to be incremental because you don't want to lose all that kind of brand equity that you've got from the past of people recognizing what the aesthetic looks like. Yeah. Like changing the color, that would be bold because we're like people, you know, know our color.
Let's show this in practice. So I want to pop up here a thumbnail that you did with Red Bull that went absolutely nuclear. And I want to just kind of walk through why it did so well.
Title, thumbnail, ideation. Where did it start? Tell us everything.
100%. One of my favorite things about this screenshot is this is a month after the video was posted, right? And it's on 18 million views.
I think it's on like 30 now. It's on like 30 or 40. Wow.
Disrespectful. We're going to re -put up a new one with 30 million views. But I think there's a few things, right?
Like, first of all, the idea is great. World's fastest camera drone versus F1 car. Like, look, world's fastest camera drone.
Like, fastest is a superlative. camera drone versus F1 car you associate F1 car with the fastest thing on earth so that's interesting what's going to win that battle Max Verstappen is the greatest driver in the world in my opinion you know that's obviously lending a huge amount of credibility to the title so all those things are obvious right like and I almost say those because people contend they're like that would have always gone viral no matter the thumbnail and like I you know my our thumbnail designer I shouldn't say my our thumbnail designer Brittany who's in my opinion the best thumbnail designer in the world she made this thumbnail and I'm like that has a huge impact on this video because If it's actually interesting, I had an argument about this video and about how we're going to package it.
And someone else had like a different title from that idea. And it was still a good idea. But I just remember saying, I think with your title from my idea, this video is going to get a million views.
I think with the one we want to go forward with, I think this video can get 10 million views plus. And I felt so confident. And that's the thing.
It's like people will sometimes contend and be like, oh, it's a fast camera drone versus an F1 covers max for stop. And of course, it's going to go viral. It's like, do you know how many videos out there have like all?
the ingredients to be great, but they're not packaged well and they just get no views, like super common. So what I love about it, great title, pause then action, right? Click to unpause.
You have to click that video. It feels like you're actually seeing the start of a video right there. You feel like you're seeing them revving up right beside the start line.
You're clicking to just make that scene happen. Got these like beautiful leading lines into the horizon that are just directing your focus towards the race itself. And look how simple it is.
It's just clean, right? It's not overcomplicated. Max Verstappen is probably top three most famous drivers in the world, like very recognizable face.
Didn't put him in the thumbnail, right? Like because the actual thumbnail itself didn't need him. Well, it's under the notion that you probably don't want to double up on kind of themes or POVs.
You want to kind of use all the real estate there to kind of hit different senses, I would say. 100%. I love the idea of like, yeah, like you're at the starting line or you're just waiting for the start.
And it like, it like baits you into like, I have to click to start the race. Click, click to unpause. Like that, that concept, click to unpause.
Because I'll say that, and this is another great example, right? Like we have, okay, we have a video here with an F1 car and a drone, a Max Verstappen. That's probably cost, you know, an insane amount of money.
All this access, incredible, right? And it was uploaded to a channel with tens of million subscribers. So a lot of people are going to look at that and be like, oh, click to unpause.
That sounds great. Like, how am I going to do that with my... small podcast?
Or how am I going to do that with my health and wellness company or whatever? And what's interesting is like, you can do click to unpause for a podcast. So if I look at your thumbnails, they're kind of click to unpause, right?
It's someone speaking, and it's generally like a quote, or it's something beside them, right? If you look at like so many of the biggest podcasts as well, they're like someone mid speech, right? If it was like, poised, if I was for our thumbnail for this video, right, if I just sort of stood there, and I was like, hey, smiling at the camera.
that's not click to unpause. Well, you're clicking to unpause some like idiot just with his thumb up. But if I'm like talking like this and there's like some text here, it's like, oh, I'm clicking to unpause him saying what it's saying in the thumbnail.
So you can use it in so many different issues. Like it's not just action. Yeah.
And to unpack this for people out there listening, like talking about kind of taking external videos and then making it yours. Like, I feel like I've seen, you know, other YouTubers like. There would be a random YouTuber and they're racing like Usain Bolt.
Like you could say like they loosely took that idea off of this. Yeah. So like there's just a million different concepts within this concept that you can just kind of drag into your own.
And we loosely took this concept from a channel called CarWow in the UK, which does drag races between cars, right? It's like we were thinking of so many different concepts and we were like, look, CarWow does these line up film miles where they have the car and then you have like this, you know, thing. like the other car behind let's sort of adapt that and try our version of that so everything is kind of an adaptation of other things that work makes sense so packaging idea title thumbnail let's kind of walk through the full packaging workflow from the moment when you have the idea to actually hitting publish just from like from a macro perspective you have the ideas then what how do you go title thumbnail like what's that kind of order of how you do things so workflow to me is this you have your idea next up you have your 500 ideas that turn into one idea you have your 500 you have your idea gladiator that's yeah that survived 500 ideas in a fight to the death and it's been left there right at that point you have an idea to me the next step is titles first so some people like come up with a thumbnail first in my opinion it's always better to come with the title first because then that's sort of like saves you the time of having to work on the thumbnail and also like
when you have your title, you can start to inform what the thumbnail should be because the thumbnail should compliment the title, right? So I'll go over titles first. I like to encourage you to do a minimum of 10 titles.
So simple. It's like, you know, world's fastest camera drone versus F1 car, like camera drone versus F1 car featuring Max Verstappen. Max Verstappen races world's fastest camera drone with his F1 car.
You know, like there's so many different titles. Like I just said five in like five seconds. It's like.
It doesn't take that long to come up with a lot of tiles. I like to just sit there and say, what are the different ways I can tile them? We can get into like the title principles I use in a second as well.
But simple, 10 tiles, you got your tiles, next up, thumbnail brief. So just like how you have like a photography brief or like a shoot brief for like a production or whatever it might be, we'll create a document that we will hand to our clients, which basically says, here are the five concepts to shoot in this video. What's really interesting is the vast majority of people, and I would say even creators that have millions of subscribers, big budgets, they still to this day, and it drives me insane.
I don't get it. They'll still just shoot the video and then afterwards be like, okay, what's the thumbnail? And I'm like, so we do these thumbnail briefs first, or we'll be like, these are the five images we need you to capture on the day.
So, oh, you're making a video with the Philadelphia Eagles, with Jalen Hurts, or you're making this video with an F1 car or whatever. We want it from these angles. We want it to be posed like this.
We'll like draw up these concepts because you're either sketched or like hand draw them. Sometimes they're sketched. We'll use image generation with AI to like give sort of rough ideas of what we're looking for.
Even I have like committed absolute like artistry crimes making thumbnails before just with like terrible stick figures, but just something to be like, this is what we're roughly looking for. So that's the thumbnail brief. That's step number two in the workflow.
You got the thumbnail brief. Then you go shoot the thumbnail. So that's just taking the photos.
Now, the interesting thing at this stage, again, this is a thing that sort of retraced me is just like, I'll be like, we'll take like, I don't know, like three or 400 photos for a thumbnail. And then everyone's like, what? Like, why do you do that?
I'm like, how, like, if I just take my phone out, like, right? Like, okay. I just took 11 photos of you, like in slightly different poses, slightly different micro expressions.
So when I'm. asking like a creative to shoot a thumbnail I'm like let's get it from different angles let's get them like facing a little bit different way let's try different lighting so I'm just like for each of these concepts let's say in our thumbnail brief we have five concepts like I'll want like 10 20 30 different shots in different angles or different positions for each of those thumbnails and then after that we'll take the source and then you go into the design phase and you know you've got your your thumbnail shoot done you go into thumbnail design and that is going back to the original brief looking at the source and picking at least three separate different thumbnails that you are going to create from that source and designing and fully designing three different thumbnails at least so like i said earlier we have worked on videos recently where we have made 50 45 50 thumbnails that does happen but also it's expensive takes a lot of time not always feasible so what i like to say is everyone should have time to make three thumbnails even if you're a beginner creator that only has like
10 20 hours a week to do this you know even if you're like a business owner who's just hired like a strategist to do this you can probably still afford to put time into having three thumbnails for your videos like for your podcast i'm sure you come up with a lot more than three yeah i mean one of 10 has a thumbnail generator it's pretty good and like that is one thing that obviously you can come up with the ideas but outsourcing to really really good thumbnail people it's not crazy expensive for people out there listening like a couple hundred bucks and i think to double click on what you're saying this all leads back to following the data So like when you're talking about thumbnails, like we've seen like, should they wear a hat?
Should they not wear a hat? Should there be a logo? Should there not be a logo?
Are they smiling? Are they serious? And then just like really, you know, the more data, internal data that you have, you start kind of seeing patterns and just kind of iterating off that.
So yeah, I can only imagine when we have like 100 interviews in, we're just going to have so much data on what works and what doesn't. And then A -B testing every single one. And then like going back and A -B testing them and being like, I wonder if I move the text down a little bit or whatever.
It's like. I think people would assume that the best people on YouTube are the most creative. And sometimes that's true.
But I think quite often they're actually more like architects, engineers than pure like creatives like you might see in Hollywood. Like if you ask me like someone like a Mr. Beast, like he is an engineer.
He's engineering virality. He's studying every angle, every way he can open a video, every way he can thumb up a video to find the best video. and even for me myself like i think i'm a creative person like my parents are both writers i used to want to be a like a writer that was like my biggest best skill in school actually was english but i sort of think i view it through the lens of like an analyst and like a data analyst of like what are the trends what's the pattern recognition one of my friends owned a very big performance marketing company he spends a lot of time with me and he's just like dude i think you the skills you're using for this are kind of the same skills as performance marketing it's like The different ad copy, like tweaking things, testing it.
Okay, if I like have the ad running at this time of day, if I use this text, if I use this color, does it convert better? It's like, that's the same thing with packaging. It's like the same game.
I completely agree. I feel like the title should be like creative analyst, 100%. Yeah.
And I feel like the people that are getting the asymmetric outcomes in this world usually are creative first and they're not leaning on the analytics and these kinds of principles and frameworks that Patty is giving you all in this episode. That is how you win, is you're taking all these frameworks and... making it objective, not like so subjective.
To tie a bow on that, what is the minimum amount of titles and thumbnails people should have when they put out a video? I think minimum 10 titles, three thumbnails. Like I actually, I don't have it in my contracts anymore, but for a certain point I had it as a contract line item that like it's a non -negotiable, you're going to make three thumbnails a video.
If you don't, I'm just not going to sign you as a client. Like under the notion that. you want to be set up for success like if they don't do that then you can't even do your job yeah i'm like i don't like because because i like i don't care about the business like i do care about the business of course but like i care my my whole career is built on case studies and growing channels so i i go fully in on the channels we work with and i'm like i want to grow this channel to the biggest channel in the world so if you're not willing to make three thumbnails per video like you're not gonna be our client it doesn't matter if you want to pay us a hundred thousand a month we're not gonna take it You added 10 titles.
Let's call it six thumbnails. You probably should have more than three, six thumbnails. You press go and you publish.
What does that look like? It's eight o 'clock AM PST. What does it look like in Paddy's world once you press publish?
Depends on the channel. So with the big channels we work in, like we had a, I'm not going to name the channel, but we had a video recently where in the first day it did 4 million views and it was a failure. People were like, what's happening?
It's not working. Must be nice. So it depends on the channel, right?
