1h 23m 10 min read 133,929
How To Get Subscribers On YouTube 2022
Chris Do breaks down the seven-year journey to 1.8 million subscribers, revealing the Shorts strategy that added 800,000 in one year.
Chris Do
Founder, The Futur™ · December 11, 2021
Anatomy of an Explosion
In one day, The Futur gained over 17,000 YouTube subscribers. For context, it took the channel two full years of consistent work to earn its first 9,800.
Read that again.
Two years of effort were eclipsed by a single 24-hour period. In one week, the channel added 81,000 net new subscribers, a number that took the first three years of its existence to achieve. This was not a fluke. It was the result of a deliberate, if initially uncertain, strategic shift.
Chris Do, founder of The Futur, saw his channel grow by 800,000 subscribers in 2021 alone. That single year’s growth nearly equaled the total of the previous six years combined. While subscribers surged by 241% year over year, views skyrocketed by 640%, from 17.8 million to an astonishing 114 million. A new, much broader audience was discovering the channel for the first time.
The engine behind this exponential growth was not a complex marketing funnel or a massive ad budget. It was a single, focused bet on 60-second vertical videos.
It was a bet on YouTube Shorts.
This explosion in reach, however, did not translate to a proportional explosion in revenue. Ad revenue only increased by 26%, a clear indicator that the primary value of Shorts is audience growth, not direct monetization. As Do notes, “If your primary revenue source and primary focus is to grow revenue, you’re probably not going to be doing it with shorts.”
Different strategy, different outcome. For The Futur, the goal was growth, and the results were undeniable. But this “overnight” success was seven years in the making, built on a foundation of failure, feedback, and relentless iteration.
Big Things Have Humble Beginnings
The Futur would not exist without an act of generosity. In 2014, designer and educator Jose Caballer pulled a reluctant Chris Do, then 42 and running a successful motion design agency, in front of a camera.
The beginning was not glamorous. The first videos were shot on an all-white set, a stylistic choice from Do’s commercial background. He was tense, his jaw locked, a stark contrast to Caballer’s natural on-screen energy. “I got through it, I survived, and I kept doing it,” Do recalls.
The numbers reflected the struggle. In the entire year of 2014, the channel’s highest-performing video earned a lifetime total of 2,642 views. A good day meant 30 to 40 views. Do would check his stats each morning, excited by the smallest increments. The early days were a lesson in persistence.
“Don't get bogged down by the numbers,” Do advises aspiring creators. “A lot of us are creating content, we don't have that instant hit, instant success, instant fame and love and audience.”
The first year was a slog. The content was unfocused. Do and Caballer, both experienced teachers, believed they could simply wing it, brainstorming topics in the morning and hitting record. The approach was not working.
The most critical feedback came from Do’s wife. Her review was blunt and loving. “Honey, I love you, but your videos are unwatchable. I cannot watch them. They're a total mess.”
It was the feedback no one else would give, and it was invaluable. Do realized they needed to stop selling and start teaching. They needed structure. He proposed a new process: build a Keynote presentation, plan the talking points, and use real-world examples to educate, not just talk.
This led to a video a few months later, “Identity Design and Branding.” In one month, it gained nearly a third of the views their top video had taken an entire year to accumulate. Something was changing. The shift from improvisation to structured education was the first major turning point.
Embrace The Suck
To succeed in a new and challenging endeavor, you must accept that you will be bad at it first. Expecting great results from the start is a recipe for failure. Do calls this philosophy Embrace The Suck. It’s the mindset required to survive the initial, awkward phase of any new skill.
He visualizes this process as the “Wheel of Suck,” a journey from the outer edge of self-doubt to the core of enjoyment.
- It starts with the feeling: “I have nothing to say and what I'm doing is really stupid.”
- Once you overcome that, you find something to say, but then realize: “Nobody shows up.”
- After someone shows up, you face the next challenge: “One person said it was dumb.” Dealing with negative feedback is a critical filter. A principle Do explores in his whiteboard session on criticism.
- This culminates in the dark night of the soul: “This sucks, why am I wasting my time?”
This is the valley where most people quit. But for those who push through, something remarkable happens. Someone shows up who likes what you do. Then another. And suddenly, it starts to be fun. You must navigate layers of disappointment before you get to the reward.
By 2016, Do was finding his stride. The video “My First Design Portfolio” gained over 162,000 views. In it, he structured a lecture around clear, visual slides, explaining concepts like the “T-shaped creative” and the importance of niching down.
He told creatives to stop using endless slashes in their titles: photographer/director/juggler/dog walker. “I don't know what to think of you,” he explains, “and because I'm confused, my brain hurts, I'm moving on.” He argued for focus: pick a lane, claim it, and prove you can do that one thing well. It's a foundational idea for anyone looking to build a personal brand that stands out.
The advice resonated because it was practical and backed by his own experience as a studio owner who had 60 seconds to review a portfolio. He even shared his own embarrassing student work, bridging the gap between beginner and professional and making the advice feel attainable.
The $1,800 Bet
The video that truly changed the channel’s trajectory was born from an intense, unscripted moment. In 2017, Do was leading a live workshop. An audience member, a professor named Jung, was adamant about one question: how much do you charge for a logo?
