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The NEW Rules Of YouTube (From a 50 Billion View Strategist)

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Start with the signal

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Summary

At-a-Glance

  • Verdict: Watch fully
  • Core thesis: Paddy Galloway argues that YouTube growth is an integrated packaging, ideation, and retention system: titles and thumbnails create the click, while structurally engineered videos create satisfaction and repeated distribution.
  • Why it matters: It provides a practical operating model for turning brand and podcast content into higher-reach YouTube assets without confusing raw subscriber counts, short-form virality, or corporate publishing activity for meaningful growth.
  • Best use: Use it to redesign Ken's YouTube production workflow around idea selection, packaging tests, opening structure, retention planning, and distinct short-form versus long-form audience strategies.

Executive Summary

Galloway's central assertion is that packaging is roughly half of YouTube performance: creators do not merely make videos people watch; they make titles and thumbnails people choose to click. Strong thumbnails pass a near-instant "glance test," use simple and bright imagery that reads in dark mode, and capture an unresolved moment—"paused in action"—that feels incomplete until the viewer clicks. He treats literal fidelity to the footage as secondary to communicating the video’s underlying promise, provided the video ultimately delivers real value.

His growth system begins upstream with ideation. Rather than stay confined to a channel's category, he searches for 3x–4x view outliers across adjacent niches, extracts the underlying format or emotional mechanism, and adapts it. He recommends a portfolio: roughly 80% of output should maintain audience overlap and channel identity, while a deliberate minority can take broader, higher-risk swings. The aim is not predictable middling results but a mix of reliable base hits and occasional home runs.

For execution, Galloway advocates unusually aggressive iteration: at least three genuinely distinct thumbnail concepts at launch, ongoing title/thumbnail retesting for underperforming videos, and—in major productions—20 to 50 packaging variants. An idea is not ready simply because the underlying content is interesting; it must be easy to package and plausibly capable of achieving a defined aspirational view target.

Retention starts with the first 5–10 seconds: visually or verbally deliver on the title/thumbnail promise, introduce a specific intrigue hook, and bridge seamlessly into the substance rather than using generic transitions. For podcasts and educational videos, the creator should map retention devices in advance—foreshadowed questions, future payoffs, and "soon X, first Y" sequencing—while optimizing for viewer satisfaction rather than artificially stretching watch time. He views Shorts and long form as largely separate audiences, so short-form success or subscriber growth should not be assumed to transfer.

Key Takeaways

  • Claim: Packaging is approximately 50% of the YouTube game, so a video concept must be designed simultaneously with its title and thumbnail rather than packaged after production. | Evidence: Galloway frames YouTube as making "title thumbnails that people click and videos that people watch," and says he will leave otherwise good ideas on the shelf for years if he cannot identify a compelling title/thumbnail angle. | Implication: Treat packaging as a gating criterion in greenlighting and production, with a concept brief that includes the title, thumbnail premise, and opening payoff before a shoot starts. | Caveat: Packaging can create the click, but the opening and body still need to fulfill the promise; misleading viewers without value is not presented as a durable strategy.
  • Claim: The highest-performing thumbnails are fast to parse and create an unresolved visual story that viewers feel compelled to "unpause." | Evidence: He cites a Red Bull F1 car versus drone drag-race thumbnail, a basketball creator facing a line of players, and an "Old Man's Advice" thumbnail showing a man mid-thought. He recommends bright, saturated images because he estimates about 75% of users use dark mode, and warns that viewers see thumbnails only for a split second. | Implication: Create thumbnails around visible stakes, confrontation, process, movement, contradiction, or a question in progress—not static host portraits or comprehensively explanatory graphics. | Caveat: Simplicity matters more than detailed design work; extra words, clutter, and subtle details often fail the glance test.
  • Claim: Use short thumbnail text as an emotional or contrarian amplifier, not as a caption duplicating the title. | Evidence: Galloway limits thumbnail copy to roughly four or five short words; examples include "Get Rich Playbook" and "You've Been Lied To." He contrasts this with thumbnails carrying 10 words that cannot be processed alongside image, expression, and title. | Implication: Separate the jobs of title and thumbnail: let one articulate the premise while the other sharpens curiosity, tension, or the promised transformation. | Caveat: Text is not a sign that a thumbnail has failed; Galloway explicitly rejects the claim that good thumbnails should never require text.
  • Claim: Outlier research should be cross-category: identify formats that perform 3x–4x above a channel's normal view count, then adapt their underlying pattern to an adjacent audience. | Evidence: His firm uses tools including ViewStats and oneoften.com to find outliers. He cites adapting fitness/diet-channel patterns for Ramit Sethi's finance content and converting a barber's "10 seconds vs. 10 minutes vs. 10 hours" haircut format into a Milky Way photography experiment that reportedly reached about 300x the creator's usual views. | Implication: Build an outlier database organized by audience adjacency and reusable mechanisms—comparison, escalation, contradiction, transformation, experimentation—not merely by industry. | Caveat: A borrowed format needs an authentic fit with the new audience and creator's unique expertise; direct copying is not the objective.
  • Claim: A channel needs both audience consistency and controlled experimentation: maintain at least 80% audience overlap across most uploads while reserving roughly 20% for broader or unproven bets. | Evidence: Galloway's "80% YouTube strategy rule" asks whether at least 80 of 100 viewers of one video would likely want the next. Separately, he recommends a quota where roughly one-third of ideas come from internal channel signals, one-third from external inspiration, and the remaining portion from original experimentation. He tells clients he wants some 50,000-view losses and 500,000-view wins instead of a flat 200,000 views every time. | Implication: Manage content as a portfolio: protect a coherent core audience and revenue-relevant formats, but pre-commit a portion of publishing capacity to upside-seeking experiments. | Caveat: The appropriate degree of experimentation depends on whether the channel's objective is mass reach or reaching a smaller, highly valuable buyer audience.
  • Claim: Idea selection should be highly selective and testable, with packaging viability and aspirational reach evaluated before production. | Evidence: Galloway describes generating 30–50 ideas each from internal performance, external trends, and original/competitive-advantage sources, then applying a 100-10-1-style funnel: about 100 ideas, 10 finalists, and one shipped. He says about 99% of brainstormed client ideas do not get made. One stated criterion is whether an idea can plausibly reach a target such as one million views. | Implication: Replace ad hoc content calendars with a recurring ideation funnel, explicit kill criteria, and a documented rationale for why each approved concept can win. | Caveat: Aspirational view targets should be calibrated to the channel's current scale and strategic objective rather than copied blindly from large entertainment channels.
  • Claim: Long-form retention depends less on constant speed than on immediate promise delivery, specific intrigue, seamless transitions, and planned future payoffs; viewer satisfaction is the ultimate optimization target. | Evidence: Galloway's three-part intro is: deliver on the click within 5–10 seconds, create intrigue through a concrete future payoff, and flow directly into the content. He advises using an "invisible focus group" test—at any point, viewers should be able to say what valuable or intriguing event is still coming. For podcasts, he uses "soon X, first Y" to sequence two interesting topics. | Implication: Script retention architecture into episode outlines and edits: connect the opening visual to the thumbnail, avoid generic transitions such as "let's get into it," and add explicit but non-annoying future reasons to continue. | Caveat: Chapters are helpful for podcasts, tutorials, listicles, and education because they increase usability, but can damage narrative/story formats by encouraging viewers to skip directly to the climax.

Detailed Brief

Testing, algorithm dynamics, and audience signals

  • Claims: Small strategic improvements in packaging can produce nonlinear distribution gains because YouTube is an algorithmic multiplier, not a linear reward system.; Every video should remain testable after publication; a weak launch does not necessarily mean the underlying video is permanently dead.; Subscriber count is primarily a vanity metric compared with a viewer's prior viewing history and demonstrated format preference.
  • Evidence: Galloway describes changing a thumbnail on a video from roughly 1,000 views per day to roughly 40,000 views per day, even though the improved thumbnail might appear only 20–30% better to a casual observer.; He calls three launch thumbnails a non-negotiable and says larger projects may receive 20–30, or even 50, distinct packaging concepts; titles and thumbnails can also be revised every couple of weeks as YouTube continues serving impressions.; A client reportedly gained one million subscribers from a single Short, but Galloway did not expect those subscribers to translate materially into long-form viewers because their watch history was only in Shorts.
  • Caveats: A/B tests should use genuinely different packaging angles, not superficial text substitutions.; Continued impressions create opportunities to improve packaging, but do not eliminate the need for a fundamentally satisfying video.
  • Implications: Establish a post-publish review cadence for every priority video, with replacement packaging hypotheses tied to impressions, click behavior, and audience response.; Report long-form health separately from Shorts-driven subscriber growth and avoid treating a subscriber spike as proof of cross-format product-market fit.

Brand-channel strategy and format architecture

  • Claims: Brands should decide whether YouTube is a strategic brand-building medium or avoid maintaining a channel altogether; a channel full of weak corporate content can degrade perceived brand quality.; There are two legitimate but different brand models: search-oriented education built around conversion intent, and entertainment/story-led programming built around people, access, and distinctive brand resources.; Shorts and long form can coexist on one channel because they are mostly distinct audiences, while incompatible long-form formats—such as short analytic breakdowns and two-hour interviews—may warrant separate channels.
  • Evidence: Galloway contrasts Red Bull's content-led identity with an unnamed technology company valued in the tens of billions whose public channel mainly held poor corporate training videos.; For a supplement brand, he suggests either search videos such as supplements for de-bloating or muscle-building, or story-led series built around ambassadors' distinct routines and lives.; For the Philadelphia Eagles, he adapted a broad YouTube trend—testing 100-year-old objects—into players testing and comparing historical NFL equipment, using privileged access to players as the brand's differentiating resource.
  • Caveats: Search-oriented education can drive conversion but is described as slower and less creatively exciting than entertainment-led brand programming.; For a narrowly monetizable audience, 50,000–100,000 highly relevant views can be more valuable than mass reach.
  • Implications: Audit every brand channel as a public product surface: remove or relocate low-quality operational content, then choose whether the channel's primary KPI is qualified demand capture, brand salience, or both.; Identify proprietary access, talent, community, data, or operational capabilities that competitors cannot easily reproduce, then use them as recurring show ingredients.

Notable Concepts & Terms

  • Paused in action: A thumbnail principle in which the image depicts an unresolved moment, making a click feel like pressing play to discover what happens next.
  • Glance test: The requirement that a thumbnail communicate its core situation almost instantly on a small screen rather than rewarding close inspection.
  • Contradiction packaging: Using an apparent paradox or challenge to conventional belief—such as "the cheapest car, but nobody will buy it"—to produce an automatic "why?" response.
  • Outlier Strategy: Galloway's approach to researching videos that outperform a channel's normal baseline by approximately 3x–4x, then adapting their mechanisms across niches.
  • 80% YouTube strategy rule: Most uploads should have substantial likely audience overlap with one another; the remaining capacity permits controlled experimentation without destroying channel identity.
  • 100-10-1 ideation funnel: A high-rejection process: generate a large idea pool, narrow it to the strongest few, then produce the single best candidate rather than shipping most ideas.
  • Soon X, first Y: A retention device that promises one desirable future discussion while moving immediately into another desirable current segment; both elements must be genuinely interesting.
  • Invisible focus group: A retention diagnostic: pause at any point and ask whether a viewer can clearly articulate the worthwhile payoffs still ahead.

Operator Notes / Why Ken Should Care

  • Require every proposed long-form video to include three distinct title/thumbnail routes, an intended opening visual, and a stated aspirational view target before approval.
  • Create a monthly cross-niche outlier-research process that captures 3x–4x-performing formats, their audience psychology, and the adjacent channel categories from which they can be adapted.
  • Add a content-portfolio allocation to the editorial calendar: protect core audience-overlap uploads while explicitly reserving a defined share for high-upside experiments.
  • Implement a 5–10 second opening QA check: the first visual must confirm the click promise, followed by one specific unresolved payoff and a direct bridge into content.
  • Build a one-page retention map for every priority podcast or educational video, marking planned foreshadows, future questions, section bridges, and whether chapters improve or harm satisfaction.
  • Separate reporting and goals for Shorts and long form; track long-form returning viewers and viewing history rather than celebrating Shorts subscriber growth as a conversion metric.
  • Audit public brand-channel inventory and unlist, relocate, or redesign corporate training and low-quality informational uploads that weaken the brand's premium signal.