But basically, The way I like to think about it, you post the video. I always like to just pick the, you come up with 10 titles.
I like to pick the one title I feel the strongest about. If we have a team, we'll discuss it together. Which one title would we put our career behind as having the best chance of working?
Pick that title. Leave that alone for now. Put that title in.
Put your best three thumbnails in into your A -B test. A little thing I would always like to say as well is like, I'm looking for like differentiated thumbnails. I'm not just looking.
What I see sometimes is like, I'm like, make three thumbnails. And someone's like, okay. And then they make three thumbnails.
And the only thing that changes is the shirt color. It's like, you know, you just took the same shot and just put me in a white, a yellow and a blue t -shirt. Like that's not changed.
That's not three different thumbnails. So three differentiated thumbnails. To me, I love YouTube A -B testing natively.
Some people don't enjoy it as much or, you know, have mixed experience with it. I use it with every client. That's all I can say.
You know, we, we work across a billion views a month and we use it with every client. So I love native A -B testing on YouTube. I'll upload those three thumbnails.
I'll press publish. And basically. The minute before I press publish, I'm just making sure I'm really aligned on the expected view performance of the video.
So what I'll actually do, it's really interesting with our clients, we'll have like the video, then we'll have the team members and everyone is predicting the views of the video in the first, let's say, well, usually the first hour, the first day and the first week. And the reason I love to do that before I press upload is because if we have a video that we think should be the best video we've ever made, we think it should be like.
A one out of 10. How am I even getting to that point? Well, it's a bit of like, you know, feeling data hasn't worked in the past.
Like if you have Elon on your podcast, you're going to be like, this should be a one out of 10. Like surely this should be the best video we've ever made, right? So if you post that video and it comes out the gates and it's a two out of 10, and for people listening, that means it's the second best video out of the last 10 videos you posted in the YouTube ranking system.
You should change the number. You should do, it should be panic stations, right? It's like.
you know, when MrBeast made Squid Game, like if he posted that video and it was a 3 out of 10, technically a 3 out of 10 is above average. But it's not for the expectation of that video. And on the flip side, sometimes the creator has a video where they're like, yeah, I know this isn't going to work.
Like, I know it's not going to really work that well. It's a smaller topic. I still really want to post it though.
I'm like, okay, great. Let's post it. They'll post it.
It's an 8 out of 10. They're like, shit. What the fuck?
Why isn't it working? We need to change something. I'm like, it's not just about where it ranks against your last videos.
It's where it ranks against your expectation. So before I press publish, I make sure that... I am aligned and the team is aligned with like, where do we expect this video to fall?
Like roughly, we get it wrong all the time. It's not a perfect science, but it's like, I think this is should be, I remember posting this video and being like, it probably should be a one out of 10. It could be a two out of 10 because we posted an other video before that also did really well, but it should be a one out of 10.
If it came out of the gates as a four out of 10, we should probably stop that A -B test and just try a new one altogether. Like we should probably just make a dramatic change because if it's not working, you know, as quickly as that, we could make that decision. So a lot of it is about the expected outcome.
But usually what I'll do is I'll set the expectation outcome. I'll run the thumbnail test. I'll let the thumbnail test pick a winner.
I'll make sure that winner is selected as the main thumbnail. And if I'm not happy with performance, I might try some different titles as well. But generally, that's my approach to it.
Wow. So you don't go back to the title and test the title again once you've locked in the thumbnail? If it's underperforming expectation, that's the whole thing, right?
Because it's like, it is a thing where I know we just talked about like how you can be a little bit like a... and engineer and try all these different things. But like, if a video is performing well and above where we expect it to perform, it's kind of this thing of like, you know, if you have good data, good data is always better than no data, right?
So if you have good data, which is basically this tile is working, the video is doing better. This tile we have no data on because we haven't published it yet. Don't want to shake the boat.
Good data, better than no data. On the flip side of that though, what's interesting is like, sometimes like people will post a video and it will be doing bad. So you know you have bad data.
And then you have no data on the one you haven't tried yet. And they'll be like, oh, I just want to give it a bit more time. Like, I'm just like, okay, well, now we have bad data versus no data.
No data is better than bad data. Because like, the no data might be good. We don't know.
It could also be bad, but we don't know. So in that situation, I will make the change. So I do generally suggest to move away from this sort of, I think a few years ago, people on YouTube in general were just like, changing the title like 10 times in the first day, changing the thumbnail so many times.
It's like, at that point, like... I don't even know what's causing the impact then. Like if I'm changing things that much, like how do I know it was the title?
How do I know it's not just like the fact that like, you know, something else was happening in the background. Like there's so many external factors on YouTube. Like maybe, I don't know, right when you posted, maybe another person posted a podcast that people were watching.
And now after they've watched that podcast, they're getting you suggested next and that's all coming in. But you've changed the title just before that. And now you're like, oh shit, the title works.
But it's like, is it or is it, you know, this other factor? So I generally steer away from changing too much. Unless if the video is dramatically underperforming expectation, I'll go to war a little bit and I'll make some big changes.
I think the second layer to that is absolutely amazing advice to anybody out there on creator, operator, YouTube side. The expectations is huge. I think it goes back to like, you shouldn't probably do a concept or have a guess that you don't think could be at least a five out of 10.
Obviously, there could be like external reasons why you do something. But like, if you're going in thinking it's going to be eight or nine or 10 out of 10 on one of 10, probably shouldn't have that guest on to begin with. Yeah.
Yeah. Or you should have a very good reason, right? It's like, think about this, anything like I just, I just did a tweet on my Twitter account.
And like, I view my Twitter just the same as I view YouTube. I think these skills just translate across the board. Like I view Twitter as like, okay, I average about 200 ,000 views per tweet on Twitter or X, I should say.
do I think this tweet is going to do better? Do I think it's going to do worse? I did a tweet last week, which was promoting like my program.
I know that's going to do worse, but I'm still going to post it because it's got a huge potential upside for me, but I'm not going to post a lot of them, right? I'm going to post that once every now and again, and the other ones are going to make sure. So there are sometimes situations where it does make sense to post videos that you don't think are going to get as many views.
People have sometimes called me like the view maximalist. Like I just think about view maximizing everything, view max, right? It's like views, views, views.
And like Patty just doesn't understand that there's like value to like smaller niche audiences. I'm like, there is, there totally is. But sometimes the people that say that are the people that can't get the views.
Just saying, like, it depends. Like if you are in a niche where like it makes sense to be more niche and smaller, like I get it. Like there is a value to like, you know, if you're like a high net worth accountant.
I don't care if you're getting a million views in your videos. You just care about the 1 ,000 viewers who have ultra high net worth. You care about the people who are buying yachts and boats or whatever.
Sure, then make videos that are reaching as many of those people as you can. But for a lot of people, I think there is a value to just trying to see how big the niche and time can be. I think regardless, playing the one of 10 game is important because it's really you versus you, not you versus the external.
It's just knowing that you're incrementally doing better than you did from the past. Because if you're not going up and to the right, I think you're doing something wrong. On the title side, principles, framers, what are the specific things that you're looking at in a title?
Like what's that filter under the notion that you're not changing the title most of the time? It looks like you're obviously testing the thumbnail. So what do you look for in a title to make sure that it can grow live?
Yeah, so fewest words possible while still making it interesting. So a while ago, I used to say keep it to under 50 characters because that's what I would typically do. I'm a little bit more lenient on that now.
Like a lot of YouTube right now is watched on TV where you might have a bit more display room for titles. I think generally if your title is like 60 characters plus, it's a bit long. Sometimes I'll like push people to keep it under 60, but there are still times I'll do that over.
But that's why I come to that principle of like as few words as possible to make it interesting. Use universal language. This is actually a really interesting thing, which is like depending on how global your audience is or how broad your audience is, everyone has a curse of knowledge bias.
So everyone sort of assumes people know the things that they know, right? So if I said the word, do you want athlete to you? You'd be like, I don't know what that is, right?
Three years ago, I did not know what that was. So if someone said D1 athlete, I'd be like, what's that? I don't know what that is.
I'm from Ireland. It's like, oh, college athlete. Okay, I get that.
So if you're making a video and you have like, you know, more than half of your viewers outside the USA and you title a video that says, I don't know, D1 athlete tries viral like workout techniques for the first time. I'm here in Ireland. If I'm here in England or Europe or Australia, I might be like, what's a D1 athlete?
That's weird. I don't know what that is. Pro athlete.
I can understand. Right. Same with like, you know, I didn't know what Goodwill was, you know, like a Goodwill store.
Yeah. Like, so there was a guy that made this video and he's like, I made this video and it was like, I went to Goodwill and like built this thing from Goodwill or something. And I was like, what the fuck is a good, what, what's a Goodwill?
And he's like, oh, it's a store. It's like this, you know, very famous store here in America. And I looked into the analytics for him and it was so interesting.
The video had just had done just as well as normal in the USA. But he just missed all of his like Asian viewers, his European viewers and all these things because everyone's like, what is Goodwill? I don't know what that is.
Like it wasn't, it's not a thing, you know? So. Under that lens, it's just, how do you not shrink your TAM?
You want the biggest possible TAM. Yes. Yes.
And of course there's like, there's limits to it where it's like, you know, sometimes for example, like if you are, let's just say a business channel, right? You know, if you're putting like. EBITDA and like these terms in your title, you might be shrinking your time a little bit.
If you want to reach those fears. Oh boy. Oh boy.
I hear you guys out there. Any more definitions up here? If you want to, if you want to reach those fears, it can work.
Right. But like, I don't think, let's just say Diary of a CEO, like one of the biggest business podcasts in the world. Right.
If not the biggest. Don't really think he'd put EBITDA in a title. I don't think so.
Like he put profit, he put money. Right. But like.
So it's about like your audience and who you're trying to reach. If you are trying to reach a more like qualified audience, it's fine to use like jargon and terminology like that. But like, yeah, I would say if I went down the street here in LA and interviewed 100 people and asked them what EBITDA was and define it, they'd be like, maybe five people would know it out of 100, 5%, you know?
So if you're going for a broad audience, it's going to limit you. So everybody out there listening, TAM is total addressable market. Just continue.
Sorry. There you go. Yeah.
So that's a big one. Use universal language. Your title should always compliment the thumbnail.
So you need to think about your title and thumbnail together. That's why I say come up with title first and then look at the thumbnail and make sure they're complimenting each other. Generally, I don't like to repeat the information in the title that's in the thumbnail.
So let's just say that you titled this episode how anyone can go viral in 2026. I probably would suggest against putting that as also the thumbnail text because then it's just like repeating itself. It's not complimenting itself.
Like, you know, if I saw the title being how anyone can go viral in 2026 and the thumbnail text said like, this is the key or something. It's not great, but this is the key.
Those are complementing each other. You read that, then you're like, this is the key. What's the key?
I need to click. So complement the thumbnail. That's a really important one.
Readable at a glance. This goes back to that original point of like people are reading your, they're not even reading your title. Let's be honest.
They're just like scanning it. They're like, is that something I want to watch? Scroll, scroll, scroll.
So kind of going back to our point of like use as few words as possible. Use words that are very readable. Contemporary.
Okay, that's a very long word. It doesn't look great in a title. Modern is probably a better word, right?
Generally, I avoid titles that have like heavy like segmentation or truncation, like divided up into three titles. I've seen these people make titles where it's like three different titles all like meshed in together. I like my titles to be clean, simple, easy to read, generally shorter words.
