I can make any niche viral, literally any niche viral. That's Paddy Galloway, the most prolific YouTube strategist in the world, and he is here today to address the most common problem hurting smaller channels. Oh, I can't do this because my niche isn't like that or my niche is limited because I think so often creators use that as an excuse. Over the past decade, Paddy has worked with thousands of channels and generated over 10 billion views. And in this video, he's going to walk you through the strategy he used to do it, including pre-production, I always like to say there's three main sources of ideas, internal ideas, external ideas, and then packaging.
A 20% better title could mean double, triple, quadruple, it could mean a hundred times more views. And some hot takes. There is no meta. Thank you to 1of10 for sponsoring this video. Some of the most common comments we get from people, especially when we have videos about how to find more success on YouTube, is people will say things like that's great, but that won't work for my niche.
Or yeah, but I'm operating in this really small audience or that would never work for me. So my first question to you is, are there niches that are just destined to fail? Like are there niches that are just too small to make work on YouTube?
This is honestly one of my biggest pet peeves as a strategist, as someone that works with so many different channels is people just associate me with, you know, the biggest creators I've worked with. And I sometimes feel like saying, hey, like I've worked with hundreds of channels. I'm not just like a beast boy.
I'm not just like a Mr. Beast disciple just because I might have worked with him at some point in the past. I've worked with channels in so many different niches and I have yet to find a single niche where I can't get some traction. Now, that traction might look different for different niches.
You know, some niches are naturally smaller. I always like to use this term, which, you know, and you've heard me talk about before, TAM, totally addressable market. I like to think about that for YouTube channels. and think like, how big is the market for something? But every time someone has come to me and said, hey, you know, my niche is too small.
It's all well and good. You talking about all this stuff. I don't have all this money. My niche is small.
I don't have this and that. I look at their niche and it's like a golf niche. I'm like 30 million people play golf every weekend or something like, you know, there's a lot of viewership in the golf niche. There's plenty of room there.
Or it's something like knitting. And, you know, again, like go search knitting on YouTube and filter by most viewed. you'll see knitting videos with millions of views.
So I have yet to sort of find a niche that I don't think has a big enough audience. Of course, there's going to be like some exceptions, some examples of things which are just so, so hyper niche that there's only a few thousand people in the world that care about it. And in which case, maybe in that situation, you should look at trying a different niche. But I really, I really hate that viewpoint of, oh, I can't do this because my niche isn't like that or my niche is limited because... I think so often creators use that as an excuse to not actually try harder with their content and not to put the onus on themselves to make great content instead of just blaming the market they're operating within.
It feels like a very disempowering belief. Like, why would you want to believe that there's a low ceiling on what you're trying to do? I feel like you should be doing everything in your power to blow that ceiling off what you think you can do. So when you think about... the TAM, the total addressable market.
How do you actually go about identifying or calculating what you think the TAM for a channel might be? Yeah, I love thinking about it like that as like a limiting belief because my team will sort of testify this. I've built a small team around myself over the last few years.
And something I always say is like the mindset you have towards content and like the sort of philosophy you have towards content has a huge impact in what you actually go on to do. So like one thing my team will always hear me say is we can make literally any niche viral. Like I can make any niche viral. Just give me the topics, give me the tools, give me the right sort of direction and I can make that niche viral.
And I think even just like this idea, like you talked about, or like we've talked about a TAM. Like, how do you calculate that? Sometimes people think about things, there's a fancy name for it, TAM, they overcomplicate it. To me, it's just about saying, well, what's our niche?
Let's just say our niche is golf. Let's go to YouTube, search golf in YouTube. And then in the search filters that you can apply on YouTube, this isn't using some like weird paid tool, just on YouTube, search that term golf, filter it for longer videos.
So just filter out short. So you can actually filter video length in the search filters on YouTube and just then sort by most viewed. And what you'll see is for golf, you'll see like probably all these huge outliers at the top where there's like some random like, you know, another side men make a golf video that has 30, 40 million views. That's probably not an accurate representation of how many views there could be for the golf niche. But if you go down a little bit further, you see, okay, here's this golf channel that does tutorials.
There's many videos they have that have a million views. Here's this other golf channel that does entertainment videos. He has like one and two million view videos. And before you know it, you're getting a picture of, okay, at the very high level, the best channels in the space get this viewership.
That's probably a pretty accurate picture of roughly where your time could be. Now, of course, there's some niches that aren't. capitalized yet.
There's some niches that haven't been fully explored and discovered and conquered by creators. So there is like more viewership in some of those niches. But Tam to me is just really just seeing what are the best in the niche currently doing views wise? Like what are they hitting? And what am I hitting?
So before blaming the niche, I could look at that and say, well, if I'm a golf channel that's doing like 100,000 views a video, which is still great, but I'm like, my niche is too small. I need to change. I need to pivot.
Well, if the best channels are doing a million views a video, I'm still like 10% of what I could be doing. 10%, which is kind of crazy when you think about it. And a lot of people that come to me with these things are saying I'm in too small of a niche.
The reality is they're probably a golf channel doing 10,000 views a video or 5,000 views a video. So that's just generally how I think about it. Just like looking at what the biggest channels are doing and using that as a bit of a benchmark for what is possible in the niche.
Do you have any examples of channels that... They started off narrower than they needed to be. And you decided, hey, let's actually expand the way we're thinking about this to have a larger total addressable market. Yeah, someone I do think is a great example of it. And it's someone I'm sure you're familiar with is Noah Kagan.
So when I first started doing some work with Noah Kagan, I believe that was 2020 or 2021. And I could just see he was a really talented entrepreneur. He had lots of... interesting stories, but he was doing like very, very niche things.
When I thought there was more potential there, I thought like he had built a lot of the foundation of what a great YouTube channel needs to be. So he had, he built a team, he had good editing, he had like decent thumbnails, but the topics he was picking was like, you know, six tools that helped me run my business or how to use Slack or how to like, which Zoom, Zoom versus like Google Meets, like, like these sort of like very niche business topics. And I went in and I was like, what if we just go for... bigger swings. We go for bigger videos.
We go for things like, you know, asking millionaires for advice. And, you know, that's obviously such a huge trend now, but we were doing that like two or three years ago, going for like really general business videos that we could say to ourselves, someone at the very beginning of their journey who doesn't know what Slack even is, because they don't even need to think about Slack yet because they're just by themselves. They can watch this video and enjoy it. And then also someone that's a more seasoned entrepreneur can still watch and enjoy it because they'll still find interest in the things we're covering in the video.
And actually just even going back to this idea of like niches being too limited or like my niche is boring. Like even when I was thinking before this podcast, I was just some names just came to mind. Like someone that was actually in the last cohort of my accelerator program, which is, you know, this group coaching program I run.