Source/Metadata

  • Title: The NEW Rules Of YouTube (From a 50 Billion View Strategist)
  • Transcript words: 21033
  • Duration seconds: 4101
  • Timestamp note: No usable timestamps or chapters were present in the supplied transcript.
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Full transcript 14328 words · 93 min read
0:00

I think I can make any channel on YouTube go viral. I've worked on 50 billion organic views on YouTube long form. This is Paddy Galloway, Mr. Beast's secret YouTube consultant, driving over 10 billion views a year. But the craziest thing is, in one hour, he completely reframed my thinking and my playbook for YouTube and for this podcast. I always create at least three thumbnails on launch. Sometimes with some clients, that's as much as 20 or 30 thumbnails. I often actually say that it's 50% of the game. So in this episode, you're going to learn how he thinks about thumbnails, how to package them for clickability, how to structure your YouTube videos,

0:36

how to think about foreshadowing and introducing progress, all of these things. But in the first minute of the episode, I had to get him to reveal all of his thumbnail secrets.

0:46

So I want to show you three thumbnails. And out the gate, I want you to explain to us, to the audience, what makes these thumbnails great. And if you could just swipe to the left, there's three thumbnails. So this one, yeah, this is a pretty special video. We did this with Red Bull a couple of years ago. And I think it's interesting because when I think about packaging, I find that a lot of people outside of the YouTube industry just don't understand the cul-de-sac of a differentiator it is. I often actually say that it's 50% of the game. And that shocks people because you think YouTube is a video platform, right? People think you make videos that people watch.

1:28

But I think about it, you make title thumbnails that people click and videos that people watch. It's 50-50. So a film like this, it's really simple, but you've got the F1 car and the drone side by side. And even the little details of the leading lines you see stretching off into the distance, directing your focus to the track that's in front of them. A concept I really like to think about with thumbnails is this idea of paused in action. So it almost feels like you're clicking something to play the image. Yeah. And I even think about that for a podcast. If I look at the best podcast thumbnails that I see, it's someone with their hand out with text,

2:08

and they're in the middle of speech. It's the highest outlier. It's like a thought bubble. And so then the clicking is like, it's almost like the finished thought is going to come. Exactly. It's like a story that has to go only by clicking. You have to click it. And I remember one of the best pieces of advice I ever got on thumbnails was from Mr. Beast. And he was like, I want to put a thumbnail in front of someone that if they were on their last minute of scrolling their phone before bed and they saw that thumbnail, they couldn't sleep and they clicked on it. And so I was struck with the extremity of how important it is.

2:39

See, I think a thing like this is paused in action. You have to click it to play it. It has some enhanced colors. It still borders on realistic. Yeah. It definitely is pretty. That was going to be a question of mine, how much do the saturation and the colors come into play? I mean, the way I think about it is about 75% of users use YouTube on dark mode. And when you're scrolling through and you see a bright thumbnail, it's just naturally eye-catching. Of course. And another concept I always like to think about is this idea of the glance test. Yeah. It's another mistake people make, especially when they hear me say things like this about how important a title thumbnail is,

3:16

is they'll end up obsessing over it so much and working on all these details, and they have it on their 5K monitor, and they're spending hours looking at it. But the average user on YouTube is going to see it in a split second. It's going to be just like, boom. Oh, is that interesting? So when a thumbnail is bright, has good saturation, it's very simple, such a simple image, where you just see what's happening. You can see it's a race. You can see it's a drag race. And even the fact that it's from behind, it feels extra, like you're almost setting them off. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I think those are some of the things that made that such a special thumbnail.

3:50

What about then moving into something educational? If you scroll to the left, I think the other way, it sets up much easier to have a Formula One car versus a drone. But then when you're recording just a talking head video, it's harder to think about the creative elements that can make a very clickable thumbnail. When you think about that and then you look at this thumbnail, what makes this one great? If you could show it as well. Yeah. Just to see it there on camera. So yeah, I think some of the same things again. It still feels like you have to click to almost unpause this moment of this guy holding up this board in front of you. Yeah. Like a fun fact about this video

4:24

is there's no board. There's no whiteboard. Yeah. That's not in the video. Yeah, yeah. And sometimes people get really precious about that. They're like, if it's not in the video, I can't show it in the thumbnail. I'm like, bro, by the time someone's clicked this video and they're watching it and it's valuable, they don't even know what the thumbnail was. Right. With Noah Kagan. Yeah. Right. And I think you talk about that in the video where you were like, it was something where he was knocking on people's doors and you guys used someone that wasn't even in the video as the thumbnail or something along those lines. And it's like, nobody commented,

4:52

and that video has probably nearly a million views. Yeah. That's a great example of, you know, I love Noah and his team, but they came back from that shoot. They made a great video, and I was like, let's see the thumbnail source. And they're like, fuck. And I was like, so I think the actual story was Noah just went to his neighbor that lived on the street and was like, would you mind posing in this thing? He's like, I don't want to be in the video, but I'll pose. And he was worried about, well, if she's not in the video, can she be in the thumbnail? And I was like, literally no one will notice. And that video had 5 million, 6 million views.

5:22

I think one of the highest-viewed business videos of all time in terms of long form. And I scrolled through the comments, and I think there was one commenter who was like, was she in the video? No, no, no, no one cares. One of the most, like an Easter egg, right? I mean, that's its own form of engagement farming. Exactly. But even then, the thumbnail was like knocking on the door of someone opening, right? Which is again, one of those other moments that you feel like you need to unpause. Yeah, exactly. And if you look at it, I think that concept, it's so simple, but people would, some people think something's simple, but the execution is what makes the difference.

5:51

So with that concept, I think a lot of people would have gone, both people looking at the camera, smiling. I think that's how most people naturally think. They have to overly pose for a thumbnail, right? They have to be like, oh, perfect. Yeah, it's the token super surprise face, very expressive. Yeah, yeah, but by directing their body language towards each other and having, even that thumbnail, if you look at them, because we repeated that thumbnail so many times, Noah's always like this in the thumbnail when he's asking the question. He's like, I don't talk like that, but just do it for the thumbnail because it just looks like he's throwing this question at her. Yeah.

6:19

And then the person in the thumbnail is always looking like this. I'm like, if she looks really happy, there's less jeopardy. I want them to look like they're going to reject you. Controversy. Yeah, exactly. Talk a little bit about the visual elements that you like to include in a thumbnail because this one has a whiteboard, a playbook. Those obviously go together. The Get Rich playbook is pretty clear in terms of it's an expectation for what I'm going to get from the video, but how do you first-principles identify the visual element you want to include? So I think especially with education, I like showing process. Okay. It depends what people are coming for.

6:43

I think a lot of people that would click on this video, I don't talk like that, but just do it for the thumbnail because it just looks like he's throwing this question at her. Yeah. And then the person in the thumbnail is always looking like this. I'm like, if she looks really happy, there's less jeopardy. I want them to look like they're going to reject you. Controversy. Yeah, exactly.

6:48

Talk a little bit about the visual elements that you like to include in a thumbnail because this one has a whiteboard, a playbook. Those obviously go together. The Get Rich playbook is pretty clear in terms of it's an expectation for what I'm going to get from the video, but how do you first-principles identify the visual element you want to include? So, I think especially with education, I like showing process. Okay.

6:51

It depends what people are coming for. I think a lot of people that would click on this video, the title of this video for clarity was I've made millions of people rich. Here's my entire playbook. And I think when you see that title and you think about this financial advice video, process and seeing actual technical detail stuff, it's, oh, look at this stuff. And again, this wasn't really covered in the video. There were steps, but it wasn't like we were like, oh, one, two, three, spend percent of it. This is more just like create this feeling. It's like a movie poster, how Spider-Man and the Green Goblin might not be posed in the exact way they are in the movie poster. It's like, yeah, it's just rep. That scene never happens, but it was eye-catching.

6:52

Yes. Yeah. Exactly. So, I think about that a lot. I think about text. I remember having an argument with someone a while ago. They were like, if you have to use text in your thumbnail, your thumbnail's not good enough. And I just couldn't disagree more. I think using a few words, usually I'll limit it to four or five words max in your thumbnail. I see so many people use 10 words, and it's like, again, bro, you've got a second of attention, if not less. Can you read everything in your thumbnail, including the facial expression, including the pointing, and then you have 10 words? It's like, that's too much, right?

6:54

And with those four to five words, is there a framework to use on, hey, say this kind of statement or introduce contrast, or how do you think about that? I think about short words. So, in terms of character count, I don't want really long, like, playbook is on the verge of being too long. Yeah. It's still fine, but I like short, punchy things. Get rich playbook, clear. Even this creator, I don't think he would say that. Right. I'm not going to say get rich. Get rich playbook, but in the thumbnail text, it's just like, get rich playbook, right? Yeah.

7:02

One of my favorite pieces of thumbnail text ever was one that I saw on this channel that was doing a video on the dodo extinction. Yeah. And it was a picture of the dodo, and it said, you've been lied to. I just love that text. So then with this creator, actually, we made a video where he's like, why I don't own a house as a multi-millionaire? Yeah. And then we were brainstorming the text, and I was like, you've been lied to. It's so good. It's just punchy, short words, under five total words. Right.

7:08

Well, and it's condensing a core idea of what someone's going to get in the video, right? But at the same time, I think a curiosity gap is something that a lot of people talk about in YouTube. You have to establish a curiosity gap where, when I see the thumbnail, like Mr. Beast said, if I'm on my last minute of scrolling, I now have to go understand what's behind it. You've been lied to is a perfect example because every man is desperate to uncover the truth.

7:09

It's funny because that video played in my head so much when I was buying a house. It talks about renting as the better option than buying a house, and I was buying a house, and I'm like, bro, I know they're saying this is not, I'm getting lied to right now. I'm in the moment of getting lied to.

7:11

What do you think about, though, when something like a podcast, right, and typically, or a lot of people talk about podcasts never getting the same reach as maybe a 12, 15-minute YouTube video, but Brian and I cover a lot of things that are playbooks or case studies or breakdowns. For something like that, are you recommending us put in, hey, show the process, like if you're going to do a whiteboard, if you're going to do whatever, show the process within that thumbnail as well? Like if we're breaking down some brand's art direction, showcase maybe mood boards and then how you would think about sequencing images, et cetera.

7:12

I think with podcasts, there's some different rules I would think about. I still think it's something you could test. My First Million, things like that, where they'll use something similar to a whiteboard or something. Yeah.

7:13

That thumbnail, even though it's not featured in video. I think to me, it's again, it's like if it represents what the video is covering. I think the great thing about this is the title is, I've made millions of people rich, here's my playbook. The thumbnail says, Get Rich Playbook. And then the start of the video, he's just saying, I've made millions of people rich, here's exactly the steps I take. And we even create, we don't create this, but through visuals, we create similar things. It's like a white background with some numbers and a listicle, and it feels somewhat connected. So I think in the podcast, if you're able to create that either in motion graphics after the fact or even just like a little cutout or something, I think then you can go as far as you want with the actual thumbnail.

7:14

I think about a lot as well for podcasts, and just YouTube title thumbnails in general and the art of packaging in general, is one of the things that I find creates that feeling of I have to click this is contradiction. Right. Or it's like challenging the conventional thought. So I do this exercise with students in my accelerator that I run to help smaller creators, where I say, let's take a title that says something like the cheapest 911 GT3 RS in the world. Right.

7:18

It's like, that's an okay title, right? The cheapest. Okay. But how do we improve that? Well, we could say, I found the cheapest 911 GT3 RS in the world. And it's like, okay, well now I found makes it feel a bit more like an adventure, like a story. But how could you add a contradiction? Yeah.

7:19

So it could be like, I found the cheapest 911 GT3 RS in the world, but nobody will buy it. And suddenly you're like, well, if you found the cheapest one, if you found this really cheap thing, why would someone not buy it? What's the story there? You can take it to another level. It's like, I found the best apartment in Austin, but nobody will move in. As a title, I'm immediately like— You're like, why? You ask yourself why so fast? Which I think is one of the coolest things about the frameworks that you talk about, which is pattern recognition. Yeah. And being able to take that simple idea, which is contradiction, and then apply it to different niches. Yeah.