Generally, I like to use something that I call, it's called title case formatting, where I'll capitalize the first letter of each word, unless it's like a connecting word, like and or is or on, just because it's more readable. He used all caps. The interesting thing about all caps, I never even realized this before, but all caps makes every letter the same height and it makes it less readable.
Like when you look at an all caps thing, if I just showed you like a piece of paper and it's all all caps and I give you like a second to read it, you're going to be able to remember less than if it was in title case. So I'm always looking for things that can just make it so my viewer can just really quickly process what's on the screen.
If you look at any video with over 100 million views, I guarantee you, you look at the title and you're like, oh, I can understand that right away. It's super readable, simple words, easy to understand. I do the same thing with my notes for the podcast too.
It's got to be quick and readable at glance. And it's actually why I bold certain words so I can do a quick glance down as opposed to, you know, having to spend 10 seconds reading something. 100%.
Same thing plays. And then the final one, and this is like the most important of all, which is like, I think sometimes people are trying to make YouTube this sort of check the box thing. And look, frameworks are really important, like what we're doing here.
And like, like I said, it is kind of a, it's an analyst's game. that's great. But at the same time, I'll tell you about, I don't want to throw anyone under the bus here, but my, my, my, my biggest frustration are these ideas called like SEO optimizer tools that just like people put their title in an SEO optimizer and it comes out with a tile and they're like, okay, that's what I'm going to use.
It's like, well, first of all, how much traffic on YouTube actually comes from search? For most channels, it's like 10%, if even, right? It's, it's, it's quite often less.
It's one of my favorite things to tell people. It's like, How many views come from subscriber boxes?
Less than 5%. How many views come from the channel page? About 3%.
How many views come from search? For most channels, about 5 to 10%. There are some channels that get 50 % plus from search, but that's rare.
For most channels, it's about 5 to 10%. So why would you optimize your title for an SEO score that, you know, is going to make a rank in search and the cost of that is making a title that's absolute garbage, right? iPhone, if you edit the video where you're reviewing the new iPhone 16, right, which is a better title?
new 2026 iPhone 16 review, unboxing tutorial, or don't waste your money reviewing the new iPhone 16. Right? Both of those still have like the iPhone 16 keywords.
So they still can vote rank and search. The first one technically has a better SEO score because it's jam full of keywords. But no human I know would click that video versus the don't waste your money one because the don't waste your money one you're like, that doesn't actually tell me the right thing.
It's like is the phone a waste of money? Or like, is it about picking the right version of the new iPhone or whatever?
So you're playing on human interest. And an example I like to give on this is like, you know, a while ago, people did say, including me, keep a title to under 50 characters, right? But again, that's sort of doing the same thing where you're trying to appease a sort of like system or like an SEO score or like a title, like an optimizer score or something.
What is the most interesting title for a human to click on? That's always the thing. So we can actually do like a kind of a live demo.
Let's just say you have a video, which is like called the best value Porsche GT3 on the market, right? That's your video. So what's that title?
Okay. The best value Porsche GT3 on the market. It's not great.
It's not that interesting. Would you click that? Probably not.
Even if you're a car guy, you're like, whatever. Okay. Let's make it a little bit better.
What if you said I found the best value Porsche GT3 on the market? Okay, now the I found creates a bit of a story. So okay, there's a bit more in there, but still best value GT3 on the market.
It's quite generic, right? How about I found the cheapest 911 GT3 on the market. Now you're adding a superlative.
Now it becomes more interesting. You're like, I found, gives you a story, cheapest superlative, desirable thing, 911 GT3. Okay, cheapest GT3.
But what if we made it longer while actually making it better? I found the cheapest 911 GT3 on the market. but nobody will buy it, right?
Dot, dot, dot, but nobody will buy it, right? Okay, what does that do? It makes the title longer.
So technically it gets a worse score if you're just looking at the, you know, purely at the length of the title. But what does it actually do? It creates a human interest, which is like, wait, this thing is the cheapest superlative unique, right?
Okay, great. This thing is the cheapest thing. I want to see this thing, but nobody wants it.
You can apply the inverse, right? I found the worst apartment. in new york city and it's expensive but everyone wants to move in you'd be like well why does everyone want to move into the worst apartment right like i found the cheapest apartment but nobody wants to move in it's like creating this contradiction that's playing on a human interest it's playing on a human emotion to be like why is that interesting like why why why would nobody want the cheapest 911 on the market what's wrong with it it doesn't have like some serious damage has it been flooded like suddenly all these these ideas come to your mind click go back to that original title and compare it.
Like look at those two tiles side by side. It's like a completely different game. Yeah, I feel like the principles and frameworks bring you like zero to 80.
But to go from 80 to 100, you need curiosity, taste, analytics, have really, really good ideas. Because what you just did was nuclear. So it's completely different.
Makes a lot of sense. And we're going to pop up kind of going through that whole entire sequence on a good, better, best for sure. So you have these title principles, you upload it.
What are you looking on one of 10 to see how it's performing? What are those like key metrics that you're looking at? So I always say this thing, most important metric on YouTube is views.
So people are always like, you know, whenever I'm at an event, I'm actually going to VidCon this week. And, you know, I already guarantee you, someone's going to corner me in a hallway and be like, Paddy, what's the most important metric to look at in YouTube? And they're like, no, don't tell me.
I'm going to guess. I'm going to guess. Is it a CTR, right?
Or is it a views per viewer? I'm like, it's views. Like it's kind of like asking the question of like, what's the most important metric in a business?
It's kind of revenue and profit, right? Like ultimately everything, lots of other things like your cost of acquisition, your lifetime ROI, all these things are really important, right? But like, ultimately, like that's probably the most important metric to be paying attention to.
So views as a metric, I can, you can blindfold me from metrics. Basically, you can say, Patty, all you have to do to grow a channel is look at the views. Don't look at CTR.
Don't look at AVD. Don't look at anything else. I could grow that channel.
I don't need those other things. Like they're really not that important. And an example I like to give with that, so something like CTR, right?
There's a big difference between saying AVD and CTR don't matter versus saying AVD and CTR as a metric are very hard to focus on. So for people watching, CTR means click -through rate, the amount of people clicking a video, and AVD means average view duration, how long that person is viewing for. And we've all been trained that those are the most important things on YouTube, clicks and watches.
True. But the interesting thing is the actual metric you're displayed in your YouTube studio is kind of misleading. Because let's use this example.
Let's just say you have a lemonade stand. Let's say you put that lemonade stand in front of your house at home where you grew up. I grew up in the countryside in Ireland.
Lovely little like, you know, countryside community, you know, lower middle class, people walking by, everyone likes to support each other. So I got my lemonade stand outside my house. My conversion rate is probably gonna be really good because they're my neighbors.
I know them. My family walked by. Maybe I'll have like a 20 % conversion rate.
If I put that same lemonade stand in Times Square, New York, my conversion rate is probably going to drop through the floor, but I'm getting more sales because there's more customers, right? So CTR, like sometimes people are like, oh, click -through rate is so important. CTR is so important.
Like, oh, let me like, I need to aim for 10 % or I heard that Mr. Beast gets 15 % CTR and oh, let's aim for that. It's like some of the biggest channels I've ever worked on have some of the lowest CTRs because they're operating in the biggest markets.
CTR and same with AVD, you know, average view duration. Well, okay, you want to get really high average view duration, make a three hour video. Like, does that mean it's better than the 30 minute video?
Not necessarily. So I don't really like to pay too much attention to AVD and CTR. I look at views and I look at retention curves.
The reason why views don't really lie. They're what you would call a comprehensive metric because everything goes into views, right? The click, the watch, the satisfaction, all that goes into the view count you see.
So because it's feeding the algorithm. Yeah. Yeah.
So views don't lie for the most part. So I'll look at views. And then the other thing I'll look at is retention curves.
So the actual curve, because that teaches me where people are dropping off, where I'm losing people. So I have been a little bit of a psycho when it comes to retention curves, but I have studied like thousands, if not tens of thousands of retention curves across multiple niches. And you start to see the patterns of like, what causes people to leave?
What causes people to drop off? When you say this, you know, 5 % people leave or 2 % people leave. Why is that?
When I always talk to bigger, beginner creators, even, even bigger creators, I'm like, look at your views and look at your retention curves, understand which video is working better. Focus on those, understand the patterns of your, your viewership as well. Like, you know, if you change the title of thumbnail, like I don't really care about the CTR.
I care about deleting more views, right? It's like, if I created a different sign for my lemonade stand, if everything else was a control, if it was in Times Square, New York, and it was held as a control, okay, then I can measure the conversion rate change. But if I changed the sign, but then some of the time I'm in.
outside my front door at my house and some of the time i'm in times square new york it's hard to like measure whether it's a sign or whether it's something else views is pretty consistent so views and retention curve and retention interesting about retention curve is you know you could have a retention curve on a video that has a million views and then that video could get 10 million more views The retention curve will be lower because as you go to a broader audience, generally engagement drops and people are less engaged in the video.
Because they're finding net new audiences that are less likely to click your video. They're just trying to grow it as much as possible. Exactly, exactly.
So they're less likely to watch your video, but that doesn't mean that the video is less interesting. It's just like, you know, naturally like, you know, the same way that like if you listen to a band you've never heard before, you're less likely to listen for as long as like your favorite artist, right? It's like the same thing, right?
what happens though that's interesting is let's say the retention curve will drop we can actually show i could send you a really cool visual which summarizes this the retention curve could drop quite considerably down after 10 million views but the behaviors are still pretty similar so if if you know core viewers left at this moment new viewers are probably still going to leave at that same moment or at a similar moment like the actual behavior stays pretty consistent between audiences like universally people might find this thing funny or not that funny or if i say in a video At the end of the day, whether you're a new viewer, a core viewer, a casual viewer, most people determine that as ending language, as conclusion language at the end of the day.
So if I just said they're like, look, at the end of the day, this was a great podcast. Cut this out. If I said that, like people are going to be subconsciously listening on their, you know, iPhones, iPads on the TVs.
Oh, it's finishing now. Go. Right.
So universally that leads to drops. What's up, guys? It's Mark.
Quick break. Patty is one of the sharpest minds on YouTube strategy today, and he has given us so much free game in this episode. So I put together a playbook that distills all of his systems and frameworks into one free PDF.
Link below down in the description. Enjoy the rest of the episode. So prepackaging, idea, title, thumbnail, taking a look back from a macro perspective.
The two big things are views and retention. Let's go deep into retention now. I feel like we should start with the intro because, again, Good title, good thumbnail, people click.
And in the beginning, I mean, this is, I don't even want to show it. Maybe we'll pop it up just so we can laugh at me. Like our first couple episodes, the intro was slow.
I'm talking about myself. It has no context, absolutely terrible. And it's a, it's a micrometric, but the average view duration was very, very low.
So I'd love to hear from you. Like, what are those kinds of rules on the intro to get people to stay along and buy yourself a chance to kind of feed the algorithm? 100%.
So. Interestingly, I mentioned earlier, my parents are both writers. And I think I have probably ghostwritten 10 ,000 intros in my career for my own channels, for other channels.
And still today, like I have a whole team. I'm technically the CEO. I'm supposed to be just signing business and, you know, leading the company.
I still ghostwrite intros for our clients all the time. And let it go, baby. I just love it.