His name was Andrew Millicent. Have a guess what his niche is. Like it's the most it's like the actual niche itself is so niche, but he gets so much viewership.
Like. Try to think of the most random niche you can think of. Oh my gosh.
Okay. I'm going to guess that he does Eastern dance trends. This is a great guess. Great guess. That is pretty neat.
And actually, it sounds like there's probably quite good viewers within that. I might look into that right after this podcast. So his niche is horticulture and more specifically permaculture, which I believe, hopefully no one calls me out on this in the comments, but I believe it's just like a...
a strain of horticulture that focuses more on like permanently like building out sustainable horticulture like you know resources uh plants farms you know uh water systems this is what he focuses on on his channel that's like his background and if i was to tell you okay he's he's niches horticulture he's like a lecturer in horticulture um what do you think like his most viewed recent video got well to answer that it's 12 million views We got 12 million views on a video during our last cohort. The video is how the UN is holding back the Sahara Desert. And that has 12 million views in four months.
And across his channel, you're just seeing, you know, 1.5 million, 1.6 million. He's got multiple videos that are a million plus. When he started his channel, he was focusing much more on kind of a bit more nicher topics around like water harvesting, rehydrating the concrete jungle. Like. maybe show these videos on screen as we're talking about it.
A lot of these are much more kind of niche. And then he realized that, wow, even though this is like a small, potentially boring niche, I can make really broad topics. So that 12 million view video, how the UN is holding back the Sahara desert. It's got a really interesting thumbnail. I love like the left and right contrast in the thumbnail, the title itself, how the UN, so the UN is a very well-known thing, you know, the United Nations, super well-known, everyone knows about it, like really top of mind, holding back the Sahara Desert, like just that framing of holding back, I love that term, holding back the Sahara Desert.
He has managed to build his niche of permaculture and gardening, basically. into a topic that's relevant to 12 million plus people. And I think that's like, you know, this is kind of what it's all about, right?
When you think about how easy it would be for him to say, oh, I can never get views in this niche because no one cares about permaculture or like, you know, there's not enough interesting topics. I can't make the average person care about it. Well, he made 12 million people care about a video about, you know, the Sahara Desert and permaculture in the Sahara Desert. So it's a great example of just thinking beyond your niche. kind of playing into some of the key principles I think about when it comes to building out big viewership in a smaller niche.
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If I'm thinking visually, it kind of sounds like what you're suggesting is if you think about your niche, it's probably a sub interest of some number of cascading larger interests. So it seems like the advice you're giving is to go upstream or a little bit more broad. above that category to figure out what is the broadest or one of the broadest categories this sits within and let's make videos that address that audience. Am I getting that correct?
Absolutely. Absolutely. Like when I'm thinking about what are the traits of a viral video within a niche, the first thing on that list of traits that I look at is what I call CCN, core casual new.
I'm looking for videos that hit our core. So if we think about like our niche, like within our niche, there's like the really core viewers who like really care about the thing. The second C stands for casual.
So core casual. So are we hitting the more casual viewers that kind of dip in and dip out of this niche and like care a little bit about it, but they're maybe not as like hardcore viewers? And are we hitting the new viewers?
So those are viewers that maybe aren't into the niche. They haven't watched our channel before, but there are people that just, if they see something interesting, they might click the video. So just like how...
Let's just say we talk about permaculture, horticulture. Maybe I don't care about that. Maybe I'm not into it.
But if I see that video about how the UN is holding back the Sahara Desert, it's packaged in a way that can attract me as a new viewer. It probably also attracts the core viewers who really care about that topic too. And it attracts the casuals who kind of dip in and dip out.
The best way to look at your niche and expand your niche is look at every idea and say, can a core casual and new viewer all click this video and enjoy it? And I think that's where so many people go wrong. They get too caught up in just the core. They get too caught up in just like appeasing like the hardcore horticulture, you know, students and viewers who want to see these really technical things and they forget about the casual and the new viewer.
And then on the flip side, some people get too caught up in the new viewer and they just forget to like also appeal to that core and they go too broad and they kind of miss the mark with the audience that they have been building. So I really, really like to think of that. Like that's that framework.
It sounds simple and I think I've mentioned it in tweets and things before, but I cannot mention it enough because that just changes how you approach YouTube. You look at every niche as, like you said, a kind of expanding niche and not like a limiting niche. So if I'm reading between the lines here a little bit, it sounds like what you're saying is if I'm trying to grow my channel, that means that I'm by definition trying to attract new viewers. And the best way to attract new viewers is to make a video that has broader appeal so that it has a better chance of getting a click when it's in a recommended area to a stranger.
Exactly. Exactly. Like broad, broadening the appeal of your niche is so crucial. And I think There's this thing, you know, curse of knowledge bias, where when we know something, we assume everyone else knows it. And what that means is sometimes as, you know, creators in niches, we can end up always trying to go like really specific and narrow to try to like show viewers new things.
But sometimes we just forget that like, oh, actually, the more simple things, the more simple ways of framing things like that might seem obvious to us, but maybe that expands the reach of the video, maybe it makes it more interesting to, you know, a broader group of people. So Yeah, I'm always looking at it and saying, like, how can we just make sure that we're not just limiting it to the hardcore viewers? And often if you're if you're hardcore enough of a niche of a fan of a niche to make a YouTube channel around it, you're going to want to go really niche and specific.
But that's in itself a trap, because then you end up just appealing to other people that are just as hardcore about the niche as you are. And that's probably a very small percentage of viewers. Is there a risk here of making something that is so broadly appealing that it goes well and suddenly our audience isn't targeted for what we're actually trying to do anymore?
Yeah, I think I always find that point kind of interesting because there definitely is something to it. But from my point of view, I would describe myself as a view maximizer. And I am very open about that.
I go into channels and I try to maximize views. I try to take channels from a million views a month to 10 million views a month to 100 million views a month. There are so many other objectives we have as creators. Sometimes that objective might be, hey, we actually have a niche product that is actually more focused on the more hardcore, you know, really focused viewers in this niche.
So expanding out broad doesn't actually do much for our bigger business. And in that case, it's okay to just like focus down on that more specific viewer. But if our goal is to grow viewership, then I don't think we should ever be afraid of trying to expand that out.
So long as we're not just like, you know, doing absolutely random stuff, just in, you know, an attempt, just jumping on any trend. So long as there's still that core casual new, which is why you have to hit each one of those points. Because if you're just going after the new viewer, if you're just like randomly jumping onto any trend you can, then you're not bringing along your core with you. But yeah, it's kind of fascinating how many creators come to me and they say like, I want to get more views.
I'm like, okay, here's more views. And they're like, oh. Now that I've got more views, I don't like how it means I have to make these more broad videos.
And it's like, it's the classic trope. It's like the classic case of like the, the alt band saying they want to make it rich and famous. They make it rich and famous.