7:25

Because you just mentioned that You've Been Lied To was a dodo video. Yeah. And you just applied it to a personal finance niche. So maybe talk a little bit about that research process and how you find the pattern first and then apply it to the new thing. Exactly. So what I think about is, I think and dream in outliers. My company's called Outlier Strategy, right? That's all we think about. So what we'll do is we'll use different tools. There's tools like ViewStats, oneoften.com. Yeah. And we will basically identify what we typically define an outlier as: a 3x or 4x the average view count on the channel. Okay.

7:35

So we'll use those tools to find videos across multiple niches that are 3x or 4x the average. And the way I like to think about this is so often people get caught up in this mindset of like, I am a finance channel, was a dodo video. Yeah. And you just applied it to a personal finance niche. So maybe talk a little bit about that research process and how you find the pattern first and then apply it to the new thing. Exactly. So what I think about is, I think and dream in outliers. My company's called Outlier Strategy, right? That's all we think about. So what we'll do is we'll use different tools. There's tools like ViewStats, oneoften.com. Yeah. And we will identify

7:52

what we typically define an outlier as a 3x or 4x the average view count on the channel. Okay. So we'll use those tools to find videos across multiple niches that are 3x or 4x the average. And the way I like to think about this is, so often people get caught up in this mindset of, I am a finance channel, so I can only look at finance channels, or I'm a fitness channel, so I can only do fitness channels. One of the biggest inspiration points for this channel, Ramit Sethi, when we worked with him, was actually fitness and diet channels. And it's like, how could that apply to finance? He's a finance channel. And it's like, well, it's similar. You're teaching

8:22

someone how to do something that requires discipline, self-improvement. So I think about adjacent niches a lot. If I'm a fishing channel, what's adjacent to fishing? Well, to me, it's golf. It's enjoyed by a similar demographic. It's very gear-heavy. You buy golf clubs, you buy fishing rods. There's a lot of skill involved, so you can use those examples as ways to adapt over from niches. You talked about this, I think, in a Twitter thread where somebody that went through the accelerator, where a lot of their videos were getting stuck at 1.5 thousand views, maybe upwards toward 11,000 views. And then, out the gate, he had some outliers. And all that you guys did

8:52

or changed was the format. You looked at a format that worked for him. It was the astrology one. I think the format, it was one hour, 10 hour, 100 hours, something along those lines. And then his was taking a photo. And it was, I think, taking a photo of maybe the Milky Way, and it was an hour exposure, 10 hour exposure, and maybe a day exposure. Yeah. And that is almost what you're referencing here, where you can look at a completely different category. I don't remember the category that you referenced in the... I think it was haircut. It was a 10-second versus 10-minute versus 10-hour haircut or something. Yeah. From a barber channel. Which is a sick idea.

9:18

10-hour haircut. Yeah. I know. What's that going to look like? Yeah, dude. I don't even know. And then you brought it over. But dude, out the gate, the video got one point something... I mean, it probably has more now, but one point something million views. Yeah. It did 300 times his average view count the last time. And that's the crazy thing I think about YouTube in general. I think about the algorithm as this multiplier. Yeah. The almighty multiplier that people still underestimate, which is you could make a video that's 20, 30, 40% better than your previous videos, but just in the right ways. Like a thumbnail. I always talk about this example we did with someone else,

9:55

where he had a thumbnail for a video. It was doing a thousand views a day, and we brainstormed a better thumbnail for him. And I think if you ask people on the street which is the better thumbnail, most people would pick the one we brainstormed, but it'd be like, it's a little bit better. Maybe 20% better, 30% better. But the video went from a thousand views a day to 40,000 views a day. And that's the multiplier effect. I think we still sometimes have to... As humans, we think about things so binary: if I make it a bit better, it will get a bit better, and everything's linear. Yeah. Whereas with algorithms, you've probably seen this yourself, the difference between

10:25

a piece of content that maybe gets a thousand views and a million sometimes isn't as drastic as you think. It's just strategically really better. It's twisting it a little bit. Right? You see something that's proven and then you slap your own unique ideology onto it and unique background and lessons that you have. We always talk about 3% iterations, and this is coined by Virgil Abloh, the designer, where he talks about you can make something completely novel if you take something from another category, you spin it 3% to a point that it's unique to you, and all of a sudden it's novel to the world. I feel like you do that a lot. You can look at something in whatever niche,

10:58

whatever category, you spin it, and it's completely new to this category as well. But yeah, it's crazy to see because it is so natural to look at it from the perspective of maybe I'm getting 100 views a day, and then I get up to 200. I'm just going to keep climbing until you have that rocket launch moment where you're like, well, shit, I am getting 1,000 views a day, 2,000 views a day. So it shows you the value of what that actually does over time, compounding like that. I have a question for you. In a sea of the same with the YouTube algorithm, which is what we're talking about, where it's okay, I'm going to take this proven concept and then twist it 3%,

11:29

where do the original ideas come from? Who is the original outlier producer? Do you have a process for that? Is there a moonshot division over at Outliers where you're like, yo, we're just going to try some crazy shit here, or... I think about a quota. Yeah. If you're a channel, this is what happens to a lot of channels: they get in this pure repetition of what's working, what's working, what's working. I like to have a quota of: maybe 33% of our videos are inspired by external sources, like what's working in other places. Maybe 33% are from our channel, what's working here. And maybe the rest is: let's try something original. Let's brainstorm.

12:13

So I like this idea of a quota of maybe one in three, one in four, one in five videos. We're just going to try something unique and original that we don't know how it's going to perform. Right. I remember talking to a client. This is the thing that's funny: quite often, people... We benefit so much from the unlimited ceiling of the algorithm, but we don't want the downside, which is the fact that there is a lot of predictability in the apps. So some people are so in this mindset of I need to get this exact view count every time. I can't take risks. And I remember saying to a client that was doing maybe 200,000 views a video, I was like, I want more 50s and 500s.

12:47

And he's like, what do you mean? I'm like, I want some videos that hit 50,000 and some that hit 500,000. I don't want to just hit 200,000 every time. And he's like, why would you want a 50,000-view video? I'm like, I don't want one, but sometimes by trying something, you're going to take an L. A lot of times, they're 50,000 before the 500,000. I mean, first of all, that's a goated client. Yeah. Because they understand the game very well. Yeah. It's really interesting because short form is a little bit different. With short form, look, you're putting out volume, but the stakes of a video flopping with your spoken hook not being good... When you script it

13:24

and then the spoken hook is not good, you posted the video, you would have to repost it a long time later. And maybe that's also a psychological thing. You don't actually have to do that. But with YouTube, you can literally change the title and thumbnail every two weeks. You post the video and then you just change the packaging a little bit and continue to test. So if it does flop, you have the opportunity to fix that later down the road as well. It's like no man left behind. I don't give up on a video. YouTube doesn't give up on a video. If you look in the back end, you'll be able to see they're still giving impressions. They're still giving this a shot.

13:57

They're still showing it to people. Yeah, yeah. Because they want to satisfy everyone's content diet. Yeah. Their incentives are aligned with yours. They want your content to perform, so they're going to keep giving you at-bats. So yeah, before anything, I always create at least three thumbnails on launch. I'll use A-B testing there on YouTube to test the three different thumbnails. To me, that's a non-negotiable. change the title and thumbnail every two weeks. You post the video and then you just change the packaging a little bit and continue to test. So if it does flop, you have the opportunity to fix that later down the road as well. It's like no man left behind.

14:30

I don't give up on a video. YouTube doesn't give up on a video. If you look in the back end, you'll be able to see they're still giving impressions. They're still giving this a shot. They're still showing it to people. Yeah, yeah. Because they want to satisfy everyone's content diet. Yeah. Their incentives are aligned with yours. They want your content to perform, so they're going to keep giving you at bats. So, yeah, before anything, I always create at least three thumbnails on launch. I'll use A-B testing on YouTube to test the three different thumbnails. To me, that's a non-negotiable. Even when I'm signing a deal with a brand or a creator client, I'm like,

15:08

if we can't do this for every video, we're not signing a deal. This is a non-negotiable. We have to make at least three per video. Sometimes with some clients, that's as much as 20 or 30 thumbnails just for one video. And then what I'll do is I'll run that 20 or 30 thumbnails for one video. Yeah. I've done more than that. I've done 50. That's insane. 50 different variations. Yeah. And not just the same thing with 50 different pieces of text, complete unique ideas and angles. Yeah. Because when you're investing maybe 50, 100k into a video, it's like, gotta work. You gotta work. It gotta work. There's one more thumbnail in there. If you could scroll

15:43

and break down that last, the last one. Yeah. Yeah. This was a banger. And now that you say the unpausing, I can't unsee it. I agree. You get what I'm saying? It's completely shifted my frame of thinking relevant to a thumbnail. Yeah. And it's just made me think, there's this example of a video. I'm not sure if I know you guys have seen it, but the title is An Old Man's Advice, and it's this guy with this, he looks like Santa Claus. He's got this big white beard. He's in his 70s or 80s, and he's just got this blurry thumbnail. Everyone always sends it to me. They're like, you say packaging is so important, look at this guy. He clearly didn't even think about it.

16:23

And I'm like, this guy's a genius. This is a great thumbnail, whether he meant it or not. It doesn't matter. If you look at that thumbnail, it's this old guy. His mouth is open and he's talking. He's looking at the camera. The background is really dark, and he's got this white beard that's popping so well. He's just with his hand in the middle of thought. And then I'm like, imagine he had made that film, though, but it was him smiling like this, and then pieces of advice from me or something beside him. No one's clicking that. It's the fact you have to. You know you're going to click it. It almost feels like when you hold down on an iPhone live photo to see the scene.

16:57

That's the psychological thing underpinning what you're talking about. With this one in particular, I want to click to animate that exact scene. I'm going, what the hell's going on? You're going to see all these players lined up. You're going to see the guy in the front is another creator. Flight is his name. And then the guy at the back is Jaron Jackson. Jaron Jackson. Yeah. One of the best defensive players in the league. So you're just like, what's going on? I need to click this. I need to watch this. And it's, again, following some of the same principles. It's very simple. As much as there's lots of people in it, it's still simple to process. You can see that

17:38

in a second. One versus many as well sets some stakes. Exactly. Yeah. And even the little details, it's funny. I think I remember, it might not have been this thumbnail, but there's been thumbnails in the past where let's say the third person in the line is really tall. Sometimes I'll make them shorter just so there's this build up, like a mini Jaron Jackson. Yeah. Put Wembanyama in there. He's the shortest guy. So I remember I gave a note like that before, and they were like, I feel like the guy might be kind of pissed that you're making him 5'10" instead of 6'4". I'm like, it works better for the thumbnail. Performance solves all. Yeah, exactly. Sometimes that's

18:20

the thing I say. Do we want to make everyone happy, or do we want to get 10 million views? Sometimes people will say that to me where they're in the thumbnail, or it's their idea, their video. And I'm like, you could make the thumbnail you really want that's going to make you look great and everything, and we'll get 100,000 views, or we can make the thumbnail that I want to do, and I think we can get 5 million. Yeah. That kind of cures all. Yeah. Of course. Problems. Of course. I want to take that same information and almost ask you, live, how do you think then we should package this? Because that is our biggest focus this year, is packaging, our thumbnails,

19:00

and things within the episode as well. But I think our packaging has been a 3 out of 10, and it's worked well enough to get to where we're at, but we can be so much bigger. Can you live brainstorm how you think we should do packaging for an episode like this, where we're thinking about how to break YouTube in 2026, etc., ideas like that? So I would think about, who's the guest? In this case, the guest is me, right? What are unique things about my story? I was always thinking big numbers. Is there big numbers we can talk about? So for me, it's like we work across 10 billion organic views a year. I've worked on 50 billion organic views on YouTube long form. And it's like,

19:28

10 billion, 10 billion views a year, 50 billion, those are some things I'd start thinking about in my head. Could that be the angle? Then I might go, okay, that's the big number rule. And then I might think, contradictions. Is there anything that I'm saying here that might contradict conventional thought? It might be I might say something like, subscribers are useless, because they kind of are. They don't matter. They're a vanity metric, and YouTube doesn't really put much emphasis on it. So that's a kind of contradiction. Most people think subscribers are really important. I'm going to tell you they're not. That's something. And then it's like