It's like my favorite thing. And I just love like how you get this, like, the thing I didn't like about writing is I would... I always love writing stories and essays and, you know, I want to be a journalist at some point.
Very hard to get your kind of like, you know, feedback immediately on is this good or not? Like, whereas with intros, I can be like, okay, I tried this intro. People didn't like it.
They left, you know, I can see exactly where they left in the retention curve. So I love writing intros. My formula, it's gonna be different to other people's formulas.
The thing about intros is ultimately all that matters is can you hold people on the video? There's some principles that are just general. So like one principle that general to me is like, generally, it shouldn't be that long.
An intro probably should be under 45 seconds. You know, sometimes you can go a bit longer, but like most of the best performing intros on YouTube, they're under 45 seconds, right? They use simple language.
They focus on intrigue and like getting people like bought into the video and leading with proof points and these different things. But the actual formula I use is three steps. Number one, deliver on the promise.
So I love this idea of thinking of your title thumbnail as a promise. That's what it is, right? You're basically telling people.
I promise you, I'm going to give you this, right? What is so obviously a mistake people make is they make a big promise with the title film out. And then in the first 10 seconds of their intro, they do not reaffirm that.
They do not like deliver on it at all. So if you make a promise that you're going to see the world's fastest camera drone versus an F1 car, and you start the video and you don't see a drone or an F1 car, you're like, I'm gone. And genuinely, I have seen videos on YouTube where in the first 10%, The first 10 seconds of a video, 60%, 70 % of viewers have left.
And it's like 10 seconds, not like a minute in, 10 seconds you have, now you only have 30 or 40 % of viewers left after the first 10 seconds. And it nearly always is because you click the video and you're just not getting what you came for. And I'm sure people watching this can relate to this experience of how frustrating it is when you click on a video and you're like, I came for this and it just feels like I've been baited into something completely different and it doesn't make any sense.
So delivering on the promise, you can do that visually or verbally. You know, like you could visually show an F1 car and a drone, or you could verbally say that that's coming. I think the visual is a lot stronger in this example.
Let's say for our episode, you might make a certain claim in the title about like what this episode is titled around. Just want to make sure those first 10 seconds I'm saying something to that effect or saying something similar or you're saying something similar to that effect. So deliver on the promise is number one for me.
Make sure they made the right decision. I want to kind of say like... I've got someone with a click.
I want to grab them and be like, you made the right choice. Trust me. Trust me.
Look at this. You made the right choice. That's my first step.
Number two is create intrigue. Very basic, very generic. But your intro is not just about statements.
And this is a big mistake people make is they sometimes be, they're sometimes too statement focused. So they kind of go like, you know, they'll just be like, in this video, we're going to cover this, this, this, and this. Okay, let's go.
I was like, okay, you know, I guess it's pragmatic. But it's not creating much interest. I want to hear things like, you know, in this video, we're going to cover this and how it leads to this.
And we're even going to break down that, you know, I want to hear that kind of interest based language. So I'm always looking for like, what are the little hooks, curiosity gaps? I like to think of my intro is just opening up all these little hooks in the viewer's mind where they're like, I have to keep watching to hear these things answered throughout the video.
So that to me is the second most important thing. And on that point as well, I like to do that in the least amount of context as possible. So big problem people do is they over explain in their intros.
They put too much in. This is probably what you did at the start, right? You put too much information.
You thought you had to introduce the guest too much. You had to like build all this stuff up. And it's like, try to explain that in the least amount of time as possible.
So like only necessary context in that section. So create interest with the least amount of words possible, basically. And I always like to use this example of like, if you do look at like, I know we're using it quite a lot in this episode.
If you look at... like a genius like Mr. Beast in his videos.
Technically, there's so much happening in his videos. What if you gave that to an amateur or just like a, let's say a good YouTuber, they would feel the need to explain everything that's happening. Like, oh, there's this FBI agent.
He used to work for the FBI for 20 years. His name is John. And he's going to be chasing me for 24 hours.
And if he can capture me, he gets to keep this bag of money. If he doesn't, you know, all this explanation, that's what most people do. He's just like, this is an FBI agent.
He's got 24 hours to catch me. Go, you know, like it's, it's like you don't need to. say his name now.
You can drip feed context. You can put context in later. This idea of drip feeding context, I think is really interesting, which is like, you know, what's the most necessary context to make someone understand the video and create intrigue for them.
And then the rest of the context, I mean, you can put that later. Like, you know, people that maybe didn't need to know in this intro that I worked for exactly this person or that I own this company or that my dog went viral, but we can, we can, you know, drip that in as we go. And then my third step of a great intro is seamless flow.
So I said this thing a while ago, which is like, the best intro doesn't feel like an intro. It just feels like the video started. So yes, like, you know, an intro reel or like a sort of highlights of the conversation or clips, if it's a podcast, that can be great, that can work really well.
But it should feel like it just seamlessly flows into the start of the storyline, right? If I sort of say to you, like, we're going to do this thing, it's going to be great. Anyway, let's get into it.
Okay, we're into the thing, right? That's a very like... choppy start to the video.
Like it doesn't flow very well. If I said and said, we're going to do this thing, it's going to be great. And we're going to start with this.
And then the video starts, right? And we're going to start. That's the connecting sentence that makes it flow.
So I always look for those seamless flows. And if you look at the great intros on YouTube, you're almost like watching the intro and then it's like, oh shit, the video started and it's great. So that's, that's my formula.
Yeah. I think what's underrated and I actually do this before I do the actual intro is that first bridging sentence.
So I'll do the social proofing. It'll be two, three sentences. I'll say, you know, the 50 billion views, the Eagles, Red Bulls, Mr.
Beast, et cetera. But then what's that first sentence? Because that's where I know like the meat of the conversation is going to go.
And then I actually do that after the fact. What's your thoughts on the trailer that we have first? So we have like a 45 second highlight sizzle trailer and then like a 10, 15 second intro.
And then the first question, what's your thoughts on that? Dice this up. This may or may not make it.
Dice this up, baby. So that trailer takes a long time. Yeah.
So I hate the word traitor. So I know that technically is what it is, but like that's a fucking movie. That's what it is.
Yeah. That gives me, because like, I think a lot of people, for a lot of people, that's a terrible idea. Yeah.
I think for you, it can work because the production level is insane. And I think half, like the unique selling point here is you get great people, you know, I'm not, I'm just going to blow smoke up your ass for a second, but like, I've never gone on a podcast that's prepared me as much for it and like gone through as much stuff.
So like you, you have all this like amazing value. You've got beautiful visuals. You've got all this sort of stuff.
So I think like. that in a way is delivering on the promise. And it's like showcasing what's great about the conversation.
And it's not like your intro reel is like, I don't know, like, today we sat down with Patti Galloway. But you know, that to me is like, get rid of that, right? But if it's like an actual sizzler where it's like good conversations, that's more the diary of a CEO approach.
I can't critique it. The biggest podcast in the world does that. Like diary of a CEO does that.
On the flip side, you know, a podcast like Modern Wisdom, Chris Williamson, who's also on the biggest podcast in the world. he'll quite often just start his podcast with just a question. Just like, so what do you think about this?
And it just starts, right? So I think you've got competing like different ends of the spectrum of different ways to start things. I think for now, I think the trailer would make sense for you.
As you grow, you might actually transition to something a bit shorter. Ironically, we live kind of somewhere in between the Diary of a CEO and Chris Williamson, where I completely agree. Like, well, all these principles and frameworks out there, everybody listening, you have to take it with a grain of salt and like use common sense.
That's how we look at it is we think like one of our modes is obviously the production value. So we have the trailer, but at the same time, I want to respect the audience's time. And then like, we get into it right away.
We don't like schmuck around the beginning. We were right into it. I don't know, in like 30 seconds.
So you gotta really just find what works for you. And as far as like the algorithm goes, is there anything else that people need to know outside of like, when you upload a video, obviously the first hour is very important when you want to retain people. Is there anything else that people should know from a retention perspective on like timing?
So the interesting thing about. retention to me is like, the videos that hold people for a long time and leave them really satisfied are usually the videos that become the most evergreen. So that I think the biggest when I look at the different algorithms, and then I look at YouTube, I think YouTube's biggest strength is the fact it's an evergreen algorithm.
Like you, if I go into my YouTube feed right now, and I pull it up, I guarantee you, I see a video from six months ago, from two years ago, from three days ago, from two hours ago, from eight years ago, like, it is this kind of just platform of distribution. And it's kind of funny, like people go like, oh, YouTube are prioritizing new videos, or they prioritizing old videos, all these things.
It's like, they're prioritizing whatever the fuck people will click on. Like, if they're going to click on a video from eight years ago, they're going to show videos from eight years ago. I always like this idea, which is funny, which is like, if everyone tomorrow only clicked videos that were six hours long, let's say the whole world, we only click videos that were six hours long, and were like a black screen, and just said video one at the top, that's all that would be displayed on YouTube.
Like they are reflecting human behavior. Like the algorithm, I know people like to think it's like curate, like YouTube putting their finger on the scale and curating a certain thing. Look, we can get into, we won't get into like that sort of stuff, but like there is some things that they curate.
They're like, okay, we don't want this kind of content or we don't want like really violent content or whatever. But after that, it's the wild west. It's like whatever gets the most clicks and watches and satisfies people will be at the top of the platform.
Great example of this would be like, I'm kind of going on a tangent, but this is fun. Great example of this would be TV, right? So TV has become this really powerful device type for YouTube.
It's crazy. I can actually send you a graph about this, which is wild. But like even five or six years ago, only about 20%, 15, 20 % of our clients' traffic was from TV.
That number today is like 50, 60%, like in just five years. So we're playing in this completely different game, right? And what's interesting is like, I heard someone, a really smart person I respect say like, oh, YouTube are prioritizing longer videos because they do better on TV, right?
Which I guess technically is not incorrect. But the way I think, the reason I bring this up as a point is really important is because everyone goes like, oh yeah, like YouTube are just trying to make people watch longer, like all this sort of stuff. They're prioritizing longer videos, like longer videos do better on TV because YouTube are trying to make them do better on TV.
It's like, do you know why longer videos are doing better on TV? Because people want to watch longer videos on TV. If you're sitting down and you're like, I'm going to pick a video.
and you see a four minute video, I don't know if anyone relates to this, like, but like, if I see a four minute video, I'm like, I don't watch that on my TV, I have to put it on, and then it's going to be finished right away. It's like, I want to watch a 30 minute video on my TV, right? So it's not a case of YouTube priorities and longer videos.
It's a case of the audience telling YouTube, look, we prefer longer videos on TV. So what gets promoted on TV, longer videos, if you open up your TV right now, you'll see longer videos than if you open up your mobile. So the device type itself informs and you know the youtube algorithm is just so vast but it can just be described with the simple fact which is for the most part it is always right behind the audience whatever way the audience is going if everyone tomorrow decided we're going to watch six minute videos with no audio that's what will get promoted that is so mind -blowing because on my tv i've never ever watched shorts and i'm thinking right now it's all long form because that's the intent with that medium And kind of riffing off what you just said, I definitely think that the only thing that's kind of part of the algo is, you know, you always hear that like they're giving small creators like a chance.
Maybe they are, maybe they do do that, but then it ultimately comes down to, okay, we'll give you the chance, that small pool. But if you don't get the clicks on the watches, then you're dead to them. So it's really just comes down to clicks and views.