And now they're like, oh, I miss when I was like able to play these small shows and like had this real connection. Now we have people in the audience who are just wearing t-shirts and don't actually know the music. And, you know, it's the classic kind of like situation.
But I think it's really, it really comes down to the creators to be really clear to themselves. But then also if they, if they end up working with someone like me or. someone else to be like, my main objective is product sales for this niche product.
And in which case I'll be like, okay, let's, instead of focusing on getting you to 10 million views a month, let's focus on getting you to two or 3 million really targeted views per month. And that would actually end up contributing more to the overall business. Yeah.
That leads me to what may sound like a really obvious or weird question, but who should be a views maximizer? Like what is the conditions where views maximization is the right thing to be chasing. What else needs to be true for me?
I think like the first thing is if your main vehicle for generating revenue, and we could also get even like very meta on this and say like, is even generating revenue your goal? Because if a creator is just like, I want to make enough to pay my bills and just really make content I'm passionate about, that sometimes can be at odds with. generating more revenue through views, you know, so like, we have to be kind of clear about what we want to do. But if you're, if your main vehicle for revenue generation is ad revenue, and I mean that in terms of AdSense on YouTube videos and sponsorships on YouTube videos, if that's your main vehicle that you see as the main way to make revenue on your channel, you should be a view maximizer, in my opinion, within reason, you know, because there's even like, you know, more deeper arguments around, hey, like, if you go too broad, your viewers might not convert as well to um sponsorships and etc etc so like there's there's always these kind of exceptions and things to think about and you know there's a friend of mine who runs a youtube agency and his name is dave whiskus if you've ever heard of him and he always like talks about how yeah like sometimes these like creators have really viral view counts and they do really well but From a sponsorship perspective, the data shows they don't actually convert because they go so broad.
So like there is like all these kind of exceptions, things to think about, things to take into consideration. But most channels could benefit from having a mindset of I want to get more views and I want to like build out a bigger audience, especially people that are like still maybe below that line of being able to make a full time living from it. So I would say the only people I would discount are people that are looking at it and saying, hey. I can make more money by focusing on a very small, specific group of viewers.
And those people might be people who sell like a product, a course. Like if you're selling like a course, let's say you're selling a course on how to like, you know, effectively use Slack, you know, as a manager. You want to target managers that use Slack in their organization.
You don't want to make a video like, you know, I use Slack for 3000 hours. I used every product tool for... Stuff like that might not really bring in the right kind of viewership for you. So I think getting really clear about where your main vehicle for generating revenue is.
But I would say most people, their main vehicle is still ad sales through AdSense or through sponsorship and through maybe affiliates and other things as opposed to a product. Even for people with the product, though, there's still more of that viewership that you can attract. You just have to be a bit more tactful.
You don't want to just completely go and say, hey. I'm just going to try and make the most MrBeastified viral video I can. It's more about within my niche, what can I do?
So I'm just even thinking of an example. Let's just say you are this Slack example we gave. You sell a course on how to use Slack as a manager. So making a really weird viral video where you're trying to go viral with Slack in some way probably isn't a great idea.
But making a video that follows a trend that has gone super viral across multiple niches, which is... If I was to start over with Slack, here's what I'd do. We've seen that go viral.
Like if I had to start coding all over again, here's what I'd do. If I started to learn web design over again, here's what I'd do. You'll see these examples of plenty of outliers. So as that channel, you could look at that and model off that video and say, hey, could I do that for Slack? Maybe it won't get 500,000 views, but if I'm used to getting 1,000 views a video and that gets 30,000 views, we have maximized views, you know, we've increased views and we brought in the right kind of viewership.
So I think... For channels that just have a specific vehicle they sell through or a specific revenue generating vehicle like a product or like something more niche, you have to still think about it as core casual new. But in this case, your new viewer is not going to be just a complete casual.
Your new viewers may be just like still someone that uses Slack, but just isn't like your exact customer profile. I'm curious to hear what are some of the aspects or similarities across videos in different niches that you see. lead to virality?
What are the commonalities of videos across niches that all go viral? So I'd really like to make it very simple. Number one, the video has to have CCN fit.
So we've already talked about that core casual new gear fit. We won't dive into that again. But the first thing should be, does this idea have interest across all those bases? I've referenced this before in the past, but like, even from my channel, when I was active on my own channel with my own name.
Like I would look at it and say, the world's biggest creator needs to be able to watch this. And my mother needs to be able to watch this, you know, someone who is like an absolute hardcore YouTube nerd. And then also someone that's just roughly interested in the whole platform. So core casual new. A second trait of viral videos that I look for for any niche is some form of unique novelty value, something about it that makes this video just feel like it's its own thing, its own island, and not just like another, you know, screaming into the void idea, something unique.
So we talked about that Andrew Millicent example of, you know, the UN holding back the Sahara Desert. Like that feels like he has some information, something new that I don't know that I haven't heard before. So always looking for that, like what is unique?
What is novel about what I can talk about? And that kind of goes into why we should spend so much time on brainstorming and trying to find new, fresh things for our niche. So that's another thing. Sounds simple, but number three, easy to convey in title and thumbnail. So many great ideas are hard to convey in title and thumbnail, and they're just not great ideas then.
They're just interesting things. They're not great ideas because a great idea has to be easy to convey in a title and thumbnail. I get really annoyed at YouTubers saying, I've got this amazing idea, I just can't think of how to thumbnail it.
I'm like, you don't have an amazing idea then. That would be the third thing, making sure you can convey it in the title and thumbnail really easily. The fourth thing that I always look for is other people in your niche, or even friends that have similar interests to you. When you mention the idea to them, do they get excited? Like, do they just genuinely feel like, oh, that's interesting.
That's exciting. And I always like this idea of building a bit of a council around yourselves, like a YouTube council around yourselves, so that you can ask people, like, hey, I'm thinking of doing this. Like, do you find that interesting?
Do you find that, you know? Does that make you excited? So when I'm looking at these niches, like if you just start applying these little frameworks to like how you think about it, even the first one just being CCN fit, you're naturally going to start looking at bigger videos.
You're not going to just look at like a really specific thing. Let's just take another niche, for example. So just to give another channel, 731 Woodworks, it's a woodworking channel. Now I think woodworking is really interesting, but you could argue that like, it's not a niche that you can Mr. Beastify. It's not a niche you can like make viral because it's just all about like, tools and whatever.
If you look at that channel, a lot of the videos are built around viral formats. They are things like testing hacks, testing woodworking hacks, or 99% of woodworkers get this thing wrong. Or, you know, this tool is now illegal in seven and a half states.