19:58

every channel still being like, like and subscribe. Yeah. But like you said, vanity metric. Exactly. And then bold claims. I think I can make any channel on YouTube go viral. That's my, yeah. There's obviously constraints with some, but I've never entered a niche and thought that I couldn't figure out a way to make this niche go viral. People will say that doesn't happen in my niche. I heard that in the YouTube education niche. When I started that, the average view count of a YouTube education channel was about 15,000 to 20,000 views. Yeah. And then I started my channel, and on my channel, I was averaging over a million views in episodes. And it's like,

20:30

I just took the niche and was like, how can I go bigger here? So I think that's a great segue. Well, not segue. I want to stay in the workshop here, selfishly. But you talk a lot about TAM and packaging, where it's like you want to package the video for as wide of an audience as humanly possible. And something that we probably fall into the trap of, that I would guess a lot of people who attempt YouTube fall into the trap of, is we do have a pretty narrow ICP, ideal customer, for our content. It's a brand operator who is actively trying to grow through either Meta or organic content. But generally speaking, it's people who have physical products

21:01

and want to grow their business with some sort of smart marketing tactic. And something I've been chatting with Alex about is, how do we expand our TAM and go from, because I mean Ramit Sethi is a great example, where it's like, okay, well, if you talk about just home ownership, then me as a renter, I'm not super interested. But if you talk about overall personal finance, it's a bigger TAM. So I guess, what would be a way to kind of expand the TAM of someone who feels like they're too narrow? So I think one of the biggest problems with channels that feel they're too narrow, or being too narrow, is it's always not about the actual potential audience. It's about

21:24

the topics you're covering. So what happens is people will end up doing videos that are very specific to certain things, just kind of like what you were alluding to. It's like, imagine I make a channel and it's like, this video is specifically for women, this video is specifically for men, this video is specifically for people in relationships, this is specifically for people who've just gotten broken up with. It's like each one of those is 5 or 10% of your potential audience. where it's okay, well, if you talk about just home ownership, then me as a renter, I'm not super interested. But if you talk about overall personal finance, it's a bigger TAM. Yeah. So I guess,

21:52

what would be a way to expand the TAM of someone who feels like they're too narrow? So I think one of the biggest problems with channels that feel they're too narrow, or being too narrow, is it's not always about the actual potential audience. It's about the topics you're covering. So what happens is people will end up doing videos that are very specific to certain things, just what you were alluding to. Imagine I make a channel and it's: this video is specifically for women, this video is specifically for men, this video is specifically for people in relationships, this is specifically for people who've just gotten broken up with. Each one of those is 5 or 10%

22:16

of your potential audience, and it's very hard to, unless you just want to go all in on one of those, it's quite hard to do that. So there's a rule I like to think about. I just call it the 80% YouTube strategy rule, where I say your video should have 80% overlap with your other videos. You need 80% overlap each time. And what I mean by that is, when you look at a video on your channel, you have to ask yourself the question: this video, let's just say 100 people watched it, just for argument's sake, can at least 80 of those people also be interested in this next video? And it's not what we think, oh, they should be interested. It's: will they be interested?

22:46

So I just want to think for smaller times like that, in terms of expanding it, it's saying: can we be a bit broader in terms of how we package it, even if the content is still quite specific? Because there are still probably a lot of people that you're not hitting that would potentially click if you just made it a bit broader. Instead of maybe going into very specific things, you can do that in the episode, but in the title, thumbnail, maybe it's specifically a little bit broader. Maybe even for this episode, for me, right? I'm sure your exact, maybe perfect viewer for this episode might be someone who's thinking about making organic content for their brand,

23:18

and they probably have, let's say, a product or a consumer good or a product, right? Yeah. It's like, well, you could package it like the YouTube strategy for CPG brands, but I think I would just go a bit broader. I would just maybe go from CPG brand to just brand, because I don't think that eliminates the CPG audience, but it just gives the video a bit more broadness. Well, and then also there's the element of, which I'm really excited to get into, your take on brand YouTube here in a second, but you don't want to isolate yourself away from a software company. Yeah. Right? I think all marketing is condensing itself into just, we are in a sea of content, and you have to

23:52

get attention somehow. Yeah. Because everyone, even C-suite executives, are liking your random Instagram posts, and it's like billionaires are checking in on DMs on Instagram reels, right? So the things that are really powering marketing these days are just the ability to get eyeballs to content. And so, to your point, I don't want to isolate one of these YC batch software companies from this video by saying it's just the playbook for CPG brands, even though what we're saying can be really valuable to a CPG brand. One of my arguments to Brian has been, if we position ourselves as just organic content, then I think it casts a big enough TAM, especially where

24:26

brands are going, right? Where all these brands are investing more and more money into organic. Where, if we're positioned as social, or the podcast more so dedicated to brand social, and I'm more so asking for your take, do you think that's a big enough TAM? Have you ever calculated how many people you think there are in America that fit that? I've gone on LinkedIn and just searched job titles, and then I'll combine them, and there are millions, like tens of— Yeah, probably in the range of five to ten in marketing? Yes. No, no, no, in brand social. So I looked up content creator, I looked up social media marketing, social media manager, and there's definitely overlap.

25:10

So I did, it was six to ten different titles, and then I kind of combined them using LinkedIn. Yeah. That was kind of my thought process. I kind of would look at it like this: it depends on what your expectation is, because sometimes there's this funny push and pull of what's best for our brands and our podcasts, and the exact people we want to be watching, or the companies we might have, or whatnot, and then there's the more vainglory goal of, well, I want loads of people to see it, right? That sometimes can contradict each other. So, I very much define myself as someone who just tries to maximize views for what the person wants. So, with Red Bull, we do 10 million views

25:56

on videos, right? But they're selling energy drinks to everyone, so that's important there. We worked with a hair care channel for a while that was selling just hair products, right? And it's like, 50 to 100,000 the right viewers there is way more valuable than them getting millions. So I think it's maybe a question for you of: there's probably a world where TAM is important to expand, but are we even capitalizing fully with our execution? I think about it like this big chart of: here's the TAM of everyone on YouTube, right? Here's our niche's TAM inside the circle, and then here's our execution. And the question I would have back is, maybe for execution right now,

26:40

what's the gap between, do we think we're already hitting 100% of the small TAM? But it's probably not. It's probably absolutely, you know, if that. Yeah. Do you then think about the frameworks that you have where, if you're creating content, there's the idea of making your core content, your casual content, and your new content? Would you then say, hey, your new content would be cast a much wider net, right? Like, bigger TAM, and then narrow it in later with, they become a fan of you, now you go a little bit narrower with the content? So it's a great example of the concept we were talking about earlier of the quota, right? Maybe there's a quota for, most— the 80% rule.

27:42

Here's the part of the 80% rule that I don't always explain very well, which is: it's the 80% rule for overlap, and then there's also that 80% your topic should have 80% overlap with each other, and you should do that 80% of the time. So you have this 20% where you can go a little rogue and try something unique and different. So again, I think often a channel should have a theme and an identity that's pretty consistent. That's a big problem when I see channels jumping around too much. But at the same time, there's always space to try something broader and bigger. You can almost look at those as top of funnel in a way. I like this idea of a home run, single, base hit

28:28

strategy. You have these single base hits, which are maybe your solid videos that you know are going to hit the right audience, and they're pretty simple. And then maybe once a quarter, once a month, once every two months, it doesn't really matter, you're swinging for a home run. And by swinging for a home run, you might miss and hit air, or you might hit a 500k episode. 100%. So we were talking earlier about a lot of these strategies and how brands are not necessarily leveraging YouTube the right way these days. A lot of them are using them maybe as a billboard or just a source of information. What are some of the questions that you would tell a brand to ask themselves

29:07

as they're building out their YouTube strategy? And do you have a framework for that as well? I would really think about it like: are we viewing YouTube as just a content dumping ground, like a Vimeo, or are we viewing it as something that's actually going to strengthen our brand, make it more premium? And is there a reason that they shouldn't view it as a dumping ground? Well, the reason they shouldn't view it as a dumping ground, in my opinion, this gets more philosophical, of where I think marketing is going, and I'm curious if you guys align with this, but it's like, performance marketing obviously still works, and it's very trackable, and it's easy to present that

29:41

to your CEO or whatever, that we're tracking and blah blah blah. But when I look at the brands that are crushing right now, and even new brands coming up, it's like, yeah, performance marketing is still a thing, traditional marketing, billboards, still a thing. But so many of them have this story, this content surrounding it, whether it's the actual founder-led story of what the founder is doing and the story behind it, or it's unique content around the brand that what makes the brand special, right? I always use the example of Red Bull, which is one of our, I guess our biggest brand client right now, and they don't view— they almost don't view their YouTube channel

30:14

or their content as this advertising or this thing that needs to be

30:19

of where I think marketing is going, and I'm curious if you guys align with this, but it's performance marketing obviously still works, and it's very trackable, and it's easy to present that to your CEO or whatever, that we're tracking and blah blah blah. But when I look at the brands that are crushing right now, and even new brands coming up, it's like, yeah, performance marketing is still a thing. Traditional marketing, billboards, still a thing. But so many of them have this story, this content surrounding it, whether it's the actual founder-led story of what the founder is doing and the story behind it, or it's unique content around the brand, what makes the brand special, right? I always use the example of Red Bull, which is one of our, I guess, our biggest brand client right now, and they almost don't view their YouTube channel or their content as this advertising or this thing that needs to be completely tracked for ROI. It's like, no, this is what builds brands.

30:20

Yeah, it's an ideological thing rather than a performance marketing initiative. They just know it will be good. Exactly. And I actually think the reason why brands shouldn't treat it like a dumping ground or like an email is because I think you either do it or you just don't do it at all. Yeah.

30:21

Just don't have a YouTube channel. I talked to a tech company, which I won't name, that has a valuation in the tens of billions, and on their YouTube channel they had these awful corporate training videos. And I was like, why are they here? And they're like, well, we like to use it to share it to our team. And they're like, and it would also be nice if some people discover these and think, wow, that's such a cool company. No one is going to watch that and say that's a cool company. If anything, a lot of people are going to see that and go, wow, they're lame. That's a dumb company.

30:22

It's something I've been really thinking about with regards to, there are so many clients that we've had that were in undifferentiated spaces, whether it's electrolytes, greens, you name it, supplements in particular. And it's like, how do you think a supplement brand should be going about creating YouTube content with a growth initiative? Is it just only through social shows that are pure entertainment value? Is it capturing some sort of search demand against the problems that they solve? What would you do there?

30:23

I think there are two directions. One direction is very education-y, conversion-y focused, which would be actual informative videos about supplements and about the best supplements to take for de-bloating, the best supplements to take for building faster muscle, whatever it is, and just hammering on SEO. I want to appear at the top of search results for these key terms. And that model, it's never the model that excites me the most because it's a slow grind of, we're going to make all these videos, they're going to do poorly at the start, but some of them will rank and will drive website traffic and blah blah blah. I think if you're a bigger brand, though, and you're thinking about it more from a premium point of view, it's like every brand is the people that make it, right? And I like the model that Red Bull and some of these other brands have. We work with Philadelphia Eagles, and it's very similar. It's like, well, the Philadelphia Eagles is a brand, but the brand is built up with the players.

30:24

Yeah, yeah. Red Bull is built up of Max Verstappen, Neymar, all the different athletes they have. And it's like, if I was a supplement brand, I would think about if I have an ambassador program, those people might have unique stories. And it's not about those people being famous. That's not what matters to me. It's like, is there something unique about these people? Do they have a specific morning routine that we can show and build a series around everyone's different morning routine? And then layer on those same principles that we talked about earlier, contradiction and the ability to find something in an adjacent niche and potentially layer it onto that.

30:26

Exactly. One thing that I'm curious about, because for brands, especially if a brand is getting into YouTube, the ideation part gets very cloudy because you have to think you maybe nailed the idea, or you have to think about a hundred ideas, etc. You have a clear ideation process. Can you run me through it? And then I'm very interested in what your elimination criteria is.

30:27

Totally. So yeah, I have an ideation process, which I just call the YouTube idea flow, right? And it's basically like a funnel. So at the top, you remember earlier how I talked about the different sources for ideas? You've basically got internal, what's working already for us. Now, that's kind of hard if you haven't got a channel yet, but even I might look at what's worked on other platforms. What do our audience talk about the most? These are things that we see as core things that work. You've got internal, and in a given week or month, I want someone to be brainstorming 30, 40, 50 internal ideas. People always say that's a lot. It's like, if we sat down, the three of us right now could think of 50 internal ideas for your podcast or something.