That's what it always comes down to. And it's, it's just the beautiful game where it's like, it is, it is almost like pure meritocracy. It's like, if you are a small creator and you make a better video than me and my clients, you will get more views.
The difficulty would be like, well, at the highest level, people on YouTube right now have these big budgets, these big teams. They have, you know, people like, you know, even hiring us is not cheap, right? Like, and they have, you know, all these things that they have behind them.
But if you can make a better video than us, you will get more views than us. And the good thing about being earlier in the stage as well is just like in business, right? Why?
look google microsoft you know the fang all these huge companies technically they're the biggest companies in the world they're all trillion dollar market caps still every year there's startups getting acquired there's huge startups being built you know they come out of nowhere and it's because when you get big it becomes harder to experiment and move so smaller creators or people starting out have the advantage of flexibility and having an audience that they can't disappoint you know or they yeah like they having an audience that they don't really have to risk at that point so there is this like fun thing where like as a small creator yes you're competing with big creators on a lot of fronts also we can get into this but i feel like a lot of the fronts that typically were gatekeepers are dissolving with ai it's like oh like oh the big creators have all these editors and graphics that i can't have ai's coming in and helping you with that right so as a small creator like you're able to be more flexible and agile and and it is just a pure competition if you can make a better video than me you'll get more views than me this goes back to the most important skill to have in 2026 to be able to go viral because ultimately
Iago doesn't lie. It's going to feed the views. We could spend all day going on these kind of storytelling structures.
That's the next thing that I want to really jump into. We're just going to put a bunch of them below in a PDF, guys, because I want to keep going here. I think the big thing to understand on the storytelling is just a good storytelling structure is basically useless without stakes.
So I'd love for you to just kind of walk through how people should be filtering in their brain, incorporating stakes into their whole entire kind of A to Z playbook and making the videos. Yeah. such a good question i think the thing is like yeah you're right you could have a great you could follow all the rules you have a great structure a great storytelling format all these things if people don't care enough to be invested in the video like they're just not gonna watch it it just doesn't matter so like if i said let's just like use like a live demo of this like if i let's just say i crunch up this paper into like i'm actually gonna do this with this yeah if i crunch this up into a ball and like let's just say there's a bin there's a trash can off camera and i just go I'm going to throw this into the trash can.
So you're probably like, okay, cool. If I said, I'm going to throw this into the trash can and your camera guy off camera here, he said, there's no way I can do it. He thinks there's no shot I can do this.
I'll go next. You're a bit more invested, right? And then if you throw in the trash can and get it in, I'm going to give Tyga a million dollars.
I better fucking get it in. And you could just keep going more and more and more. Yeah.
Maybe I'll give Tyga a million dollars and punch Jake in the face. If you get it in and then everybody's just, is he going to get it in? Is he not going to get it in?
Are you going to give him the money? Are you going to show us punching Jake in the face? A hundred percent stakes.
Yeah. Right. And it's like over overly, like almost like facetious level stakes there.
But like, that is, that is human interest, right? It's like, yeah, people don't care unless you make them care. And like, you know, that could be, it could be an enemy to overcome.
The first one I used was an enemy, right? Like he doesn't think I can do it. right like that's like such a classic human psychology thing it's like you're like i'm about to run a marathon you know okay i'm about to run a marathon and my ex -husband divorced me because he said i couldn't get fit okay i'm way more invested in that you know it's like that's where you create that that feeling and that stake so it could be a time limit it could be like a reward it could be a punishment it could even just be like the kind of fomo of missing out like you know earlier in this episode we gave an example of like buying the new iPhone, don't buy the wrong one or like, don't waste your money.
Like that feels like a stake. It's like, I don't want to waste my money on the wrong iPhone. Like you've got to like, you can't just be pure pragmatic.
You've got to think like, why does someone care about this thing? And can anybody hypothetically manufacture stakes in videos? Yes.
You just got to, you got to understand when stakes matter, right? Like if I am making you a video saying, here's how to, let's just say the video I'm making is how to optimize your investment portfolio right and i'm like okay so today i'm going to make a video where i break down the the most bulletproof investment portfolio it's really important you pay attention because if you don't listen to this i have someone in another room who's going to break down the door and put slime over my head so you got to keep watching you know if i if i can't explain this to you in 10 minutes i'm gonna get slimed i mean that's just bizarre it's like i came to you for information i don't care what you're getting slimed who are you that's weird what the hell like what's going on here If you said instead, I'm going to break down the most bulletproof investment portfolio for you.
And this is so important to get right because the difference between this portfolio and the one that the average person picks is over $3 million in retirement. It's like, well, that's a stake because it feels like a cost if I don't understand the information. So it's about like understanding what's the right stake for the video, right?
Like it's not always like a goofy action -based stake. It can also be just like, what's the cost of not paying attention? Guys, we're going to pop down below.
This PDF is going to be jam -packed with principles, frameworks, examples, all the different ways to create stakes. We talked about a couple. We're going to put all of them down below.
I want to open up and talk more about just, you know, you've been in this, I mean, when have you been in this space? Since you were 10 years old? Yeah, I turned 30 this year.
Okay, so Patty's been in this space for 20 years. He's 30 years old. He has been in this space for 66 % of his life at only 30 years old.
I want to just, we have a lot of operators listening right here. So I kind of want to get into. How should brands look at YouTube?
What does the future of YouTube look like? So I guess let's just first start with, like, what is the biggest mistake that you think that operators are doing when they're entering YouTube? I would say having a YouTube channel to begin with.
So here's my sort of like scorched earth take on it, which is like, don't have a fucking YouTube channel unless you're willing to put in the time and effort to grow it. And as an operator, like, you're probably very busy on a lot of things. So you've got to really understand if this is like the thing for you.
And it's like, you know, what's going to drive business for you. I am very bullish on company channels and brand channels. But I think the worst thing is when it's half -assed.
And you're like, you know, when I go on my rants, you know, when I have a few drinks with me and I start ranting, I'll start pointing at like these brand channels. And I'm like, what is the point of that? Like, you know, there's this huge brand that's worth half a trillion dollars.
And they're just posting like... corporate training video, weird stuff on their YouTube channel. And it's just garbage.
I'll call out OpenAI, cool company, right? Awesome company. I looked at their YouTube channel the other day.
I'm like, this is, what's the point of this? Like, it's just sort of hosting ads. It's just a dumping ground of like random things.
And that's a cool new company with like fresh, smart people all over it. And like, in their case, I think it's almost better for them just to have like an ad account and not even have a YouTube channel if they're going to do that. So I think it's like...
My sort of score chart take is you probably shouldn't have a channel unless you're willing to put in the effort to do it. And then I think for the most part, it's like you either need to like get really good at the skill, which I think is super valuable. Like if you're as a founder, as an operator, if you're able to figure out this skill of like what sells attention, what gains attention, as we've said, I think it's one of the most valuable skills in the world.
But the other thing, which I see a lot of people do, a lot of entrepreneurs do, is just find the strategist. find the person that can come in and be kind of like the creative director for your youtube channel for your brand you know a lot of these big business creators right now you see them in front of the camera but there's someone behind them there's like a 22 year old that's there and just lives in breeze content and they're growing it you know themselves like i have a friend and probably greg from austin from bloom uncle greg that episode will be up by now we'll pop that up awesome so greg he's a buddy of mine like you know he's got a guy brilliant creative guy that's just behind the scenes working on to figure out the YouTube channel with them.
And it's like, I think bringing someone like that in is super valuable. But yeah, YouTube can be so powerful for business. But it has to be done right.
Like we're with our clients, like the clients we talk about, like we work with, you know, obviously the Red Bull, we've worked with Philadelphia Eagles, Yeti, car companies, we even worked with like the Academy, like the Oscars, you know, so many different companies and like the ones that crush it, take it seriously, like they really go for it.
I think like my, and again, I'm not welcoming more competition in this space. You guys can have fun. You can listen or not listen.
But I think what's awesome about YouTube and it kind of plays to the whole thesis of this video is it is of all of the platforms and all the skills, I'm talking about long form YouTube. It is the most transferable skill that gives you the most impact under the notion that if you think about like communication, whether it be photo, whether it be video, whether it be writing, like video is the holy grail because that can be, you can take screenshots, that could be photo, you can transcript it.
It can be. words. And then you think long form versus short form, long form can be diced up into short form.
And then just the evergreen nature of it. I mean, bro, I'll actually pop her up right now. She actually lives in Austin.
Her name is Kayla. I might have to pay her an extra bag of money for this. She, we gave her art like five, six, seven years ago.
And she did like a random UTM link. Bro, it still gets sales. Like people don't understand like the evergreen nature.
where A, it could just hit the algorithm. Maybe you redo the thumbnail or B, maybe someone goes down a rabbit hole and looks through your whole channel and they find, you know, an outlier video from six years ago because they're a diehard fan. They see a brand they like in an ad read and then they buy it.
Like it is, there's no other platform that is evergreen like this. It's not even close. You're creating real estate.
Well, it's insane. And I just, I, you know, we were talking, you know, off camera before this. It's just like, I don't know why, maybe because like, CMOs need to be held to numbers and there needs to be like attribution tied to it.
But like, if you have money and you have the ability to be patient for, quite frankly, if you're not an idiot, let's just call it 18 months. We're not even 18 months into this podcast, bro. We're less than 18 months in.
And you just get better incrementally, get a little bit more views, learn a little something from each video. It's undefeated. One of my biggest regrets with Iconic is we had a web series and we stopped doing it and we had momentum in 2016, 2017.
If we were still doing that now, It would be absolutely fucking crazy. And like, think about, you know, these companies, like I referenced like an open AI, Claude, these cool new companies, but like, I think the biggest problem some of those companies face is like sentiment, you know?
It's like YouTube gives you a platform where you can control narrative. It's where you can present the great things you're doing. Like when I talk to sometimes, I'm sure you feel the same conversation, like these CMOs, CEOs of these big brands and companies, they're always like, oh, people just don't understand like how much cool stuff we're doing and all this sort of stuff.
And I'm like, You could have a YouTube channel and just control the conversation and show the world like what is cool that you're doing. Like I always say, like, this is a crazy stat, but like the second biggest purchase in America makes is a car right after their home.
Generally, 90 % of purchase decisions around cars are now primarily made on YouTube. Wow. People, their second biggest purchase.
It's not the dealer. It's not the advert on the TV. It's not reading it in the paper.
It's not going onto the website. It's watching the car videos on YouTube and being like, is the new BMW X5 better than the previous gen or whatever? And it's like, it's one of those things where it sounds crazy to say, but then you think about it, it's like, yeah, obviously, if I was like to you, you need to buy a new car tomorrow, first place you'd probably go is like, okay, let me look at YouTube and see some comparison videos or whatnot.
And it's like, the biggest, second biggest purchase Americans make is being made on YouTube. every car channel should be really making great YouTube videos, in my opinion, because they get the first look at their cars, they get to control the conversation, they get to showcase the videos, you know, instead of like, you know, that those views just going somewhere else.
So I am so bullish on companies that have the resources and time to commit to YouTube for 24 months, and just say, let's make great videos on YouTube. And that's what we try to do with our clients, but just like, let's make great videos. That's a great reference, cars, because I mean, if you think about the CAC, how much it costs and like you're underwriting, like paying the salespeople, you know, paying the dealership and then the LTV, someone buys one Honda, they're probably going to be a Honda for life.