Or, you know, there's just like these funny ideas that are built around just like looking at the saying, okay, my core is like hardcore woodworkers. But how do we also make these topics interesting to people that like do it as more of a hobby? Or maybe they're just generally interested in making things, but they're not like a hardcore woodworker. So instead of being like reviewing the, you know, Woodtron, Woodsaw 3400 second edition, it's just like this tool is so good it should be illegal. Or reviewing the most expensive woodworking tool in the world.
Or comparing the... wish, you know, saw to like this $500 saw, you know, like he's looking at it and saying, how can I make things broad and viral? So yeah, I think it is really just about looking bigger and just thinking of unique, novel, broad, and some of these other traits we've mentioned. For these viral videos across niches, what about their packaging gets people to click?
How do you think about title and thumbnail so that people want to actually click? I would always say like too many people get caught up in the design itself, like the aesthetics. So often I just look at it and say, it's showing something simple. So you can look at it. I'm not even sure, maybe we talked about this on the last podcast, but I always like this idea of the glance test.
Sometimes I'll put my thumbnail on a Google slide and the slide before I'll have just a blank white slide. The slide after I'll have a blank white slide and I'll just flick onto. the thumbnail slide really quickly and i'll keep the thumbnail quite small as well and i'll just ask myself can i process what's on screen like in that split second because people just vastly overestimate how much time the average viewer looks at a thumbnail the average viewer looks at a thumbnail for well under a second like it's going to be milliseconds it's very hard to like study this but the sort of non-perfect scientific studies i've done on this like just from observing people scrolling and just some other tests i've tried like people look at thumbnails for milliseconds So you need to have something in there that's just really easy to process and get across right away. So, you know, this idea, I came up with this idea.
I don't want to say came up with it because it makes it sound like I take the credit. But a few years ago in a video, I mentioned this idea called the three element rule. The reason I brought that up and the reason why I think a lot of people use it and reference it is because you shouldn't really have more than three things that the viewer is focusing on in a thumbnail.
If anything, three is even too much. Like, can you just have like. one to three little things they have to focus on.
So if I'm having to look at a face, another face, an item, text over here, a logo over here, text over down here, there's too much in a thumbnail. And too many beginners just feel, I have all this space, let's fill it. But if you then go and look at the most viral videos on YouTube, so many of them, they have empty space. Like, you know, instead of showing this saw with all these things pointing at it, these different arrows, there's text over here, text over there, sometimes it's just as simple as just like.
an arrow, a saw and a face or something, you know, instead of having too much stuff filling up the screen. So I think simplicity is really important. And then just like, trying to show something, this is always hard to kind of convey in words, but trying to show something that looks a little bit it's like on the verge of believable, or unbelievable.
It's like, it's not misleading, but it's exaggeration of the thing. So like, can we show something that you know, if we're trying to show the world's most expensive saw in a video, I don't think it's clickbait to go in and like add some gold onto the saw or like put some shine on it, like put like a little like diamond encrusted thing on it or something. So we're going in and just enhancing some of the details to just make it feel still, it's still not clickbait because we're still showing the world's most expensive saw and the world's most expensive saw probably looks pretty good, but we're going in and we're just trying to like make it look a bit more shiny and clickable.
So I think if you combine simplicity and exaggeration without going too far in the realm of clickbait. you have a really nice formula for for good thumbnails and and also a lot of it is just like you know studying other thumbnails in your niche like what are the what are people clicking on because like someone would bring up like, oh, at this niche, people only click on this kind of stuff. Or like, I've even seen in different geographies, like, for example, in quite a lot of like countries like Singapore or like Malaysia, countries that speak a different language, especially Asian countries, they actually quite often click on thumbnails with a lot more text in them than in the Western world. I've just noticed that.
So, you know, that's always something to think about as well, like culture, niche, what's working in your niche. Generally speaking, I don't think you can go wrong by saying, let's keep it simple and let's exaggerate something slightly. You talk so much about all of the pre-production work with packaging and thinking about an idea. How much of a difference does that pre-production really make?
Love that question. Because I would say the biggest difference, I think, between top-level creators and beginner creators is top-level creators, we're putting way more time into the pre-production. into planning before we make the content. Whereas a lot of more beginners will just sort of say, I want to make this.
Here's roughly how I think about it. Let's make it, you know? So putting like real thought into developing these things before we even press record, before we even end up writing the script.
Like I want to see like actual details of how this could go, because at some level on YouTube, it just becomes a game of decision-making. And our decisions are like, what do we pursue? Just like how in a really big business, like someone like an Amazon. They have all these potential. They can make money in so many areas.
They can do it here, here, here and everywhere. But they have to sit in their boardroom and say, like, out of these 100 opportunities, like which are the ones that we should focus our energy on? Sometimes a point of frustration for me is when I talk to people who are either beginner YouTubers or a bit more inexperienced or even like people completely outside the YouTube niche, like, you know, the brands that my company works with and different people, they will look at it and they will kind of be a little bit put out or a little bit sometimes honestly frustrated with me. with how much detail I put on these little things, like how much I will push for a certain title over another title.
An example I actually bring up quite a lot is, we work at the Red Bull, that's one of our bigger clients. We had this video a few months ago, which was world's fastest camera drone versus F1 car. That video, I believe, has 20 million plus views. So that title, I think, is a great title.
It's just really simple, straight to the point, you get it. But if we had titled it something else, and there were other titles on the drawing board that we could have used, if we had titled it something that was maybe 10 or 20% worse, the video wouldn't have 10 or 20% less views. It might have a fraction of the views. It might have like two or three million views, which is still lots, obviously.
But YouTubers often think of it too linearly and think, okay, 20% better title. Yeah, the video might get 20% more views. But what if I prefer this title? Or what if I don't like calling it this other title? Like, it's not gonna make that much difference.
Can I just call it this title? But... A 20% better title could mean double, triple, quadruple.
It could mean a hundred times more views because YouTube is this exponential game and returns are non-linear. Like a 20% better thing might mean the video ends up doing a bit better with more people. And then that can lead this snowball in motion, which can then lead to more and more and more views.
So being a bit better with a lot of people can lead to a much bigger return than you can imagine. So the reason I push like... focusing on title film out, focusing on the topic, focusing on how you present things, and this pre-production so hard is because these things make a massive difference. And honestly, I can't say how many times in my career I've been in rooms with people where they've been like, we like your title, Paddy, but we think we want to go with this title.
And then I say, why? And they go like, it just feels a bit more aligned to our brand. And then I would say, okay, aligning to your brand is really important. But if I was to say your title will get 1 million views and my one will get 10 million views, would you feel the same way? And they'd say, how can you know that?
I'm like, I don't know that, but I do know that my one is 10 or 20% better. And being 10 or 20% better in an infinite exponential game has huge outsized returns. You know, the video won't just get 1.2 million views versus 1 million.