30:27

Yeah. Sure. It's just a question of sitting down. It sounds like a big number, but it's like a similar thing to recently. I was like, I write 20 titles per video. And it's almost like, 20 titles? It's insane. It's like, I did it in five minutes. Especially in today's day and age. I don't know your stance on this, but just have Claude or one of the AI tools even help you get to that number, and then you can refine it from there, obviously. But it's like, there's no shortage of ideas.

30:30

Yeah. So, internal. You've got external, and with this one the brands are always a little careful because they're like, oh, we would never copy or do something like that. But it's not a copy. It's about seeing what's trending externally. With the Philadelphia Eagles, we did a video recently which was testing 100-year-old NFL equipment, right? A trend all across YouTube was testing 100-year-old food, testing 100-year-old gadgets, testing 100-year-old cars. There was this theme or trend across YouTube, and how does that trend fit into a brand? It's not the brand. It's not the players testing 100-year-old food. I mean, it could work, but it's just a theme that you're replicating across a different idea and then formatting it.

30:31

Exactly. So, NFL players testing 100-year-old equipment. And it's like Jordan Maeda, one of the star players, with a really old football helmet, and he's putting it on, and it's physical, he's touching it, he's like, what is this thing? And then he's comparing it to a modern-day one. That's an external idea. So, and that's the one where there's the contrast in the thumbnail, right, where it's gray and then green, and then it has them with new equipment.

30:33

Yeah. Again, you even take that concept and apply it to the brands that we were referencing, supplement brands that may be in the de-bloating space or supplement brands that are in the hydration space or whatever sort of medical thing. Back in the day, there were some insane recipes and concoctions that doctors would prescribe to people in the early 1900s. It's like, testing the original de-bloat recipe versus our products, which one makes you feel better? Right? There's that, the stakes, the contrast, that allows you to actually be curious to watch that video.

30:34

It's funny how as soon as your idea goes, I start now thinking about ideas because I'm like, oh, you could get an old Gatorade, like the first Gatorade from whatever, the 70s, 80s, and then compare it to Element now. Yeah, right. And you can do the comparisons. Yeah. Which one sells to you. Yeah, 100%.

30:38

Totally. And then, to me, you get into your innovative new ideas, and that's the final part of the top of the funnel, which is like, hey, can we just have a blue ocean? What are some cool things that we can do? The thing that really helps me with that is just thinking, what's a brand's competitive advantage? It can kind of sound simple, but what's the Eagles' competitive advantage? Well, they have access to football players. Yeah.

30:40

What's Red Bull's competitive advantage? I mean, that one's a long list. It's like Mount Everest, we have a guy that can go down Mount Everest, we have 900 athletes, planes, cars, F1 cars, jets, fighter pilot jets, all this stuff. And it's like, well, those are our competitive advantages. People listening might be like, I don't have a jet, I don't have that yet. And it's like, well, there is something that you have. There's always something. Yeah. You just got to kind of look at your resources and then pull those in as a component, like the different things that we're talking about. Exactly.

30:44

So I'm trying to brainstorm maybe 30, 40, even 50 ideas in each one of those categories. I'm putting them in the top of my funnel. People always ask how often do you do this. With some clients, we do it weekly, but I would say on average it's once a month. We do this big brainstorm to just get to this base. what's Red Bull's competitive advantage? Well, that one's a long list. It's Mount Everest. We have a guy that can go down Mount Everest. We have 900 athletes, planes, cars, F1 cars, jets, fighter pilot jets, all this stuff, and those are our competitive advantages.

30:48

People listening might be like, I don't have a jet. I don't have that yet. Well, what can you say? There is something that you have. There's always something. Yeah. You just got to look at your resources and then pull those into, as a component, the different things that we're talking about. Exactly. So I'm trying to brainstorm maybe 30, 40, even 50 ideas in each one of those categories. I'm putting them in the top of my funnel. People always ask, how often do you do this? With some clients, we do it weekly, but I would say on average it's once a month. We do this big brainstorm to just get to this base. You put it into your funnel, pass it through the funnel.

30:51

The problem is, I'll sometimes figure out a lot about a creator or a brand's approach to YouTube by saying, how many of your ideas get made? And if someone's like, oh, most of them, it's like, well, you're probably not. You're either not brainstorming enough or you're not being harsh enough. Or a creator might go, 50%, and I'm like, I don't like setting an exact target, but I would say on average, for each idea that gets made for our clients, 99% don't make it.

30:53

And I love this idea. I think Steve Jobs had this at Apple in the 80s and 90s, the 100-10-1. Come up with 100 ideas, whittle it down to your 10 best, and then the one best out of those 10 is the thing that actually gets shipped. And I think it's very similar with YouTube.

30:53

So we get to the criteria, which is what you were asking about. Basically, we have these, let's say, 100, 150 ideas. What is a four- or five-step criteria, a tick-the-box, that these ideas need to have in order to pass to the next level? That criteria to me will usually look like things like, can we easily package this? Sounds so simple, but if that's not a tick-the-box, if people are like, I've got this great idea, I'm making it, but I just don't know how to package it, then you don't have a great idea. You've got a great idea in general, but it's not a great YouTube video, because packaging is half the game.

30:54

There are many ideas that have sat on the shelf for me for a long time, for years, that I still haven't figured out how to package, and I just haven't made them with clients. It's great, the content will be great, the video will be great, but I just don't know how to put this into a title. So that could be something.

30:55

Another thing I like to set is an aspirational view target. Can this potentially hit X amount of views? For my personal channel, when I did it, it was always, can this hit a million views? And it sounds like such a basic thing again, but even just thinking like that makes you start to analyze an idea through this stricter criteria. Because I made a video before on a certain creator, and thinking about it like that creator on his own channel was doing 200,000 views, so if I pass it through that criteria, it's unlikely for me making an analysis video on this creator to get a million views, and I shouldn't have done it.

30:55

So that's very true in our... we both do a lot of short form content breaking down brands and particularly outcomes. It's like, did they achieve such an insane outcome that this is even going to be interesting to enough people for this to get amplified? If someone sold 100k worth of product in 45 minutes, okay, now you're talking about they did a million in a day. That's pretty interesting, right? But if it's like they did 100k in a month and they just make pretty images, it's going to be really hard to find that unique thing that is actually novel and people are going to pay attention to.

30:56

Do you ever see a correlation between short form and long form? The reason for that is I just put out a YouTube video two days ago, or a day ago, that's like how to launch your brand social show in 2026. The reason I made it was because on Instagram it got 2 million views, and so I was like, okay, let me see if I can package it, bring that same idea more scaled, and bring it over to YouTube. It's performing well now, but then you say, can it get a million views? Maybe a million views isn't for me, right? Maybe it's, can it get half a million views? Do you hear that idea and you're like, I wouldn't have checked the box on that?

30:57

Well, yeah, and there's a really good question there of how well does short form convert to long form? Yeah.

30:59

I will say, in a world, let's say you've got no data, no evidence at all on something, and then you've got evidence in the sense that something's worked for a competitor, and then you've got evidence in the sense that something's worked for you. It's this kind of pyramid where if something's worked for you before, to me that gives me pretty high confidence it's going to work again. So maybe my confidence rate is like 75, 80% this is going to bang. If something's worked for a competitor and done really well, I'm going to lower that a little bit because every audience is a little bit different, but it's still going to be pretty high. And then if something has no data, we've never tried it, we've never done it before, my confidence is going to be pretty low.

30:59

Yeah. Short form sits just above that to me. Interesting.

31:01

There's a little bit of carry-through, but it's quite often a different audience. Different platforms have different audiences. Some things work really great in shorts. We had this series with that basketball creator, the largest basketball creator in the world, that we did a few years ago on short form, which was pumping up a ball until it explodes. It's such a silly thing, but it's attaching a ball to an air pump and then letting it pump up until it explodes. It's like, how long will it take, right? And then we leveraged that even further. We go, well, let's have three in a row and they're racing. It's a football versus a soccer ball versus a basketball. Which explodes first? Then before you know it, I was like, what are we doing here? We got two yoga balls, we got an air mattress, we got a football, and we're blowing them up. And they were banging. We got hundreds of millions of views. We got like 100 million views on one short doing that. And then we were like, we should make a long form of this. Bombed.

31:01

Really? Bombed. Really? We did a great title, film, I thought we tried our best, but it just bombed. I would have thought there was a clear correlation between, hey, the interest is there, so I'm going to scale the information based on the interest from this platform.

31:05

Well, it makes sense because there's definitely... what's been crazy to me is there's not even a correlation between YouTube Shorts and a winning Instagram Reel. I'll post an Instagram Reel from our podcast that went pretty viral, and it won't even do that well on YouTube Shorts. Just different audience, different behaviors. People are on there for different reasons and different mechanisms as well. Algorithmically, they're all optimized for a very similar thing, right? But remember earlier we talked about this multiplier effect of how a little change can have such a difference in outcome. I think the same is true of how different platforms measure performance.

31:06

So I can just say candidly, from what I know, the Instagram algorithm, watch time is important. How long someone's watching for is really important. Whether they swipe or stay is important. Obviously all those things are important. Shares are really big on that, shares to your friends, sending it to people, saving it, sending it. That's really important. Yeah.

31:09

I don't share YouTube Shorts to friends because you don't have friends on YouTube. That doesn't exist. So YouTube prioritizes slightly different things than Instagram. They might prioritize... I know that YouTube shorts, completion rate, average view duration, they look at likes a little bit, they look at satisfaction, how satisfying do we think this was for viewers, they look at VVSA, which is viewed versus swiped away, but they're not looking at shares as much. YouTube Shorts might even be... I mean, there's some crazy brain rot on YouTube Shorts. Oh yeah. Even more so. Insane.

31:12

Yeah. I feel like Mini Katana has one that has, I think, a billion views, and it's the craziest thing you'd ever... running a balloon or now. We made a short with a client that did a million subscribers. Wow. On one short. Oh my god. Okay, so that was actually going to be my next question, was how do you incorporate shorts into your overall client strategy?

31:15

So I like to think about it like this. Again, if people think of their channel as this whole thing, holistic, this is my channel, I look at a channel and I look at it as we have a short form audience and we have a long form audience, right? So those are million subscribers we got from one short, which again, mind-blowing. they look at VVSA, which is viewed versus swiped away, but they're not looking at shares as much. YouTube Shorts might even be— there's some crazy brain rot on YouTube Shorts. Oh yeah. Even more so. Insane. Yeah, I feel Mini Katana has one that has, I think, a billion views, and it's like there's the craziest thing you'd ever— you'd ever—

31:36

running a balloon or now. We made a short with a client that did a million subscribers. Wow. On one short. Oh my god. Okay, so that was actually going to be my next question: how do you incorporate Shorts into your overall client strategy? So I like to think about it like this: people, again, if they think of their channel as this whole thing, holistic— this is my channel. I look at a channel and I look at it as we have a short form audience and we have a long form audience, right? So those million subscribers we got from one short, which again, mind-blowing, that's great for our short form audience, but we don't have an expectation that that's converting to our

32:05

long form, because what matters more than subscribers— subscribers don't really matter that much anymore. What matters more than subscribers is viewing history, how someone watched you in the past. That's what really matters. So if you think about it, if someone comes to a short, their viewing history for shorts is there, but they have zero viewing history for long form. So YouTube basically has no idea if they're going to enjoy long form. Now, we always make these leaps, which is if someone likes a short, surely they'll like my long form. But sometimes it can draw from a completely different audience. We notice quite often with our clients that our shorts will end up

32:46

reaching different people, and maybe a younger demographic, maybe different, in terms of geography, maybe a lot of Indian short viewers, for example. It can change a little bit like that. And the way I think about it is I think about it as two separate things. It's like we have a short form audience, we have a long form audience, that we're going to try crushing on both, because some people advocate for separating the two, doing a Shorts channel and then just a regular long form channel. Yeah. You're not a fan. Not a fan. Seems dumb. I'm a fan. I'm a fan of separating channels when long form is— let's just say someone has a channel that's a personal brand channel. Let's

33:27

just say my channel, where I broke down YouTube channels. I wouldn't then mix in a podcast on that channel, personally. You would? I wouldn't. You wouldn't put a podcast on that? No, because there are long form videos that are competing with each other and that have different audiences. I'm making eight-, nine-minute breakdowns, and then I'm making a two-hour interview with an editor or a YouTuber. To me, that feels like a different channel, and a lot of channels— that's a question I get a lot, which is, should my podcast be on a separate channel? You can get away with having them on the same channel, but quite often I'll separate them out. But with Shorts,