They're gonna buy three, four, five Hondas. That is insane. That's a, that's a great analogy.
If a brand has a hundred thousand dollars to spend on YouTube, I would imagine that's a lot of people out here listening. Where do you think they start? I think for a hundred thousand dollars, you hire me 10 years ago.
I think you look for a creative person. who understands YouTube generally. And here's the thing.
It's like, I think when people try to make this hard, they often like look for like, you know, someone who is, you know, traditionally trained or is really good at this thing or that thing. It's like, no, I'm actually looking for YouTubers. Like if I was a brand, I would be like, okay, let's just say I'm a brand and I'm in like the beverage space, right?
I would look and just see like, is there any like cool creators out there that are already making content that's pretty good? Like one of my friends is... starting this coffee shop in austin and he's just like showing me this this guy he's like oh this guy said he would run my social media for me or my youtube for me and i'm like has he ever done youtube before has he ever grown anything and he's like no but he's like look at how cool he can make stuff look and i'm like i don't care you can find someone that's not making any money on youtube but is making kind of interesting stuff and is you know maybe getting a few thousand views a video and it's like oh do you want to come work for me for 80 000 a year 100 000 a year so i think probably with that budget like if i if i didn't want to figure it out myself i would try to hire that person and i would look at people already doing it and just say come full time with me and let's make something on the channel together if i wanted to like really invest into myself to learn and get the skills i think you just got to start looking at yourself as like this is going to be a large commitment like you said yourself like you know it's 18 24 months and you know but if you master it it's like now every company you ever start you have a skill that you can
build an audience around your product and around what you're doing. And like I said, I think having the skill of YouTube basically lends itself to all their platforms, but you can't reverse it. Like if you're really good at Twitter, guys, that does not mean that you're going to be really good at YouTube.
So yeah, I would lead with someone being good at YouTube. What do you think they should prioritize first? So like if somebody starts a channel, what should they prioritize first?
In terms of hire? No, they hire someone and then they start, they press go. What should they be prioritizing?
I think at the start, it's just about like, there's this idea that I love, which is the YouTube pendulum idea that I came up with a few years ago. And it's this idea that like the pendulum kind of shifts depending on what stage of the journey you're in.
And I can send you the graphics so we can share it. But the idea basically is like at the start, you're kind of at the far left of the pendulum. And what that means is your videos just need to be watchable.
So for the first start, like it sounds so basic, but you just need to make a video that someone can watch. It doesn't matter if it's good. It doesn't matter if it gets a thousand views, a hundred thousand views.
You just need to be able to make a video that like the audio isn't, isn't terrible. The picture isn't terrible. Like it's, it's, it looks okay.
Right. And like, it's funny, like I'm sort of laughing about it, but like, you know, I looked at a $400 billion publicly listed brand and their YouTube channel was literally not watchable. Their audio was terrible.
I was like, you cannot watch this. So like, it doesn't matter anything else. Like you can't watch this.
So in the pendulum at the start, it's like video quality is the most important thing to focus on. Like just make your videos watchable. Step one is like, get the video quality there.
Then the pendulum starts to shift over towards ideas and packaging. So once you have like a video, let's say you go from like a video that's barely watchable to now, okay, your video is okay. It's good.
Like you can make a rough video. Now the pendulum switches over to like the packaging game, in my opinion. And then the focus, of course, you're working on everything all the time, but the focus becomes more on tile, on thumbnail, on idea.
So at that point, if you're in this position, I think it's about like, okay, like we've got to a point where we can make something look okay. now let's see what are the best videos in the space talk through our ideation framework we talked about like look at the top performers go go and make the top 20 with your own twist on them like start making these ideas and thinking really about idea and packaging once you master idea and packaging which by the way takes a very long time like i would say i still haven't mastered it even though i think i'm really good then the pendulum starts to shift back again towards video quality and then it's like okay, can we level up the production even further?
Can we like shoot with 4k cameras? Can we like add like extra angles and shots and stuff like that? But the interesting thing is when a lot of like brands or operators think about YouTube, they just think of like, how can I make it look better?
How can I make it look better? How can I make it look better? And then everything's just about how can I make it look better?
And it's not about what's the idea, the title of the film, the story. So there is that pendulum effect. Yeah, I would say another thing too, just my personal opinion is, I've said it before, I think I said in a Samir episode is just ideation, prepackaging.
production, post -production, and then the last part is how do you find creative ways to amplify the distribution and further feed the algorithm? Because obviously you can do the prepackaging stuff and feed the algorithm, but what are even like creative ways that you can get outside traffic to come in and watch the video and just fuel the fire?
I want to tie this up. So what did Red Bull get right? Because you've been with them for a couple of years and their views are 10, 20x.
What did they get right that everybody else is getting wrong? So I think... you know what's interesting about rebel is like rebel have always been good at content like historically so sometimes even when i bring them as a case study people are just like it's rebel they're always getting views i'm like well you know back when we signed them they were doing 400 500 000 views a video now they're doing eight or nine million so you're right like it's it's a 10 20 x but i think what they did right was this will sound a little maybe the first arrogant thing i've said in the podcast but i think they were willing to listen to me and to creators and not think that you know they themselves you know had all the answers like they rebel have like some really smart youtube people in there but of course it's a huge company but they really gave a lot of reigns to the youtube team that they have there and then to to my team and just let us kind of like make it happen i will give so much credit to the brand because i know i know how easy it is when you have a big company for everyone to get involved and start like putting their fingers in it and like messing around with it and stuff but like they've always been very good about like okay what do we need to do like we'll make it happen
So I think they did that right. And I think from one thing they just deserve huge credit for is just the foresight of like five years ago, all these brands were like, oh, we just need to make a documentary that gets like on a Netflix show or like we need to do this or that. And Red Bull were just like, YouTube is it.
You know, YouTube is the premium platform for video, right? And it's like five years ago, maybe you wouldn't have said that. Today, it's like, well, the average YouTube video is like 15 to 20 minutes, 30 minutes.
That's kind of like TV. and then it's like now they're really high production now they're being watched on tv 60 70 of traffic is coming from tv for some channels and it's like youtube is is the premium place to have your own content and i think they saw that before most people sounds practical hire experts and empower them how do they look at roi how do they like evaluate like your partnership is it views so when we first started it was it was views it was like part of my my deal would would have been like a certain growth target and growing to a certain number but I think it's kind of like at a certain scale for a brand like that, it's kind of the same reason of how do they, how do they calculate ROI on their F1 team or on their like soccer teams?
It's like, I think the best way you calculate ROI for Rebel or the best way you see the value for Rebel is the fact that when you make an ad, it's 10 seconds, it's 15 seconds, it's 20 seconds, whatever it is, and people aren't really engaged. When you make a video that gets 20 million views, like the one that I just scrunched up in this ball or 30 million views, it is 30 million people that watch for five minutes.
or 10 minutes, like where else can you buy that? Like if I if I just sort of said with money by 30 million people watching 10 minutes plus of a 20 minute video, that's 10 minutes of them spending time with you. Where else can you buy that?
Yeah, I mean, if you back into the CPMs, and again, however much they're paying you, it's probably not enough if you if you back into the millions and millions of views, quite frankly, pretty crazy. So for everybody out there listening, I think it's pretty, pretty clear. We're going to re -pop up the pendulum.
I think the pendulum is great. It's start with something, get the technical down, the audio, the video, and then basically listen to this podcast three, four, five, six, 10 times, download the PDF, implement all the things that we talked about, and then just swing back and forth. I'd be remiss if we didn't talk about AI.
So I'd love to just know how you integrate AI into your content, your client's content. How do you see AI? So I think I'm one of those people that's like kind of bullish and bearish at the same time, which is like, And I'm sure people relate to this, which is like, you see some people say, I'm using AI for everything.
It's great. It's amazing. It's completely transformed my content workflow.
It's everything. And then I see some people and they're like, yeah, I'm not using it at all. And I see both those people winning.
Like, you know, so it's quite hard to sometimes get through the noise. We're using AI a lot in pre -production. So when I said that 500 ideas, like it's amazing how useful AI is in ideation.
For example, like Claude has a plugin where you can connect the platforms like vidIQ. I think one of 10 might have that connection yet. And you can connect it through Claude and then actually talk to Claude about outliers.
Be like, okay, I'm in the fitness niche. Go find the top 20 most viewed videos in the last 365 days that are focused on this specific topic. And then let's talk about them and brainstorm around them together.
So we'll use... Claude and Chachapiti and Gemini, but mainly Claude a lot in the ideation process right now. We use Gemini a lot for image generation, for thumbnails, for even just for like concepts, for thumbnail concepts.
So we'll use Gemini a lot in that sense. And then honestly, the one area, I'm curious what you think about this, but the one area we have not been able to like successfully use AI is still writing good content. we get it like 80 % of the way there, but I think the 20 % is always still human.
It's still like, you know, the person getting on top. So yeah, we'll use it a lot in pre -production, but not as much in post and not as much in the writing of content. Yeah, obviously I use it for like outlines, but from a, yeah, I don't use it for anything from a writing perspective, but I have yet to not be overly obsessed on the pre -production side and make sure that I'm putting in the time to really know the guest.
I almost am scared, quite frankly. to just solely rely on AI in the pre -production where my team probably at this point is probably fucking frustrated that like, I need to put an X amount of time on pre -production or I don't feel comfortable walking onto this set that the product is going to be at the level that it needs to be at.
So there's certain things with AI will never take place with the human. I also just want to touch on something that you said, and guys, we're going to link it down below. I'm going to pop it up right now.
The episode's going to be out. What Patty was talking about, they're called MCPs and they're basically connectors where you can get data. from a third party source and bring it into Claude and ask a question.
So we did an episode with a guy named Remy, absolute 21, 22 year old fucking ninja. We went through all of this and yeah, it could help you all of these questions, you know, outliers for titles, thumbnails, ideas, all that stuff. It could take the raw data from the third party platforms and give you kind of dialed in ideas.
Huge fucking fan of the MCP. Yep. Huge, huge fan.
All right. So I want to round the corner before we get into quick strike. I want to talk about.
the next decade. Obviously we're talking about principles and frameworks that apply to any platform, but YouTube is kind of the big one that I think both of us are championing. Get on YouTube.
Where does YouTube go in the next 10 years? Where do you think it goes? I am unbelievably bullish on YouTube to the point where it's almost concerning to people around me who aren't because I have two main companies, both focused on YouTube.
Most of my investments are in YouTube focused companies. My biggest like individual stock is Google. Like I am just like so bullish on YouTube as a whole.
And I've been that way for the last 10 years, pretty much. Like I remember arguing with people. I remember when I was 19 or 20 and I had a YouTube channel at the time that was making me a few thousand dollars a month.
And I remember a college professor telling me like, that's a waste of time. That's not a real business. And like, maybe that created a ship on my shoulder.
But like back then it was like. I was 19 with a channel making more than a certain point. I was making more than my parents as a 20 year old on YouTube.
And people still were just like, this isn't real. It's not a real thing. So I've always been bullish on YouTube, but I'm at a place now where I've actually never been more bullish, which is crazy after what I've just said.