Maybe we'll get 1 million versus 10 million. So it's one of the reasons I get so excited about these little nerdy, small details. And yeah, even that example we use from Andrew of the UN Sahara video. That video with like a different title or a slightly different thumbnail, that topic might've only got 500,000 views instead of 12 million.
How do I take that insight, which I agree with and believe, and not allow it to paralyze me from publishing at all? Setting a limit on how long you give yourself to overthink. I think some overthinking is fine, but just set a limit.
If you're overthinking a title for weeks, big problem. If you're overthinking it for an hour, and then after that hour, you say I have to come up with something and stick with it, you know, just just make that happen. So I think setting a time limit and then also like realizing and understanding that there will be always views left on the table. like there's not a single video I've worked on in my entire career that we got 100% of the views we could have got every single video I've ever worked on.
We could have got even more views with something slightly different. But it's just a game of getting as close to perfection as possible. But perfection needs to have a time limit, you need some constraint, otherwise, it'll just not post anything.
So I think especially for smaller creators, like the reason I even bring up this point of like nonlinear returns and how exponential YouTube is, is to excite us with the potential we have. But when you're a small creator, like it's still so important to just publish videos, right? Because the pursuit of perfection, the pursuit of perfection doesn't account for the other factor in that equation, which is timeline. And the longer time goes on, the less learning we have, the less videos we're publishing, the less we're trying to make things happen.
I don't know if this analogy will hit, but imagine you were someone that just always tried to find the perfect husband or wife forever, but then... by the time you finally find them, you're like 65. And it's like, oh, you know, like in my pursuit of perfection, I forgot that the other timeline was actual time passing. So I think that's a way of thinking about it is we can be perfectionists.
We can overthink, but just for an hour, just for two hours, not for two weeks. It's empowering because it goes to sell a little bit of extra work on the package, on the title and thumbnail and the idea. can have outsized returns. So that's where there's leverage.
That's where you should put a little bit of extra time because finding a little bit of a breakthrough can have a huge return for you. But you're right, there has to be a limit. Otherwise, we'll go back and forth forever. Absolutely.
The majority of people watching this probably are still feeling like, ah, my channel's pretty small. I haven't really broken through yet. And so I'm wondering if there's like an order of operations when the channel's small and I'm getting started for which of the core casual and new I should develop first.
Like, should I go broad first to try and get in front of a lot of people so that some of those people become core fans? Or should I start a little bit more narrow, develop the core fandom and then broaden out from there? What do you think about that? There's actually that question really ties in well with a tweet I made yesterday, which was. how I would grow a YouTube channel from scratch in 12 months, 12 steps.
And I broke the 12 steps into these different phases. Phase one, I called establishment. Phase two, I called improvements. And phase three, I called optimization. So I almost like thinking of like a YouTube channel's like growth along those lines.
First of all, you just need to establish yourself. Like, what am I? What am I doing?
I need to start making videos. I need to get good at making videos. Then you need to get into this phase of like, now I need to keep improving upon that establishment. improve in all these different areas, start thinking about strategy and start thinking about idea generation more deeply.
And then over time, you end up optimizing and tweaking to get to that final destination you want to be. So for your question, I think we're looking more at that like establishment stage. So like, before we really think about like, how do we, you know, get in depth on all this stuff, look at all this data retention curves, like, we need to figure out like what we are and who we are as a channel.
And I will say throughout my entire career, it's always worked better for me to focus. more narrow and more at that core first, and then expand out over time. Because you just it's you can never go the other way.
You can't really start like going after the broad and then go more narrow because that's just like what the eight and eight so many of those viewers. I think it's it's also easier to get traction when you're focusing on a bit more of a specific smaller niche. And I'm even thinking back to like when I used to have music channels, like I would start with like a really specific sub genre of a niche of music, then I would start building out. So if it starts with like French deep, deep hip hop or deep bass or something, drum and bass, then it would like expand a little bit out to like European drum and bass. Then even further, you know, it would just kind of build from a really small core and then grow from there because you can kind of almost look at it like, almost like monkey bars to like different places.
Like you, you start in here and then because you're in here, that means that some of this niches overlap. Okay. So now I can sort of expand out to this broader thing with some overlap with my thing. And then I can expand out over here.
And before you know it, you can kind of capture more of the total, total niche or total whole niche as itself. Cause like every niche has like sub niches, like we've kind of alluded to, but yeah, I find it, I find it really interesting how like, sometimes I look at a new creator and immediately they're trying to make these super viral, like really broad videos. There are examples of where that works.
Um, I have a friend, James Jani. who I referenced quite a bit because I think he's just such a really great creator. His first few videos got like millions of views. Like he just, he just hit it out of the park right away. That is the exception.
Survivorship bias is such a real thing with YouTube. If you look at most channels that are now doing 100K, 200K, 500K, a million views a video, they started more niche down. So start niche and expand and grow from there for sure. How do I know when I'm moving out of the established phase and into the growth phase where I need to be looking more at data and analytics and things?
I think some of it is like volume of videos posted. So. People argue with me on this, like I'm sure like other strategists might disagree with this, but like the more I've realized this, like I've been doing this for 10 years now, creators just get overwhelmed. If you say to a creator, hey, you need to start making videos, you need to start making two videos a week, and you need to learn all about retention curves, you need to learn data, you need to learn how to like come up with good ideas, you need to learn how to package and all this stuff, it can just be like really overwhelming.
So how do you go from like that establishment phase to that improvement sort of growth phase? I think what you do first is say, am I in a consistent, you know, cadence of posting videos? Some people will say, Paddy, you've said in the past that, you know, a consistent schedule doesn't matter. It doesn't matter algorithmically, but it can matter a lot mentally and philosophically for yourself to get into like a regular cadence of posting.
If you're really good, you can post whenever you want, but you're not really good at the start. So you need to kind of have that repetition over time. So the first thing I would look at before moving into that stage is, are we posting regularly? And have we learned how to make videos?
You know, like this sounds silly, but like every YouTuber that we look up to, they know how to like roughly make things, you know? And there's some examples, I think, especially in this like new age of creation where like people can hire editors and designers earlier in the process. But still, like even if I look at myself, like I can edit videos. I can, I could edit a video.
If you sat down there and sent me the clips for this and put it together, I could edit it. Is it going to be very good? No, but it would be passable. I can make thumbnails.
I made thumbnails for years. I've made thumbnails for clients. Like I can go into Photoshop and make thumbnails.
I have the fundamental skills to be a creator. So I love the idea that in that establishment phase, instead of working and thinking about strategy too deeply, we're building those fundamental skills. We're making videos, ideally, maybe one or two videos every single week. And we're doing that for a period of time where maybe we have 30, 40, 50 videos posted.