34:09

again, think about why you would do that. Why you would do that is, in my opinion, false information, which is that Shorts are going to impact your long form, but they're not going to impact the negative or positive that much at all. It's more so for the vanity metric of getting the subs from it. Yeah. We talked a lot about getting the thumbnail clicked. Now I want to go through into your retention strategy. Walk me through that. Is it very fast intros? I've heard you talk about the best thing is going to be now to slow things down. How are you thinking about retention going into 2026? So the first place to start would be the intro. Yeah. And I kind of have three

35:03

steps I like to think about for a great YouTube intro. Very simple. Number one: deliver on the click. Okay. So to me, that looks like if you are selling me something in the title, thumbnail, I just want confirmation that that is going to be in the video. Now, it doesn't mean I have to get it all delivered right now, but if you tell me, let's just say really simply, I bought a new car, right? And then you start the video with, hey guys, I'm heading to Target right now, what's going on, having a good day, it's like you told me you're buying a new car. Where's the car, or what's happening? Whereas if you start that video, you show the car, or you say I'm going to go pick

35:44

up the car, immediately I feel like now I have confirmation that I clicked on the right thing. So I always think about delivering on the click in the first five to ten seconds. You can do that visually or verbally. Like visually, showing what was in the title. For one, performing better than the other? Visually. Okay, yeah. So if the thumbnail for this, or it's relevant to breaking, if the thumbnail image is you showing Brian the iPad like this, and then the first second in, we cut an intro, is you kind of showing it to the camera, that is kind of how you would say, yeah, from the click. Okay, yeah. Or if the thumbnail is based around a certain talking point, for me,

36:21

let's just say that talking point is I can make any news go viral, or subscribers are dead in 2026, or whatever it might be, in the sizzler intro that you might do, I would just make sure that talking point is mentioned already early so that I'm like, oh, I know this isn't just going to bait me completely. It's like Diary of CEO does a great job with that. He'll have this crazy title, thumbnail, and then you're like, I was watching Diary of CEO last night and my cortisol just flew— it's just building and building and building. Stressful as hell. Yeah, yeah. Which is effective. Yeah. 12 million subs. So, okay, you kind of said, let's go back to your intro. Yeah, Mark.

37:09

Yeah, so deliver on the promise, number one. Number two: create intrigue in the viewer. Now, that can be as simple as delivering on that promise and then teasing what's going to come. It could be, speaking of Diary of CEO, stopping on these pauses about what's he going to say, what's his answer, like what happened to you when you were a child? It's like— pause. It's like, oh, what is it? I always just look at an intro like, where's the intrigue here? Yeah. Sometimes, especially in education niches, people get too pragmatic, and it's like, we're going to analyze the five most important steps to growing a YouTube channel in 2025. It's every intro I've ever done. Yeah.

37:47

It's like, why don't you say exactly what you're going to get on today's episode of Sword Equity? Why don't you say something like, in this video we learned something that is going to completely change how we think about YouTube going forward, and leading YouTube strategist Paddy always shared something that, honestly, I didn't anticipate. I didn't think this would be a real thing, blah blah, and it's like suddenly the viewer's like, what's going on here? I would always do intros for my channel. I would say things like, in this video we're going to break down how Mr. B screw his YouTube channel, right? That's a statement sentence, which is great. Now, that's not an

38:13

intrigue sentence. Because he discovered something in October of 2017 that changed everything, and it's like, what the hell is it? Use this hook. Yeah, like what is it? So the intrigue sentence is almost a thing that gets you to lean in a bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When do you introduce that? Technically, do you do that after the initial statement? Yeah, I usually will lead with a statement. There's a few ways to do intros that I find effective. I like just statement, intrigue. You're stating what you're going to cover, and then you're teasing with some sort of intrigue sentence. And not intrigue sentences—when I give people these drills, they get lazy,

38:42

right? They're like, in this video we're going to break down YouTube tips, and keep an eye out for step number five, it's going to be so cool. It's like, that's just annoying. Specificity, I hate that. Always. Yeah, it's always specificity at the end of the day. Yeah, I mean that's kind of the last line of defense against AI and bad copywriting and script writing. It's like exactly the October 2017. That's something that AI can't deliver, or a shitty ghostwriter can't deliver. It's going to be someone who actually understands the value of planting it as the source of the intrigue. Exactly. So after that, step two is creating some form of intrigue in the viewer.

39:11

What's going to happen? Why should I keep watching this? What's the kind of payoff? These are the things I'm trying to create of why would someone keep watching this video? And then my third step is a really interesting one, I think, and this is my style. People have different styles, but I just call it the seamless flow. So I feel like the best intros on YouTube, it's hard to point where it ended and started. It just flows in. Yeah. There'll be some people that contradict this. I think Diary of a CEO doesn't have the most seamless flow, but it works. There's people that do different things, but I just love this idea of like instead ghostwriter can't deliver.

39:38

It's gonna be someone who actually understands the value of planting it. Yes, as the source of the intrigue. Exactly. After that, I'm creating step two, which is creating some form of intrigue in the viewer. What's gonna happen? Why should I keep watching this? What's the payoff? These are the things I'm trying to create of why someone would keep watching this video. Then my third step is a really interesting one, I think, and this is my style. People have different styles, but I just call it the seamless flow. I feel like the best intros on YouTube, it's hard to point where it ended and started. It just flows in.

39:40

Yeah, there'll be some people that contradict this. I think the Diary of a CEO doesn't have the most seamless flow, but it works. There's people that do different things, but I just love this idea of, instead of being like, "Here's the intro. We're gonna go through these steps. What did Patty discover in 2025? This changing YouTube blah blah blah," and then a big pause, and it's like, "In today's episode..." That just feels very disjointed to me, versus like, "The Patty steps, these are gonna be all these things for YouTube in 2026, and the first thing we're gonna start with is this," and it just starts.

39:41

Or "starting with" is a great bridging sentence. It's like, "We're gonna break down 40 tips for losing fat in 2026, starting with..." I like a bridge, a seamless bridge into the context. I advise doing the same thing on short form, and I almost talk about scripting should feel like one long run-on sentence. So a lot of times, when I hit the hook, I could be like, "This is this brand's content playbook, so the first thing..." where there's no break really between the hook. It's the hook right into the value for the short form.

39:42

I started testing that. I did three tests. On my third test, I changed and made everything bridge, and it was my first million-view video on short form. I don't think I've done it well on YouTube, and I'm three videos in. For your videos, I don't think we do it well on our intros for the podcast either. They're not seamless bridges. It's like, "We're gonna cover these five things, one, two, three, four, five. Okay, let's get into the episode," versus going back, probably looking at how we, one of the parts of the episode, and just having it seamlessly go into that, maybe that question, right? "And this was the most important question I got," and it just goes into it, something along those lines, to create those bridges.

39:42

Imagine if you had done something like, "We're gonna go through these really important tactics," and instead of going like "starting with" or "the first most important one," you said something like, "All right, now let's get into it." People do that still these days. I'm like, no, I deadass hate that. It's just fluff we do. "Let's get into it." You know what that is to me? That's like a boring signpost sentence. Yeah. Versus a smooth bridge. For sure. "Let's get started." No, just tell me. All righty. Yeah. How do you think about leveraging foreshadowing in your videos?

39:46

To me, foreshadowing can be subtle or very overt. I think YouTube lends itself to being quite overt and very obvious foreshadowing, to the point of, let's just say Mr. Beast is making a video. At the end of the video, there's a hundred million dollar golden yacht. Instead of going like, "We've got something special coming," he'd be like, "There's a hundred million dollar golden yacht at the end of this video. Keep watching, keep watching." Obviously that's for kids, but I think foreshadowing, when you watch The Godfather, is Michael Corleone holding a cigarette and his hands aren't shaking after a traumatic event, and you're like, well, he's losing his sense of innocence, whereas with YouTube it's like, no, you're just telling me why I should keep watching.

39:47

An interesting framework I think about for this is, I call it the invisible or the made-up focus group, where if we pause a video, let's say at the one-minute mark, two-minute mark, four-minute mark, wherever, let's say we pause at the three-minute mark just for argument's sake, I love to ask myself this question: if we put our audience into a focus group at this point, what would they say is coming up in the video? What you want is someone to be like, "Oh yeah, so he's giving me all these tactics. A little bit later you can find out about this, and then there's also this thing he mentioned that I just can't get out of my head. I can't wait to hear what he says," versus someone being like, "I don't know already. It's just flowing, and I don't know where this is going." So I like foreshadowing that creates this exact expectation of what I'm going to get in the rest of the video.

39:48

Yeah, love it. The last part that I'm curious about is, how do you think about a podcast episode in comparison to maybe Mount Everest, where you need a layer in progression so that it always feels like it's moving towards an outcome? Because that could be harder if it's just Brian and I talking, versus climbing Mount Everest, where we're seeing if the outcome is to see if they reach the top. How do you think about the differences, but also the similarities, that could be applied across different categories and formats?

39:48

Yeah, I think it's less of a big payoff for progression, that it gets like, because if I said to you, "Let's make a podcast that gets more and more insane every minute or more and more insightful every minute," it just doesn't fit with the format as much. But what I do think about is, I think about the payoff can be completion. So what I mean by that is, "my complete strategy" or "the complete guide to YouTube" or "the complete guide to losing weight," and it's like the payoff is when you finish it, you're going to have this full playbook of everything you need to know.

39:49

Another thing I think about is just morsels of, maybe there's not this sense of progression, but maybe there's a few questions that we're alluding to. I like this idea of "soon X, first Y," which is this idea that I'm sure it's not unique to me, but I termed it that: soon X, first Y, which is this idea that you say, "A little bit later I'm going to ask you about this, but first this," and the key is that your X and your Y both need to be interesting.

39:50

I watch this soccer news channel because I'm a big soccer fan, and he'll say things like, he'll start his video and he'll be like, "Oh, we got some really big news tonight. This is happening, this is happening," and he goes, "I really want to talk about this tweet that this player put out that everyone's going crazy about, but first we need to talk about..." They'll say things like that, and when it's done subtly and not too performatively, it just hooks you and goes like, when is that thing going to happen? So I think that's what a podcast needs. It needs this kind of sense of, I'm getting great value now, but there's this thing that's going to come at some point later in the video that I'm waiting for, like this answer, this thing, this specific tip, what happened in November, October 2017, that kind of thing.

39:51

Yeah, yeah. Should we structure that in, or anybody podcasting, should you almost manufacture those elements into the video?

39:53

I think manufacturing ahead of time is the ultimate thing, even after time. It's like using VO or using your intro to create those moments. I like to think about every video, and even a podcast, as this skeleton ahead of time of, here's roughly what we're going to cover, which I'm sure you guys do. It's like, roughly these are the things we're going to cover, and then I look at that skeleton, I put it in front of me as a one-pager, and I'm like, where am I inserting little retention devices? So I could say in the first two minutes, I'm going to insert some foreshadowing of a question we're going to ask later. Maybe at the five- or six-minute mark, I'm going to throw this curveball in of, "There's something we didn't talk about earlier that I really want to get your opinion on," or these little things that I might script in between sections. So I will think about that.