And the reason for me is I'm just seeing it happen. We are kind of, we're like in the 1920s or 1930s of like Hollywood and TV and like film, in my opinion, on YouTube right now. I can show you some crazy grass, which we could share with the audience, which just show the average increase in AVD over the last five years, not 10 years, just five years, and how it's like doubling AVD, how the platform is going from a mobile phone platform to a TV platform.
And I kind of view it like this, like, you know, I think YouTube is the number one podcast platform in America. Neil Mohan shared that from YouTube, the CEO. YouTube is going after TV with...
you know, 20, 30, 40 minute videos on TV. They feel premium. If anyone wants to go watch a Michelle Carey video, like you watch that video and you're like, this is like high level TV and it's a YouTube YouTuber, right?
It's like Emmy award winning level stuff, right? And it's just a YouTuber. So we've got podcasts, we've got TV.
I feel like YouTube is going after just like traditional Hollywood as well. I think it's interesting, like two of the highest grossing films right now are YouTubers, right? Like Backrooms and obsession they're critters they're just creators and like everyone in hollywood is like scrambling like how do they know this stuff how do they know what's going to resonate with people how do they figure out how to make these ideas go viral so people go watch the movie it's the skill right it's the same skill retention curve it's retention curves it's retention curves it's understanding hype it's understanding virality it's like it's that like and same thing i said at the start the the winner of the 2028 election might be the person who comes up the best viral content like And Mandami in New York, you know, regardless of what you think, agree or disagree with the politics, he's a fucking G when it comes to viral content.
He's great at viral content. I mean, same with Trump. I mean, you could argue that he went on the right podcasts.
100%. That might have swung and won in the election. Like a party that got new media and a party that didn't, right?
So, yeah, I'm really bullish on YouTube. I think the platform continues in this direction of kind of like... almost like two paths diverging where you have like premium highly produced content which is like you know basically rivaling tv hollywood which is already happening and you know youtube is the highest watch streaming platform in the world it's beating netflix it's being disney it's beating everything else i think that continues to happen because they just have the business model like they've figured out the business model better than anyone else where we basically stand back we don't put our you know hands into the curation we just say hey We're going to enable all these creators to go make money and go make great content.
And, you know, every other platform that tries to like buy that is struggling. It's a lot harder. So I think YouTube goes after that.
I think what's interesting is like YouTube Shorts, it is, it could be corrected if I'm wrong here, but I think YouTube Shorts is the most watched short form platform in the world. Like more than TikTok. It's, you know, not banned in India, which helps.
YouTube even just recently announced that they're bringing back DMs. So chat. and dms onto youtube which is something that used to be there like 15 years ago they got rid of it and they're bringing it back because what's interesting is recently the uk banned social media i don't know if you saw that but the uk banned social media for under 16s and youtube was put into it and i was like what the fuck like youtube's not social media like so there's nothing to be social like you don't talk to your friends on youtube you just watch content it's media right but there is a component where they're starting to look back into social so i think youtube just continues to be about who can make the best content it's going to continue to be long I think in 10, 20 years, yeah, you're going to see this divergence where there's high quality premium content.
And then there is still this like stripped back, raw, authentic content as well. That's like 30, 40 minute rambles of a guy ranting about something and, you know, things like that. You have your short form.
Don't know if you've ever been around like the younger generation. I'm talking like, you know, 10 year olds and 11 year olds or like my friends. Like I was with my friend's sister and she was, she was like, you want to watch YouTube?
I was like, sure. She puts on YouTube. puts on YouTube, starts watching this video.
And then while she's watching the YouTube video, she's scrolling YouTube shorts. And I'm like, I thought you want to watch YouTube. And she's like, I am.
She's like, I'm doing both at the same time. And I'm like, damn. That doesn't sound healthy, guys.
I don't recommend that. Yeah, I do not recommend that either. Doubling down on the views for the channel there, both the shorts and the longs.
I actually would take a completely different route. Again, looking under kind of the operator lens. On the e -com side, you are...
a slave to the algorithm of these big platforms i .e pay for google ads meta everybody's looking for the next place to spend their dollar there is no better place to plant your money that goes longer and could be chopped up and put elsewhere than youtube i would argue any single ecom operator that comes on here where do you get a better bang for your buck that you win on that platform and then you can use that content elsewhere so i just think everybody is always searching for the next app loving, the next universal CTV.
Everybody's looking for the next thing when it's literally sitting right in front of you. And if you just put the time and effort into it, you're going to be good. Yeah.
All right, guys. So clearly we're very fucking passionate about YouTube. Let's round the corner.
Let's go into quick strike. I'm going to ask you a million questions and see your thoughts. Rapid fire.
Let's go. What do you think is the best business model for a creator in 2026? I still think.
it's i still think it's views i think it's ads and and sponsors for for most creators because i think if you're starting from scratch as a creator just having the views and ads business is basically just like seamless you just turn on adsense you're making money from your videos sponsorships you plug in 45 seconds integrations like i think most i think i would say i would make a statement that 95 of normal creators should just focus on that business model maybe look at digital products but like i think that's the one because it's seamless every time i see a creator try to start a business that doesn't have the commitment to like doing it well and like really sending it like and having the expertise or bringing in a great operator it's like it's tricky if you're starting with a business though like if you're if you have like a digital product if you have like a you know something like that to sell i think that's a different question then i think that you know just making great content and being able to integrate it into the product like a rebel video like there's no point in the rebel video where you go like oh
like make sure you buy a Red Bull it's like no they're about to do something awesome and right before they do something awesome they drink a Red Bull it's just seamless product placement so I think that's a different question but for most YouTubers like I do think that just the ads and sponsor business is just elite that's like phase one phase two is you get that and then you you build into like like digital products or things that are quite seamless then phase three is probably a physical business it's like okay if you really want to go like you know you've got your Mr.
Beast with Feastables you got Ryan Train with Joyride Candy like If you want to go into like a product business, a consumer good business, whatever it might be, I think that's phase three. The key thing for me though, is like, depending on the products you're selling, everything is still downstream of the views, right?
So like, this is why I am a view maximizer. It's like, sometimes I see these people and they just get obsessed with these business models for their channel. But then it's like, well, if you were able to just get more people in the funnel to begin with, like you just have a bigger business anyway.
So it's like, depends on what you're selling. But like, you know, if you're selling candy, having more people watch your video is, going to lead to more candy sales than, you know, having a really niche candy audience.
I think what's good about it is there is an immediate model. Obviously, AdSense can be turned on fairly immediate. I think you need like 10 ,000 subs.
And then there's all these different ways to kind of get low sponsorship dollars. And you could build a real business for either zero OPEX or a couple hundred thousand dollars in cost and do a million, two million, five million in sponsorship. So highly profitable.
Mr. Beast, what's the one thing you learned from him that changed how you think about YouTube permanently? I think, you know those you know those things where like you know that phrase like everyone thinks they're a baller until they meet a real baller or like everyone thinks they're a savage until they make a real savage everybody thinks they're better than brunson until they play brunson let's go nixon 2026 well i think for me it was like ever like i thought i was really bullish on youtube and like all in on youtube and like thought this was the shit and then i had some phone conversations with jimmy i'm like holy shit like dude he However bullish I thought, because this is a great little point about Jimmy, I would say is I remember, you know, when you talk to someone like that and they say something and you think it's a little deluded, like this happens all the time when you meet like geniuses, right?
So I remember in 20, it's probably 2021 or 2020. I remember Jimmy saying like, I'm thinking about videos now that I think can get 100 million views in three years time. He said that.
And at the time he was doing, this is when I was working with him. He's probably doing like 25, 30 million views a video. Still great, right?
But I was like. 100 million views on YouTube videos consistently? No way.
I remember saying that. And this is me as a YouTube strategist who would dedicate my life to it, who believed and was very optimistic. I was like, dude, I love the optimism.
I remember saying that to him. I remember saying, I love the optimism. Dude, like 300 million views, 400 million views, 500 million views.
Like, I think he's got, I think the Squid Game video is going to cross a billion views. Like, so I'm like sitting there being like, well, you know, he was right about that. So I think.
He was just more bullish on YouTube than anything I'd ever seen. Like I've just never met anyone that was like, no, you don't, you don't get it guys. Like this is big, this is bigger than we all think.
And I'm going to get there. What is the best YouTube video ever made in your opinion and why? So I think there's two I'm going to give.
The first one is MrBeast Squid Game. It's just like an insane spectacle, perfectly built on a trend, great title, great thumbnail, you know. so much production.
I think he said he spent five or $6 million on that, which was I felt like that was like a real like turning point moment where we're like, Oh, shit, like, he's spending like a movie budget on a YouTube video, like, holy shit. So I would say that one. But another one I would pick was actually a video from Mark Rober called Ninja Warrior Squirrel obstacle course.
Have you seen this? No, let's pop that up. Because that's probably very, very interesting.
It's so good. So it's such a good YouTube video, because In theory, I don't think it's like prohibitively expensive to make.
Like I think you have to have a good skill to do what he did. But basically he was like sitting at home during quarantine and he was seeing that all these squirrels were stealing his bird feeder, his bird seed. So he created a ninja warrior course for the squirrels to get to his bird seed.
And he was like, well, basically if they can cross this course and get to the bird seed, they deserve it at that point. So he had all these squirrels and he gave them names and they're like going across this ninja warrior course to then get this bird seed. And it was just like.
such a good video did over 100 million views. And I was like, it's just great YouTube content. Like that's, that's the video that like, I remember watching that video and being like, my dad is like, you know, 66 or something, you know, lives in Ireland in the countryside.
And he's just I don't get this YouTube thing. And then I showed him that video. He's like, that was good.
That was really good. And I was like, yeah, it's so hard to typecast the skill set of who's good at YouTube. Like, how the fuck did he come up with that idea?
I don't I don't know. He was a NASA engineer. which is interesting, right?
So he, Marco was a NASA engineer who left to go make YouTube videos. And I think like some, some part of his like engineering brain of like reverse engineering. Okay.
Like this worked in traditional media and total wipe out and like, you know, warrior, ninja warrior. Like, what does it look like if I bring that over and, you know, do that with, you know, brilliant. Um, what does Mr.
Beast get wrong about content creation?
Cook his ass boys.
Does Mr. Beast get wrong?
Like, let me think about that. We're actually not going to cut this part out. Yeah.
That would be a funny little thing. It is, it is.
Huh. It's hard. Like, I think, I think as like, in terms of what he is trying to do, nothing.
Like he is trying to be the big, he is. If I said earlier in the podcast, I'm a view maximizer. It's like that thing.
Everyone's a baller until they meet a real baller. Everyone's a view maximizer until they meet Mr. Beast.
It's like, okay, like I think he is just so prioritized on views at all costs that you could make the argument that there is value in sometimes not getting the 200 million view video, but making an audience feel more connected to you or showing more personality. I think Jimmy is a really interesting person and actually has lots of layers to his personality.
that I think I'd love to see him show more in his videos. Like I think there's more Jimmy that I think he could show in his videos. So you said you schedule five hours a week studying YouTube videos.
What does that actually look like? What are you doing in those five hours? So one of the smartest things I did early in my career was I created playlists on my YouTube account.
And I created playlists. I just titled them like outlier video, cool title, thumbnail, retention, right? Each week I watch YouTube anyway, like we all do, right?
And whenever I see something I like, I add it to the playlist. So if I see like a viral video, add to my outlier playlist. If I see a really good intro, add to my intro playlist.