Then we look at it and say, okay, let's say we've got 50 videos posted. we have learned the skills in photoshop and video editing now we have a foundation where we can put strategy on top it's kind of it's kind of frustrating when i see someone put really a lot of effort into strategy and ideation and coming up with like really good ideas but their execution is so weak that they're just wasting those ideas so like at the start i just say make whatever you want like pick your niche like we need to pick our niche we need to pick our niche slash sub nation like focus in on that but then from there just make what calls to you make what interests you like make what you feel like passionate about Some of it will maybe do okay. Some of it will do terrible.
The majority probably won't do anything at all. And then over time, you can then look at it and say, I'm sitting in this position where I've been doing this for four or five months. Now I have 50 videos posted. I've got the fundamental skills. If I now put the strategy component on top, if I now think about my YouTube studio, if I start studying my retention curves, if I start putting more effort into brainstorming ideas.
So instead of just saying, I'm going to make whatever I want to, we're going to start thinking about it and saying, I'm going to put a huge amount of effort into brainstorming. I'm going to schedule time each week to brainstorm ideas. I'm going to use a process of elimination to make sure I pick the best ideas. We start putting more strategy behind it.
We have a foundation we can build upon. So I think before moving into that stage, we just need to make sure we're making videos consistently and we're improving and we've got a foundation of skill for Photoshop, video editing, whatever it might be. And if that foundation of skill isn't one you have yourself, it's at least having someone on your team that you've built to cover those areas.
I think that's so true. I talk to a lot of creators who are stuck around platform strategy. They haven't even decided yet which platforms should I be posting on. And they'll ask me, like, should I do YouTube?
And YouTube has the most moving parts of any platform, in my opinion. The most variables that could go wrong and sink the performance of the entire video if you don't do it pretty well. You really have to get a lot of things working in concert from the idea. to the packaging, which is both title and thumbnail, not just the composition of it, but the literal visual design of it.
Then you need to make sure the video starts out really well so you have good retention. You probably need to keep people's attention throughout the whole video, obviously. There's just so many, each of these things are like their own art form, almost.
And you can get good at all of it. And that's what the great YouTubers are doing. But it's such an investment of time that in the beginning, You need to get reps of doing a whole video.
So you at least experience and start building the muscle memory of all these different moving parts and variables involved. I couldn't agree more. Couldn't agree more.
Like sometimes I actually. have been quite reflect full of like the advice I've given over the years and like, how I've approached things. And sometimes I have like this benefit of I've done it for 10, 15 years, I have this experience, these repetitions.
And we talked a bit earlier about this curse of knowledge bias, sometimes I forget like how many little skills go into making a channel happen. So to think about like a new viewer being told, hey, you need to learn how to edit, that's hard. You need to learn how to do thumbnails, that's also hard.
You need to learn how to like story tell. You need to learn how to be good on camera. You need to learn how to like, you know, do some basic lighting, color grading, do all that stuff. I need to do this every week. I need to come up with ideas and then be like, also as well, you need to think really deeply about strategy.
You need to follow what Paddy Galloway says on Twitter, where he says he goes through this whole process of like hundreds of ideas. And you can just imagine how overwhelming that is. So I love the idea of just breaking it down into those different stages.
And I think that's the best way to grow like a channel from scratch or from smaller to. a big channel or at least a channel doing quite well momentum wise as fast as possible um and yeah i think like it's kind of when i really break it down like youtube is unlike any other platform in that it is really really really difficult to get good at but when you get good at it it starts to feel quite easy it starts to feel like you know you can be in this position where earlier in this podcast i said i feel i have the confidence to feel that i can make any niche viral And I haven't had negative reinforcement to tell me I can't. You know, every time I've done something with someone with enough time, we have made progress and we have got viewership.
And it's quite an easy input output game when you learn what the inputs are. But yeah, it's crazy overwhelming to think about starting on YouTube today and having all this information, all these people talking, saying you need to do this, this and this. Sometimes you just need to take a bit of time to be quiet and make 30, 40, 50 videos and just learn how to edit and make. Thelma is on Storytel.
If you do that first few months, you're gonna have a much better foundation. If I'm looking at other videos that have been successful, maybe it's my own videos, maybe it's other videos in my niche, maybe it's videos outside of my niche, but I can see that this video had the outcome that I want. It had the type of views that I'm looking to get. How do I start to understand what made that video successful? Yeah, I think there's a few things I like to do.
The first thing is just like actually having these prompts. So like writing these prompts down, maybe you can just actually take a screenshot of the video and put it in a Google Doc or a Notion or whatever you use for your note taking, and just have these prompts and start to just like reflect on them. So one prompt I always like is, what made this unique? So we talked about earlier about how, you know, viral videos usually have some level of unique novelty value. So like, what did make this unique?
Like, was it something in the topic? Was it like, something specific to this stoma that made it different to everything else? So what made this unique? I always like to ask myself, like, what about the packaging made it special? What about the packaging made it an outlier?
Like, was there some way they titled it or thumbnail it that just felt different to how most people in the space do it or just built up upon a bit of a different format than most people? Something that I think is super interesting is when I do see these outlier videos like these, and when I say outlier, I'm thinking like a video that gets three or four times more than the average at minimum on a channel. Usually.
When I see an outlier, it's not going to be, oh, they tried a different color grade or, oh, they upgraded their camera. Those things matter, but they don't have this kind of like exponential difference usually. What it's more often about is, hey, something about the idea itself, the title or the thumbnail is what made that such an outlier.
So I really like to dig into those things and ask myself those questions of what made it unique? What about the title thumbnail? Another really good prompt is.
Why did this go viral and others similar to it didn't? So there is a lot of survivorship bias at stake here where sometimes people can look at like a video and say, oh, this went really viral. But then if you look deeper, you'll see they tried the same video like eight other times that didn't go viral.
So you have to ask yourself like, was this just a lucky break on this video or was there something different or unique about it? So I think you can learn a lot by saying, hey, this person wasn't the first to cover this topic, but the other people that covered this topic got. 10,000 views and this guy got 150,000 views.
Why? Let's put them side by side. Let's look at some differences in how it's actually put together.
That can make a big difference. A lot of it, you can never be 100% sure, but a lot of it is if you just start reflecting more and digging deeper into that video and just looking at things like the timing as well, when it came out, how the views trended over time. I think that's a really useful way to do it. And also, I'll give a quick shout out to...... to my friend chucky who's just launched view stats um alongside mr beast like they have some interesting tools which allows you to like search reverse basically like reverse search a thumbnail so if you have a thumbnail that you see that goes really viral you can place it into their their thumbnail search and it will like look at like other thumbnails um like it so you can see oh were they the first person to come up with this concept or maybe they saw this concept go super viral in another niche and they tried it in this nation that's why it went viral so I think the more like deeper thing here is just taking time to really reflect on a video as opposed to just being like chalking it down to something really quickly.