39:53

Yeah. One piece of that too is probably the chapters, right? I know when I opt into a two-and-a-half-hour podcast, there's just no chance that I'm going to watch the whole thing, so I usually will skim the chapter names. Yeah. Right? Is that something that you would say is mandatory for most podcasts? I would say for podcasts, I like it, and I like chapters for education, tutorial, listicles, podcasts. I don't like them for anything that's narrative or story-based. Yeah. Because I just feel like it incentivizes people to skip to the big payoff. Does YouTube care if people skip ahead? Well, here's in terms of the five or six minute mark I'm going to

40:01

throw this curveball in. There's something we didn't talk about earlier that I really want to get your opinion on, or these little things that I might script in between sections, so I will think about that. Yeah. One piece of that too is probably the chapters, right? I know when I opt into a two and a half hour podcast, there's just no chance that I'm going to watch the whole thing, so I usually will skim the chapter names. Yeah, right. Is that something that you would say is mandatory for most podcasts? I would say for podcasts, I like it, and I like chapters for education, tutorials, listicles, podcasts. I don't like them for anything that's narrative or

40:24

story-based, yeah, because I just feel like it just incentivizes people to skip to the big payoff. Does YouTube care if people skip ahead? Well, in terms of the hierarchy of what YouTube is prioritizing for, I think their number one thing really is viewer satisfaction. Interesting, because viewer satisfaction, too, people might think of things individually. They think about, well, you should clearly care about people watching my video for the longest period of time, and that's really important, but satisfaction means that someone's had a good experience on YouTube and is probably going to go watch something else versus close it and open up Netflix. Yeah,

40:44

right, so I think about it like this: does YouTube care about chapters? If chapters help with viewer satisfaction, that makes people more satisfied, because if you click on the podcast, it's very tactical and multiple parts, but there's no chapters, you're probably like, this is annoying. Yeah, what am I even going to do here? I'm not going to watch this, versus you click on it and it's like there's chapters, it's really clearly laid out, you can watch what you want. You're going to end that podcast, even if you don't watch much of it, even if you watch 20% of it, 10% of it, you're going to leave it thinking that was a useful, insightful. You might like

41:01

the video, you might share the video, you might go watch another video right after that, which is the step that YouTube really cares about, getting people. That's really interesting, yeah, so it's a combination of all the different behaviors that they want put into this one metric that they're using. Yeah, their hierarchy to me would be YouTube cares about satisfaction, then you should care about average iteration, and people clicking. Those two things go in tangent, like someone clicking and someone watching for a long time, but so often people will put watching for a long time ahead of satisfaction, and in doing so they'll make a video that is stringing someone along,

41:21

not delivering anything, and so many of those, yeah, the equivalent of the SEO recipe industry. It's like, how to make banana bread. Banana bread is great. Banana bread is the best thing. Banana bread originated in 1885, and you're just like, shut the fuck up, I'm sitting in front of my oven, I need to be at an after. Yeah, well, Patty, man, I appreciate you coming on. This was a blast. I have a lot of notes. I have a lot of things that I'm going to, we're both going to be taking from this and infusing into our content, into the pod, into our own YouTube channels, and appreciate you coming on, because this was incredible, all the knowledge and

41:38

information that you shared for us. Yeah, tell them where to find you. I mean, different things that you're doing. Yeah, yeah, well, thank you so much for having me. This was a pleasure, and thanks for pulling out all the stops. I know this is all for me, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly, but great set and really nice interview, guys. It was a pleasure. In terms of people finding what I do, I mean, I'm very active on Twitter, pattyg96. We're pushing 150k followers there, so there you go. About with the journey. Nice. LinkedIn as well. I post quite a lot of stuff, and I don't really do much YouTube content personally these days, but I might be making a little comeback

41:51

at some point this year. And if they're interested in taking action on some of these things you're talking about, you also have the cohort-based stuff. Yeah, we run an accelerator cohort three times a year. It's about a hundred students each, typically creators and brands that are trying to figure out YouTube, and eight weeks of me sharing my entire playbook of how YouTube works. And if this was the free version, just imagine what would be going on in this accelerator, the hour 30-minute conversation versus the eight- week program. Yeah, you're gonna get locked in. There you go. Yeah, I am. Well, we appreciate you. Thanks again for coming on, brother. Thank you. Yeah,

42:11

thanks, Patty. yeah you know like it's yeah what's Red Bull's competitive advantage well I mean that one's a long list it's like Mount Everest we have a guy that can go down Mount Everest we have 900 athletes planes cars F1 cars jets fighter pilot jets all this stuff and it's like well those are our competitive advantage you know people listening might be like I don't have a jet you know I don't have that yet and it's like well what can you say there is something that you have there's always something yeah you know like you just got to kind of look at your resources and then pull those into as a component like the different things that we're talking about exactly so

42:50

I'm trying to brainstorm maybe 30 40 even 50 ideas in each one of those categories I'm putting them in the top of my funnel people always ask how often do you do this with some clients we do it weekly but I would say on average it's like once a month we do this big brainstorm to just get to this base you put it into your funnel pass it through the funnel the problem is is like I'll sometimes configure out a lot about a creator or a brand's like approach to YouTube by saying how many of your ideas get made and if someone's like oh like you know most of them it's like well you're probably not you're either not brainstorming enough or you're not being harsh enough

43:20

or a creator might go 50% and I'm like I don't like setting an exact target but I would say on average for each idea that gets made for our clients 99% don't make it and I love this idea I think Steve Jobs had this at Apple in the 80s and 90s the 110 one come up with 100 ideas whittle it down to your 10 best and then the one best out of those 10 is the thing that actually gets shipped and I think it's very similar with YouTube so we get to the criteria which is you were you were asking about and it's basically like we have these let's say 100 150 ideas what is a four or five step criteria a tick the box that these ideas need to have in order to pass to the next level

44:03

that criteria to me will usually look like things like can we easily package this sounds so simple but if that's not a tick the box like if people are like I've got this great idea I'm making it but I just don't know how to package it and it's like you don't have a great idea then you've got a great idea in general but it's not a great YouTube video because packaging is half the game there's many ideas that have sat on the shelf for me for for a long time for years that I still haven't figured out how to package and I just haven't made them with clients it's like I just it's great but the content will be great the video will be great but I just don't know how to put this

44:31

into a title amount so that could be something you know the another thing I like to set is like an aspirational view target can this potentially hit X amount of views you know so for my personal channel when I did it it was always can this hit a million views and it sounds like such a basic thing again but it starts to be even just like thinking like that makes you start to like analyze an idea through this like stricter criteria because I made a video before on a certain creator and thinking about it like that creator on his own channel was doing like 200,000 views so like if I pass it through that criteria it's like unlikely for me making an analysis video

45:05

on this creator to get a million views and I shouldn't have done it so that's very true in like our I mean we both do a lot of short form content breaking down brands and particularly outcomes you know it's like did they achieve such an insane outcome that this is even going to be interesting to enough people for this to get amplified you know like if someone sold 100k worth of product in 45 minutes okay well now you're talking about they did a million in a day you know that's pretty interesting right but if it's like they did 100k in a month and they just make pretty images it's going to be really hard to find that unique thing that is actually novel and people are going

45:42

to pay attention to you know do you ever see a correlation between short form and long form and the reason for that is I just put out a YouTube video two days ago or a day ago that's like how to how to launch your brand social show in 2026 the reason I made it was because on Instagram it got 2 million views and so I was like okay let me see if I can package it bring that same idea more you know scaled and bring it over to YouTube it's performing well now but then you say you know can it get a million views and maybe a million views isn't for me right because it's like maybe it's can it get half a million views do you hear that idea and you're like that's I would have

46:16

I wouldn't have checked the box on that well yeah and there's a really good question there of like how well does it like short form convert to long form yeah I will say in a world let's say you've got no data no evidence at all on something and then you've got evidence in the sense that something's worked for a competitor and then you've got evidence in the sense that something's worked for you so it's like this kind of like pyramid where like if something's worked for you before like to me that gives me pretty high confidence it's going to work again yeah so maybe my confidence rate is like 75-80% this is going to bang you know if something's worked for a competitor

46:49

and done really well like I'm going to lower that a little bit because every audience is a little bit different but it's still going to be like pretty high and then if something with no data we've never tried we've never done it before like my confidence is going to be pretty low yeah short form is like it sits just above that to me interesting there's a little bit of carry through but it's quite often a different audience different platforms have different audience some things work really great in shorts we had this series with that basketball creators the largest basketball creator in the world that we did a few years ago on short form which was like pumping up a ball

47:19

until it explodes it's like such a silly thing but it's like attaching like a ball to an air pump and then letting it pump up until it explodes it's like how long will it take right and then you know we leveraged that even further we go like well let's have three in a row and they're racing it's like a football versus a soccer ball versus a basketball which explodes first then it's like before you know it I was like what are we doing here it's like we got two yoga balls we got an air mattress we got a football and we're blowing them up and they were banging we got hundreds of millions of views we got like 100 million views on one short doing that and then we were like

47:50

we should make a long form of this bombed really bombed really we did a great title film I thought we tried our best but it just bombed I would have thought there was a clear correlation between hey the interest is there so I'm going to scale the information based on the interest from this platform well it makes sense because I mean there's definitely what's been crazy to me is there's not even a correlation between YouTube shorts and a winning Instagram reel you know like I'll post like an Instagram reel from our podcast that went pretty viral and it won't even do that well on YouTube shorts just different audience different behaviors like people are on there for

48:30

different reasons and different mechanisms as well algorithmically they're all optimized for a very similar thing right but like remember earlier we talked about this multiplier effect of like a little change can have such a you know difference in outcome I think the same is true of like how different platforms measure performance right so I can just say candidly like from what I know the Instagram algorithm like watch time is important like how long someone's watching for is really important swipe whether they swipe or stay is important obviously all those things are important shares are really big on that shares to your friends like sending it to people saving it

49:05

sending it that's really important yeah I don't share YouTube shorts to friends because you don't have friends on YouTube like that doesn't exist so yeah YouTube prioritize slightly different things than Instagram like they might prioritize I know that YouTube priors the shorts like you know completion rate average view duration like they look at likes a little bit they look at like satisfaction like how satisfying do we think this was for viewers they look at VVSA which is viewed versus swiped away but they're not looking at shares as much YouTube shorts might even be I mean there's some crazy brain rot on YouTube shorts oh yeah like even more so insane yeah like I feel

49:41

like Mini Katana has one that has I think a billion views and it's like there's the craziest thing you'd ever you'd ever running a balloon or now we made a short with a client that did a million subscribers wow on one short oh my god okay so that was actually gonna be my next question was like how do you incorporate shorts into your overall client strategy so I like to think about it like this like people again if they think of their channel as this whole thing holistic this is my channel I look at a channel and I look at it as we have a short form audience and we have a long form audience right so those are million subscribers we got from one short which again like mind

50:16

blowing that's great for our short form audience but we don't have an expectation that that's converting to our long form because what matters more than subscribers you know subscribers don't really matter that much anymore what matters much to subscribers is viewing history like how someone watched you in the past that's what really matters so if you think about it if someone comes to a short their viewing history for shorts is there but they have zero viewing history for long form so YouTube basically have no idea if they're going to enjoy long form now we always make these leaps which is like if someone likes a short surely they'll like my long form but like

50:48

sometimes it can draw from a completely different audience like we notice quite often with our clients that like our shorts will end up like reaching different people like and maybe a younger demographic maybe different you know in terms of geography like maybe more a lot of Indian short viewers for example like you can sort of change a little bit like that and the way I think about it is I think about it as two separate things it's like we have a short form audience we have a long form audience that we're going to try crushing on both because some people advocate for separating the two doing like a shorts channel and then just a regular long form channel yeah

51:23

you're not a fan not a fan seems dumb I'm a fan I'm a fan of separating channels when long form is like like let's just say someone has a channel that's a personal brand channel let's just say my channel where I broke down YouTube channels I wouldn't then mix in a podcast on that channel personally you would I wouldn't you wouldn't put a podcast on that no because there are long form videos that are like competing with each other and that have different audiences like I'm making eight nine minute breakdowns and then I'm making like a two hour interview with like an editor or like a you know a YouTuber to me that feels like a different channel and a lot of channels

51:57

that's a question I get a lot which is like should my podcast be on a separate channel you can get away with having them on the same channel but quite often I'll separate them out but with shorts again like think about why you would do that why you would do that is in my opinion just false information which is that shorts are going to impact your long form but they're not going to impact the negative or positive that much at all it's more so for the vanity metric of getting the subs from it yeah we talked a lot about getting the thumbnail clicked now I want to go through into your retention strategy what is walk me through that is it is it like very fast intros I've heard

52:36

you talk about like the best thing is going to be now to slow things down how are you thinking about retention going into 2026 so the first first place to start would be the intro yeah and I kind of have three steps I like to think about for a great YouTube intro very simple number one deliver on the click okay so to me that looks like if you are selling me something in the title thumbnail I just want confirmation that that is going to be in the video now it doesn't mean I have to get it all delivered right now but if you tell me let's just say like really simply like I bought a new car right and then you start the video with hey guys I'm heading to target right now