If I see a really good thumbnail, add to my thumbnail playlist. Then what I'll do is have time scheduled each week where I'll just go through and I'll watch those videos and I'll just take notes on what I liked or what I didn't like and take ideas. So quite often I'll be in conversation and someone's like, how did you think of that idea for the thumbnail?
It's like, oh, let me show you my playlist from three years ago where I put that in. You know, it's like, that's been the thing that's helped me the most. So I take all these videos.
put them in playlists. And then each week I'll have three to five hours schedule where I'm just like literally just watching YouTube. Like my job is to watch YouTube and study what's working.
We're just going to pop up Patty in 2026 and then Patty in 2026 with an MCP where you can use all the data and all this stuff that you like last three, five, 10 years. It's going to be on steroids, dude. What is the hardest part of your job that nobody sees?
I think the hardest part is doing it consistently. So, you know, I am not that impressed when someone makes a viral video. impressed when someone makes a viral video again and again and again in multiple niches.
And the reason I'm so bullish on myself and my team is right now, like we have an entertainment channel, sports channel, wildlife channel. We've worked with finance channels. We've worked with education channels, learning channels.
Like we've worked in so many different niches all the way from, yeah, like astrophotography to like a rebel, right? And if you can consistently go viral, I think that is the skill. Like that is the most important skill.
So I think the hardest part is just being able to do it again and again and again. Like, I don't think it'd be that difficult for me to sign a client and be like, look, give me a month and I'll blow up your channel with a video. Done it all the time.
Done that so many times in my career. The hard part is doing that and being like, we're going to work together for three years and grow the biggest channel in the niche. And we don't sign a client unless we think we can grow them to be the biggest channel in their niche.
That's our like kind of framework. It's like, we want, even if that niche is small, if that niche is like, we are a small niche that teaches you how to like build systems and click up. I'm like, okay, let's be the biggest ClickUp Systems channel on YouTube then.
Fuck it, let's do it, right? So I think the hardest thing is just being able to do it consistently. A lot of people flash in the pan.
They can make a viral video here and there. It's great. But just like in sport, in business, in anything, it's the people that just do it again and again that you respect the most.
Ironically, we're big ClickUp guys here. That's a great transition to the last question before the final four. Why would you quit?
If... I would quit if I felt that the game of YouTube was becoming less of a meritocracy and more focused on the traditional gatekeeping that Hollywood and all these different things became known for. So I think the thing I've always loved about YouTube is I am a kid from nothing in the middle of Ireland who no one ever heard of in my bedroom.
And I could make videos that people all around the world could see. Like that's always been the thing I've been fascinated about. There was no...
like no one knows my dad no one knows my mother like no i wasn't connected to anyone i just made good videos and it resonated and built my career if i felt like there was a point in the future where gatekeeping was coming back in it's like oh like you know the big guys like are holding it and like you know making sure that only only their videos get shown or stuff like that then it just doesn't become a sport anymore it becomes a game of politics and all that sort of stuff and i just i can't deal with that if i won nine to five in my life Couldn't do it.
Couldn't do it. I can't deal with like having sort of like a boss for politics or stuff like that. So I think if YouTube changed in that way, I would stop.
There's nothing financially. I hit my financial number probably two years ago that I always wanted. And I still work harder now than I've ever worked before.
So it's nothing financial. It's purely like if the game is not as true as it is right now, I'm not playing it. Love that.
All right. Last four questions that I ask everybody. Favorite poker podcast and why?
I think the podcast that had the biggest influence on me, I'm sure a lot of people can relate to this, is Naval, the first time he went on Joe Rogan. Have you listened to that podcast? Of course, bro.
His book is, Almanac will pop that book up. So many people have mentioned that book. He is, it's also like, everything is just so, everything he says is just brilliant.
And it's like, yeah, it's like he's a mini Wikipedia. The Williamson episode was good as well too. He doesn't go on that many podcasts.
That's one of, I probably have, I don't know, 10. And one of them has already been on 10 guests that I really, really want on. He's definitely one of them.
And I think his like principles and how he thinks about things actually like relate to so many spaces, right? Just like how we talk about virality, like translates to so many spaces. It's like, you know, I think if you, if you have like a car valet business, you can still learn from Naval.
So I think his, his episode was amazing. I actually met Eric who wrote that book as well. He's Jorgensen.
Yeah. Yeah. It's so funny you say that too.
Cause I was thinking in my brain too. I was actually going to say that is such a big Tam. Like you could take all of his stuff.
And like my mom, my dad, my wife, everybody, anybody can take these principles and frameworks and put it to mentally, physically, anything. A hundred percent. I also really liked the book Zero to One, Peter Thiel.
Yeah. That was a banger when I read that because like, just like the, his thoughts on like monopolies and like operating in a market of one. And like, I do think, especially when any space becomes more competitive, which YouTube is becoming right now.
Like being able to sort of view yourself as a market of one and thinking like, what are my moats? What are my monopolies on content basically that I can play on is really important. Shout out to Blake Masters.
He wrote the foreword in that book. He's a homie and watcher of this podcast. Great book.
Arizona guy when I live in Arizona. All right. Entrepreneur or creator that you want to give flowers to and why?
So I think, you know, especially being on a podcast and being on a podcast like this, which is great and incredible production value, making me think of my friend Chris Williamson in Austin. he's just someone from spending some time around. I'm like, dude, he gets YouTube.
He's so committed. Like there, I think one thing you probably relate to this, but like when you grow in your career, the most difficult thing becomes avoiding the woman in the red dress and all the shiny objects and stuff like that. Tough.
If you're someone like Chris, like you're getting like pulled in a million directions, so many things, whatever. Every time I catch up with him, he's like, dude, I just filmed this podcast. It's fucking amazing.
Here's the title. Here's a thumbnail. And he's just like, we're at dinner.
He's on Slack, like looking at the titles and thumbnails. And he's just like, I'm like, that isn't, that's, you can't train that. It's just like another level of like intensity.
I just had an hour conversation with Luke Betts, his partner on Newtonic. Yeah. And Luke was telling me some, uh, it made me feel less psycho because obviously I take this very, very seriously and hearing some of the stuff that he does.
Yeah. I got a lot of respect for what he's done, especially from a production perspective. And like.
Yeah, I feel like a lot of these kind of principles and frameworks that you talked about, he has them kind of embedded in his brain. How big can Patti Galloway be? I think I am 5 % of the way to my potential.
I think if I'm being completely frank and honest with myself, I think I work really hard and I'm doing really well. But there's so much I haven't covered and like done. Like, I think...
for example right now like we have five to ten clients you know that's all we work with right I just post tweets and go on podcasts right and I've got to that point and I've you know I've I've like got to a point where I do really well I have these businesses and whatever but like for me the next five years I turn 30 and what I was expecting is I was expecting to turn 30 and be like okay look financially I'm pretty good like I've never really wanted that much anyway I'm not too like I've always been like more about the process and mastering a thing, but like, you know, I'm, I'm fine.
I could chill. I can coast, you know, and I was sort of sitting there and it was like an interesting thing. I saw this really good tweet from a guy called Matt Paulson, you know, Matt.
And he said something like, you know, everyone thinks the hardest years of business is like the first two or three years where you're trying to make things work. It's really difficult. He's like, I disagree.
I think the hardest years of business is like years five, six, and seven, because things are working and. complacency starts to creep in and you start to look in the mirror and say, do I really want this, right? And I had that moment when I turned 30 just a few months ago where I was like, look, I've done everything I want to do.
I've grown in this space. I've, you know, done amazing things. Like, am I in a place where I just want to sort of coast or am I in a place where I want to lock in?
And I was just like, thinking about it, I took a week. I went to Arizona, actually stayed in Paradise Valley with Sedona, had a great time. And I came home and I was like.
I am going to fucking lock in. Like I do not think I have provided the world anywhere near as much value as I can. Like I have provided a lot of value for some people really, you know, including myself.
And of course, but like, I think I can do a lot more. And I think I can grow a lot more channels. I think I can have a lot more impact.
And like I said, I think I do think of course, I'm gonna be bullish on myself. But I do think media, politics, sport, here's a great example. Do you know who Oyazor Abal is?
I probably butchered his pronunciation, but Oyazor Abal is a player for Spain, the team, who are the favorites to win the World Cup. He scored two goals in his last game. He's also one of the best players in La Liga.
You've probably never heard of him. Most people have never heard of him. And he is an absolutely unbelievable player.
But there's probably players on his team that make more money than him in one social media post than he does in like six months of being a professional footballer. And I think it just came, it comes down to a simple fact, which is like attention and like content and these things. Like Laminia Mal has a YouTube channel.
I don't know if you've seen it, but Laminia Mal is like the super, super kid from Spain. He's 18. He has a YouTube channel.
He's doing like five, 10 million views a video. Neymar just launched his YouTube channel. I think the thing for me is like this skill is it's, it's entering so many spaces.
I should be able to like use my skill in these spaces more. I feel like, you know, I've done a great job, but I think there's so much more I could do with like. like sport, business, brands, maybe even politics.
I think I'd probably stay out of politics, but like, you know, there's so many areas I could use my skill for more good. Like I think in the space of creators as well, most businesses that are built on the space are built on an existing audience, right? So I think about like a talent agency or like, you know, a brand management or like production company, all these things are really valuable.
They're really important, but they're all built on something that already exists, right? The audience that already exists. My company and me, We are the ones that are working at the front of that funnel.
We're like actually building the audience that exists for the whole space potentially. But we haven't reached scale yet. It's hard for me to find people that are as good.
Like I said earlier, my number two guy in my company for Outlier is a former YouTuber with over a million subscribers, you know, and he's a genius. And it's like, there's only so many people like that you can convince to come work for you and stuff like that. But when I fix my scale problem there, I think I can be so much bigger.
So I think I'm five or 10 % of the way of where I want to be. Completely agree, man. Absolutely amazing episode.
I appreciate you sharing so much wisdom. We're going to do a special shout out to baby Pacino, his dog, 5 million views, 100 ,000 followers on Instagram went very fast. Perfect example that he can scale any niche, any channel, anything.
YouTube is the playbook and tons and tons of PDFs down below for free. That's going to help you guys on the journey to scale on YouTube. And dude, we got to do this again.
Amazing time. 100%. Thank you so much, man.
Thank you guys so much for watching. If you got value out of this episode, every single principle framework tactic is in one free playbook linked at the top of the description. Grab it, hit subscribe, and we'll see you in the next one.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The episode opens on its most concrete proof point: one thumbnail change, forty times the daily views. Everything after is the system behind that number, from how ideas get picked to how an intro keeps the click.
Add Modern Creator as a preferred source and Google shows you more of our breakdowns in Search, Top Stories, and AI Overviews. It only changes what you see, and you can undo it in your Google settings anytime.
Add to Preferred SourcesOpens your Google source preferences with us pre-loaded. Tick the box and you're done.
A two-hour-plus studio interview with YouTube strategist Jake Bryant that climbs the view ladder one level at a time, from zero views to ten million per upload.
YouTube strategist Paddy Galloway returns to Colin and Samir with the data behind TV overtaking mobile, and what it's rewriting about video length, formats, and what counts as a win.
A strategist who works with 11 creators a week explains why algorithm exploits are dead, why click-through rate is overrated, and the five-step framework he uses to decide which videos are worth making.
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