Oh, it's because they have more money than me. Or, oh, it's because they're a bigger channel or oh, it's because X, Y, Z. If you actually just sit there and just try to reflect and almost like journal around why a certain video did well, you can learn a lot. If I'm looking at my own channel and one of my videos that performed better than I anticipated, is there any data in YouTube studio that you look at that you feel like is a reliable. indicator or gives you some sort of unique insight into why a video did better than you might've expected?
Honestly, there's nothing, there's nothing really that just like gives you a definitive answer. Like here's some things I would look at if a video went way better than expected, I would look at the demographics. So like, is it appealing to a bit of a different audience than usual? Sometimes I've seen this where like a video goes really viral.
I'm like digging into why that could be. And then I realized, Oh, Oh, it's going really viral in a certain country. It might be getting a lot of viewership in India, and I try to figure out why is it getting a lot of viewership in India? Or, you know, maybe it's going really viral with a different age group to what I'm used to, and it's resonating really well there. So dig a bit into the demographics and try to figure out if there's any trends there.
I like to look at device type. So going to YouTube Studio, clicking advanced mode, and looking at device type, and seeing are we getting more views on a different device type to usual? Could that be a reason behind, you know, the extra viewership? Are we like, doing really well on this video on TV. Why could that be?
Well, maybe because this video is longer than our average videos and longer videos typically do better on TV. Or, you know, you can start to like build some hypothesis from that. I also like to look at the new viewer metric to see like what, you know, what number of views on this video were new viewers versus returning viewers, just to give us an idea of like, oh, maybe it's just because this video ended up resonating really well with new viewers. And then you can bring it back to yourself to ask yourself the question of why, why was that the case?
And obviously just like... studying the view trend over time as well. Did this get like a lot of views really quickly?
Or did it slowly build? Did it rank in search? Traffic sources, like where was that traffic coming from? So I'm sort of throwing out these different things I'll look at, but it all comes back to the fact that you're not going to have like a single thing that says, here's exactly why this went viral. So much of it is just looking at all the data points, looking at all you know about the video and how it performed, and taking that time to adequately reflect on it.
So many creators, they just like see something goes viral, and they just like spend like three seconds or, you know, thinking, oh, that went viral because of this. Let's just do more of that, you know, instead of like taking a bit of time to dig into it. So there's no data point.
There's no magic data point that gives you the reason the video went viral. But you can look at these things to sort of paint the picture. I always like that metaphor of like data kind of like can start to color in some of the picture, but you suddenly need to zoom out and look at the full picture and see, oh, here's why this video went viral.
We get a lot of people who ask me, hey, why did your video with Jenny Hoyos do so well? And it's like a hilarious question, because if I knew the answer to that, I would just do that every time. But, you know, it's about to cross three million views. And the one thing that I can point to and say this was definitively different about this video is it had a higher click through rate in the first 24 hours. And so now I just spin myself out saying, how do I get the best click through rate in the first 24 hours?
But it's so hard to know what combination of title and thumbnail amongst the stable of. titles and thumbnails we've thought about, which one will be the best one? How do you test packaging to try to find the best answer before you actually push it live on a video?
So I want to dig into this because this is really interesting because CTR itself is a very fickle and in some ways infuriating metric, where if you ask me, is CTR useful? I would say CTR as a metric, obviously like the... of people clicking on a video is extremely important. So sometimes when people say CTR is useless or not useful, then people take the wrong takeaway of saying, oh, thumbnails don't matter. It's just not how you think about it.
But CTR as an entire metric is very difficult because the more impressions the video gets, the lower the CTR drops typically. So you'll probably see even on that Jenny Hoyes video, over time that CTR has probably dropped quite a bit lower. But CTR itself as a whole is not very useful.
But CTR in the first hour first 24 hours can be a good predictor of success on videos like i've seen that for lots of our clients so when people say ctr is not useful at all i'd point to the fact that there's a very strong correlation between first hour ctr and long-term video performance on a lot of established channels um not all channels but quite often so i would look at it and say even with that video like you know title film now now everyone on youtube or pretty much everyone over the next few weeks is going to have abc testing so that's like going to be such a big unlock because you can make up a a couple of different options and like test your theories and action of like which one gets more clicks. I would actually with that video, let's just think about that video for a minute. I would dig a bit deeper though. Like, is it something you did with the design or is it something more to do with like the topic?
I think it's kind of interesting when you see Jenny and Jenny is like quite young, right? She's like 18, 17, 18. And she just seeing that, I think by nature that just makes it look a bit unique. Cause it's like this very young girl who has figured out like something really, really difficult and she's doing so well.
It's kind of like how there's videos where you see, you know, it's like bring it to the other side but like sometimes i've seen these videos where it's just like an old guy giving advice it's like old man gives advice you could probably show that thumb on screen old man gives advice and people ask why that video goes so well i'm like well because you don't usually scroll through your youtube feed and see this old guy you know giving advice and i think on the same level like this space like this space of content creation and like um you know you know coming up with strategy and youtube and how to grow i would say it's very i'd say it's generally quite male dominated, which I think is a shame because I love when I see like, more female people come in and talking about this niche as well. But it's quite male dominated. And it's also quite a lot of like, you know, guys a bit older, and you know, guys my age and above, don't sound like a boomer or anything.
But you know, I think some people like a little bit older, so you see this like, younger girl talking about something, it just makes it unique, right? And then also, I love how you titled it. And I love how you like, put that thumbnail text of like, I can make anything viral. I think those are the things I would look at.
So maybe it's more about the guest and more about, you know, the perception of that guest and like how you see that and how that makes it unique as opposed to like something specific you did in that packaging. So if I was you, I would start brainstorming like, is there like any other like really young, up and coming creators who have like figured it out at a young age? So for example, I know there's like these kids I've seen do podcasts that are like 16, 17, and they're making like 300K a month.
with like YouTube or Snapchat or something. And it's like, when you see that, you're like, part of you feels terrible because you're like, well, when I was 16, you know, I was making like $3 a month. So like, how did that happen? But I think there's something unique about that itself. So a great example, like digging deeper and like some people could look at that and just say, oh, this went viral because, oh, we placed the text a little bit to the right or we had this thing in the bottom corner, which we don't usually have, but it's much more likely around the actual topic.
the subject material, which is, I guess, the creator you're interviewing, and how you package that to the viewer, then like little details like that. Let's look at how you vet ideas. When I have an idea and I'm thinking, okay, I want this to hit my core casual new, I feel pretty good about that.
What are the next steps from there for how I prioritize certain video ideas that I have? Making sure, like, I always think about this idea of the idea funnel. So you have this big funnel that you put ideas into.
And the end result is your funnel spits out different ideas that you can then like prioritize based on what you're feeling most excited about. So like, how do we put things into the funnel? I always like to say there's three main sources of ideas, internal ideas.