53:11

what's going on like having a good day it's like you told me you're buying a new car where's the car or what's happening whereas if you start that video you show the car or you say I'm going to go pick up the car immediately I feel like now I have confirmation that I clicked on the right thing so I always think about delivering on the click in the first like five to ten seconds you can do that visually or verbally like visually showing what was in the title for one performing better than the other visually okay yeah so like if the thumbnail for this or you know it's relevant to breaking if the thumbnail image is like you showing Brian the iPad like this and then the first

53:43

second in like we cut an intro is you kind of like showing it to the camera that is kind of how you would say yeah from the click okay yeah or like you know if if the thumbnail is based around a certain talking point for me like let's just say that talking point is like I can make any news go viral or like subscribers are dead in 2026 or whatever it might be in the like sizzler like intro that you might do like I would just make sure that talking point is mentioned like already early so that I'm like oh I know this isn't just gonna bait me completely you know it's like Diary of CO does a great job with that he'll have this like crazy tile thumbnail and then you're like

54:20

I was watching Diary of CO last night and my cortisol just flew I mean it's just building and building and building stress stressful as hell yeah yeah which is effective yeah 12 million subs so okay you kind of you said like let's go back to your intro yeah Mark yeah so deliver on the promise number one number two just create so just create an intrigue in the viewer now that can be as simple as like you know again delivering on that promise and then teasing what's gonna come you know it could be like speaking Diary of CO like just like stopping on these pauses about what's he gonna say what's his answer like what happened to you when you were a child it's like pause it's

54:58

like oh what is it you know I always just look at an intro like what where's the intrigue here yeah sometimes especially in education niches people get too like pragmatic and it's like we're gonna analyze the five most important steps to growing a YouTube channel in 2025 it's like it's every can intro I've ever done yeah it's like why don't you say exactly what you're gonna get on today's episode of Sword Equity why don't you say something like in this video we learned something that is going to completely change how we think about YouTube going forward and leading YouTube strategist Paddy always shared something that honestly I didn't anticipate I didn't

55:33

I didn't think this would be a real thing you know blah blah and it's like suddenly the viewer's like what's going on here like I I would always do intros for my channel I would say things like in this video we're gonna break down how Mr. B screw his YouTube channel right that's a statement sentence which is great now that's not an intrigue sentence because he discovered something in October of 2017 2017 that changed everything and it's like fuck what the hell do you use this book yeah like what is it so so the intrigue sentence is almost a thing that like gets you to lean in a bit yeah yeah yeah when do you introduce that like technically do you do you do that after the

56:10

initial statement yeah I usually will leave with a statement like there's a few ways to do intros that I find effective like I just statement intrigue like you're stating what you're gonna cover and then you're teasing with some sort of intrigue sentence and not intrigue sentences when I give people these drills they get lazy right they're like in this video we're gonna break down YouTube tips and keep an eye out for step number five it's gonna be so cool it's like right that's just annoying specificity I hate that always yeah it's always specificity at the end of the day yeah I mean that's kind of the last line of defense against AI and bad copywriting and

56:41

script writing it's like exactly the October set like 2017 like that's something that AI can't deliver or a shitty ghostwriter can't deliver it's gonna be someone who actually understands the value of planting it yes you know as the source of the intrigue exactly so after that like I'm creating I'm creating step two is creating some form of intrigue in the viewer um you know what's gonna happen why should I keep watching this what's the kind of payoff like these are the things I'm trying to create of like why would someone keep watching this video and then my third step is like a really interesting one I think and this is my style people have different styles but I

57:18

just call it the seamless flow so I feel like the best intros on YouTube it's hard to point where it ended and started it just sort of flows in yeah there'll be some people that contradict this like I think you know like the diary of a CEO doesn't have the most seamless flow but it works um there's people that you know do different things but I just love this idea of like instead of being like here's the intro we're gonna go through these steps what did Patty discover in 2025 this changing YouTube blah blah blah and then like big pause and it's like in today's episode that just feels very like disjointed to me versus like the Patty steps these are gonna be all

57:54

these things for YouTube in 2026 and the first thing we're gonna start with is this and it just starts you know or starting with is a great bridging sentence it's like we're gonna break down 40 tips for losing fat in 2026 starting with you know I like a bridge so a seamless bridge into the context I advise doing the same thing on short form and I almost talk about scripting should feel like one long run-on sentence so a lot of times and when I hit the hook I could be like this is this brand's content playbook so the first thing where there's no break really between the hook it's like the hook right into the into the value for for the short form and I started

58:29

testing that I did three tests on my third test I changed and basically made everything bridge and it was my first million view video on short form and I don't think I've done it well on on YouTube and I'm like three videos in for you videos in I don't think we do it well on our intros for the podcast either like they're not seamless bridges it's like we're gonna cover these five things one two three four five okay let's get into the episode versus like going back probably looking at how we you know one of the parts of the episode and just like it seamlessly going into that maybe that question right and this was the most important question I got and it just goes

59:04

into it something along those lines to to create those bridges like imagine if you had started imagine you'd done something like you know we're gonna go through these really important tactics and instead of going like starting with or like and the most the first most important one you said something like all right now let's get into it it's like people do that still these days I'm like no I deadass hit that it's just fluff we do let's get into it it's like you know what that is to me that's like a a boring signpost sentence yeah versus a smooth bridge for sure let's get started no that's not just tell me all righty yeah how do you think about using leveraging

59:39

foreshadowing in your in your videos I to me foreshadowing can be subtle or very like overt you know I think YouTube lends itself to being quite overt and you know very like obvious foreshadowing to the point of like let's just say Mr. Beast is making video at the end of the video there's a hundred million dollar golden yacht instead of going like we've got something special coming he'd be like there's a hundred million dollar golden yacht at the end of this video keep watching keep watching you know obviously that's for kids but I think foreshadowing when you watch the godfather is you know Michael Corleone holding a cigarette and his hands aren't shaking

1:00:17

after a traumatic event and you're like well he's he's losing his his uh sense of innocence you know like oh whereas with YouTube it's like no you're just sort of telling me why I should keep watching so an interesting framework I think about for this is like I call it like the invisible or the made up focus group where it's like if we pause a video let's say at the one minute mark two minute mark four minute mark wherever let's say we pause at the three minute mark just for argument's sake I love to ask myself this question of like if we put our audience into a focus group at this point what would they say is coming up in the video and what you want is someone to

1:00:54

be like oh yeah so he's giving me all these tactics um you know a little bit later you can find out about this and then there's also this like thing he mentioned that I just can't get out of my head I can't wait to hear what he says versus someone be like I don't already know it's kind of just flowing and I don't know where this is going you know so I like foreshadowing that creates this like exact expectation of what I'm going to get in the rest of the video yeah love it the last part I want to or that I'm curious about is then how do you think about a podcast episode in comparison to maybe like Mount Everest where you need a layer in progression right

1:01:29

so that the that is always feels like it's moving towards an outcome because that could be harder if it's just Brian and I talking versus like climbing Mount Everest we're seeing if the outcome is to see right if they reach the top how do you think about the differences but also the similarities that could be applied across different categories and formats yeah I think it's less of like a big payoff for like a progression that it gets like because if I said to you like let's make a podcast that gets more and more insane every minute or more and more insightful every minute it's like that just doesn't refit with the format as much but what I what I do think about is I

1:02:03

think about like the payoff sale can be completion so what I mean by that is like my complete strategy or the complete guide to YouTube or the complete guide to losing weight and it's like the payoff is kind of like when you finish it you're going to have this full playbook of everything you need to know another thing I think about is just morsels of like maybe there's not this sense of progression but maybe there's a few questions that we're alluding to or you know I like this idea of like soon X first Y which is this idea that I'm sure it's not unique to me but I termed it that soon X first Y which is like this idea that you say a little bit later I'm going to

1:02:44

ask you about this but first this and the key is that your X and your Y both need to be interesting I watch this like a soccer news channel because I'm a big soccer fan and he'll say things like he'll start his video and he'll be like oh we got some really big news tonight you know this is happening this is happening and he goes I really want to talk about this tweet that this player put out that everyone's going crazy about but first we need to talk about they'll say things like that and when it's done subtly and not like too performatively it just hooks you and goes like when is that thing going to happen so I think that's what a podcast needs it needs this

1:03:17

kind of sense of like I'm getting great value now but there's this thing that's going to come at some point later in the video that I'm waiting for like this answer this thing you know this specific tip what happened in November October 2017 you know that kind of thing that yeah yeah should we structure that in or anybody podcasting like should you almost manufacture those elements into the video I think manufacturing ahead of time is the ultimate thing that even even after time it's like using VO or using your intro to kind of like create those moments you know think about I like to think about every video and even a podcast as this skeleton ahead of time

1:03:52

of like here's roughly what we're going to cover which I'm sure you guys do it's like roughly these are the things we're going to cover and then I look at that skeleton I put it in front of me as a one-pager and I'm like where am I inserting little like retention devices so I could say in the first two minutes I'm going to insert and some foreshadowing of like a question we're going to ask later maybe at the five or six minute mark I'm going to like you know throw this like curveball in of like you know there's something we didn't talk about earlier that I really want to get your opinion on or you know these like little things that I might like

1:04:20

script in between sections so I will think about that yeah one piece of that too is probably the chapters right like I mean I know when I like opt into a two and a half hour podcast there's just no chance that I'm going to watch the whole thing so I usually will skim kind of like the chapter names yeah right I mean is that something that you would say is mandatory for most podcasts I would say for podcasts I like it and I like chapters for education tutorial listicles podcasts I don't like them for anything that's like narrative or like story based yeah because I just feel like it just incentivizes people to like skip to the big payoff does YouTube care if people skip

1:05:00

ahead well here's in terms of the hierarchy of what YouTube is prioritizing for I think their number one thing is is really like viewer satisfaction interesting because viewer satisfaction to either people might think of things too like individually they think about like well you should clearly care about people watching my video for the longest period of time and that's really important but satisfaction means that someone's had a good experience on YouTube and probably gonna go watch something else versus close it and open up Netflix yeah right so I think about it like this does YouTube care about chapters like if chapters helps with viewer satisfaction that makes

1:05:35

people like more satisfied because if you click on the podcast it's very tactical and multiple parts but there's no chapters you're probably like this is annoying yeah what am I even gonna do here I'm not gonna watch this versus you click on it and it's like there's chapters it's really clearly laid out you know you can watch what you want you're gonna end that podcast even if you don't watch much of it even watch 20% of it 10% of it you're gonna leave it thinking that was a useful insightful you might like the video you might share the video you might go watch another video right after that which is the step that YouTube really cares about like getting people that's

1:06:05

really interesting yeah so it's like kind of a combination of all the different behaviors that they want yeah is put into this one metric that they're using yeah like their their hierarchy to me would be like YouTube care about satisfaction then you should care about average iteration you know and like people clicking like those two two sort of things go in tangent like someone clicking and someone watching for a long time but so often people like will put the watching for a long time ahead of the satisfaction and in doing so they'll make a video that is like stringing someone along not re-delivering anything and so many of those yeah the equivalent of the SEO

1:06:38

recipe industry or it's like how to make banana bread banana bread is great banana bread is the best thing that banana bread originated in 1885 and you're just like showing the fuck it I'm sitting in front of my oven I need to be at an after yeah well patty man I appreciate you coming on this was a blast I have a lot of notes I have a lot of things that I'm going to we're both going to be taken from this and infusing into our content into the pod into into our own YouTube channels and appreciate you coming on because this was this was incredible all the knowledge and information that you shared for us yeah tell them where to find you I mean

1:07:09

kind of different things that you're doing yeah yeah well thank you so much for having me this was a this was a pleasure and thanks for putting out all the stops I know this is all for me right yeah yeah exactly but great great set and really nice interview guys it was it was a pleasure in terms of people finding what I do I mean I'm very active on Twitter pattyg96 we're pushing 150k followers there so there you go about with the journey nice LinkedIn as well I post quite a lot of stuff and I don't really do much YouTube content personally these days but I might be making a little comeback at some point this year so and if they're interested in taking action on

1:07:41

some of these things you're talking about you also have the cohort based stuff yeah we run a accelerator cohort three times a year it's about a hundred students each yeah typically like creators and like brands that are trying to figure out YouTube and eight weeks of just like me sharing my entire playbook of how YouTube works and then for like if this was the free version just imagine what would be going on in this accelerator the hour 30 minute conversation versus the eight week program yeah you're gonna get locked in there you go yeah I am well we appreciate you thanks again for coming on brother thank you yeah thanks patty

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