So things that have worked for us in the past. So looking internally, like what has worked on our channel? Can we come up with more ideas like that?
External ideas, things that have worked for our competitors or even just other channels across YouTube. How can we come up with ideas based on things that have worked for them? and then innovation so just sort of more blue ocean like looking you know across youtube across different industries and saying like what's something innovative and new that i can come up with so if you're contributing lots of ideas into the funnel from those different sources you then pass through to the kind of the filter part which is your main question here is like how do we actually eliminate them down and i think you know asking ourselves does it have that core casual new viewer fit it's a great question and asking is it feasible to make happen So like if you went and did brainstorming, this is kind of funny when I work with like new strategists, because you know, I have to hire strategists for my business. And I also like interview and talk to a lot of like up and coming people. And first of all, I'll say like people are really good.
Like some of these young kids are such good strategists. And I think about YouTube really deeply. But the one thing they sometimes don't understand is like limitations and feasibility.
So they'll be like, let's, let's, you know, let's say we're brainstorming ideas for like a wildlife channel. And we could say, let's come up with an idea, which is like, I swam covered in blood with like 10 great white sharks. It's like, yeah, that would go viral, but it also might kill the creator.
So like, you know, we got to be careful. So like thinking about the feasibility of ideas is super important. So is this feasible?
Can we make it happen? Another one I get is like people come up with these ideas, but it's like, you know, if you brainstorm for your podcast and said like, how do we get to a million views? Well. If you had Mr. Beast on for an episode, you'd probably get to a million views, but that's also quite difficult because you need to, you know, get in contact with Jimmy.
You need to like convince him that it's a good idea. You probably need to grow this podcast more before he'd want to do it. So like there's all these like things that get in the way.
So like having that feasibility and using that as a score as well. is important so like does it have ccn fit is it feasible the title thumbnail as well like can we actually come up with title thumbnail like not only can we say yeah we can come up with it can we actually come up with one before we even go further with this like can we come up with the title we call it and like a rough sketch of the thumbnail that can like eliminate so if you have 100 ideas in the funnel maybe the ccn fit you eliminate like 40 of them because so many videos don't have that feasibility you eliminate like 20 of them so you've got like 40 left right then you say can i come up with title thumbnails for them before you know it out of those 40 you have left Now you're looking and saying, well, only half of these, I can actually think of what I would title a film album. So you've got 20 left. And then some other questions you could ask, like, am I actually genuinely as a creator excited and want to make this video? Because some people are surprised when I say that, because I am like I mentioned earlier, like a views maximizer, someone that just wants to get more views.
But if, if I think about if our goal is to get more views, it's not going to really work really well. If I keep making the credit or make these ideas, they don't like doing, because at some point they're just going to want to not do that anymore. They're going to get burnt out.
So long-term, that's going to hurt us. So it's still important that the creator feels passionate and excited about them. So even for you yourself as a creator, just looking at it and saying, am I excited to interview this person? Am I excited to do this thing?
Does this make me want to make the content? Maybe then you've got 20 ideas left and that limits it down to 10. Then when it comes to the 10, I always like to do this thing, which I call the one-page idea development. So on a one-pager, I like to have just a rough thumbnail sketch. I like to have a rough title. So you have a thumbnail sketch, rough title.
I like to have... a Y square. The Y square, I just like to list one or two or three points of like why this video is going to work. And then I like to just roughly list out like the log line of the videos, like roughly what the video is going to be about. So if I have 10 ideas left, I'm developing each one of those 10 ideas and those one pages.
Again, I can already hear people saying that's so much work. I've done, I can do 10 one page ideas in like an hour or two, you know, especially when you think about the ideas being such a source for. views and momentum across the whole channel.
Like we can spare an hour or two to develop out these ideas. You know, they deserve that at least. So I've developed them out in this one page where I have 10 ideas.
Then I just like to look at it myself. I like to ask, you know, if I've got employees or if I have like other people that are in my niche or just friends, I just like to then present those ideas. So instead of getting on a call and saying, Hey, I'm thinking about doing this idea where we swim with a great white shark.
It's like, here's the idea. Here's the log line. What do you think? Here's the idea.
Here's the log line. What do you think? And just going through and asking different people's opinions, like even you know myself i think i have like a good measure of what a great video is for the different clients we work with but without that like ability to just ask others opinion you're just going to be isolated and you're going to you know focus too much on your ego and like what you think is right so even i really like to ask just random people like even just like sometimes they get surprised but like maybe there's like a random new editor on a team and i'll be like what do you think this idea and they're like i don't know i'm just i just started here i'm like no what do you think Can you imagine this one being interesting? So asking lots of opinions, and then maybe you're left with three or four videos that you want to prioritize, and you develop them from there.
What do you think people are dead wrong about with the current state of YouTube? Either they have the wrong belief, or they completely miss something that is happening that they should be paying attention to. I would say the biggest sort of hot take I have on YouTube, which shouldn't be a hot take, but it is based on how most people think about it, is...
there is no meta. There's no like one way, one meta to do YouTube. And I feel that oftentimes a lot of people try to like declare the new direction content is going in.
Like all content is moving towards storytelling or all content is moving towards longer videos. Or, you know, we've got this guy, Sam Sulik, if you've seen him, like people are like, look at Sam Sulik, it shows that thumbnails is dead. I even saw this tweet recently where someone was like, the thumbnail bubble is about to burst because like, you can see like. Some of these thumbnails on like Sam Suluk and like other channels are like focusing on doing less editing, less thumbnail design. But all these things kind of fail to realize how big YouTube is.
Five, 10 years ago, there was people that focused on storytelling and made really long videos that were doing well. In five to 10 years from now, there'll be people that make two or three minute videos and don't focus on storytelling that be doing well. There's just so much. YouTube is so expansive that there's no one way to make content. There's no one meta.
and yet people always just try to say oh it's mr beastified but even during the peak of what you could call mr beastification on youtube where everyone was complaining about you mr beast has ruined youtube if you actually studied the trending videos and the most viral videos on youtube about five to ten percent you could classify as mr beastified videos you know so even in this like bubble of everything being this big spectacle it's still only accounted for like five or ten percent of the trending videos and that's only That's what the trending videos, if you look across YouTube, it's probably still only one or 2% of all YouTube viewership is focused on that kind of content. So that's not downplaying the impact of trends. That's not downplaying the fact that yes, we are moving into a world right now where YouTube videos are getting a bit longer. And people are putting in more storytelling and leaving out, you know, leaving the sort of really fast retention editing.
house a bit more. But that's still just a trend. It's not the meta, you know, so like, there's no one way to do YouTube. There's no one meta things are super, super varied. To continue learning from Patty, check out our first conversation where we talk even more about his process for coming up with good ideas and thumbnails.
It's quite literally the interview that changed this channel. So make sure you grab your notebook.