Do promised to get to it, but as the lecture continued, Jung’s persistence grew. The energy in the room became electric. When Do finally addressed the question, the resulting back-and-forth was aggressive, passionate, and incredibly valuable. It was a raw, real-time demonstration of value-based pricing. As they finished filming, Do turned to his producer. “I think that’s the episode.”
The multi-part series was released, and the key segment, “Pricing Design Work and Creativity,” began to get some traction, but not what Do expected. He believed the content was too valuable to be ignored. “I'm delivering so much value here, why aren't people watching this?”
He decided to give it a push. He asked his colleague, a former Google employee named Mark Contreras, to run a YouTube ad campaign, allocating $50 a day to boost the video. Then, he forgot to tell him to turn it off.
They ended up spending $1,800 over roughly 50 days. It was a significant amount for a channel that wasn't generating income. But that investment turned into a firestarter. Do’s theory is that the ads pushed the video to the right audience, which led to it being picked up by major design blogs like Design Taxi and Digital Synopsis.
The organic growth that followed was massive. A video that was doing “just okay” suddenly spiked, hitting over 6,800 views in a single day, an unheard-of number for the channel at the time. To this day, it remains one of The Futur’s top-performing long-form videos. Do calls it “probably the best eighteen hundred dollars I've ever spent in my life.” This specific strategy is a core tenet Do returns to in his detailed talk on how he went from charging $500 to $100,000.
The lesson is clear: if you have a piece of content you truly believe in, don't be afraid to put money behind it. A strategic, targeted boost can be the spark that ignites a wildfire.
The Content Trinity
As the channel grew, Do began to codify what makes content successful. The inspiration for the next evolution came from an unlikely source: a video by Derek Muller on his channel, Veritasium, titled “My Video Went Viral. Here's Why.”
Do noticed two things. First, the title was optimized for how people actually search, not for proper English. “Video viral” are the keywords, placed at the front. “This is not English class,” Do states. “This is about understanding how people search.”
Second, Muller used a low-fi, charmingly handcrafted flip chart to explain complex ideas. He physically interacted with his graphics, cutting lines with scissors and revealing information like a magician. This dynamic, performance-based presentation style was far more engaging than a static talking head. It humanized the content.
This led Do to develop his own take on the format with his whiteboard sessions, and to a larger framework he calls the Trinity of Viral Videos. He believes breakout content often combines three elements:
- Utility: The content is useful. It teaches the viewer how to do something that will better their life.
- Expertise: The lesson is delivered by a credible expert. We love watching people who are masters of their craft, whether it's a chef, a bricklayer, or a business strategist.
- Trend: The content connects to something happening in pop culture right now. It hooks into a larger, existing conversation.
A pastry chef (expertise) teaching you how to bake cookies (utility) shaped like Spider-Man (trend) right before a new movie release is the magic formula. Combine that with a strong personal voice and good storytelling, and you have a potential hit.
To ensure the story itself lands, Do follows another framework: The 5 C's of Content Creation. This is the structural blueprint for a compelling long-form video.
- Cold Open: Start with a dramatic, out-of-context clip from later in the video. A “what the fudge” moment that grabs attention immediately.
- Context: Ask big, rhetorical “why” questions. Why does this matter? Why should you care? Why should you listen to me? Set the agenda and pique curiosity.
- Content: Deliver the core insight, ideally through the framework of a story. A story needs a character who wants something but faces an obstacle. This creates conflict and makes the lesson memorable.
- Conclusion: Summarize the key takeaways. Tell the audience what they just learned, reinforcing the main points.
- Call: End with a clear call to action. Ask a question to invite engagement in the comments, which helps with the algorithm.
This structure transformed The Futur’s content from meandering chats into focused, high-value educational experiences—a process essential for anyone trying to build content people actually react to.
The Shorts Revolution
The idea to go all-in on YouTube Shorts didn't come from an internal strategy session. It came from a conversation with fellow creator Bryan Elliott of the channel “Behind the Brand.” After a podcast recording, Elliott urged Do to take advantage of Shorts, a format YouTube was pushing hard to compete with TikTok.
The instructions were simple: keep videos under 60 seconds, use the #shorts hashtag, and get on it fast. Do immediately delegated the task to his team. Their mission: find the best moments from The Futur’s vast archive of long-form content and cut them into 60-second clips.
At first, nothing happened. The Shorts were getting minimal views. They felt like zombies: technically alive, but showing no signs of life. The team grew skeptical. During a content meeting, they questioned the strategy, pointing to the poor performance and asking if they should stop.
Do was also disappointed but urged them to keep going, drawing on the memory of the channel's early days. This was another test of persistence.
This is a classic example of what author Seth Godin calls The Dip. In his book of the same name, Godin illustrates that after an initial period of excitement and easy gains, any worthwhile pursuit enters a long, frustrating trough where effort seems to yield no results. This is where most people quit. But mastery and success lie on the other side of that dip.
The Futur was in the dip.
Twenty-five days after the team wanted to quit, one of the Shorts went thermonuclear. The view count started climbing so fast that the YouTube analytics couldn't keep up. “The video was being viewed so much that I could not keep up with the number count,” Do remembers. “It was blasting through the roof.”
Seven years into making content, The Futur had its first truly viral hit. That one video now has over 41 million views. It was the catalyst for the 17,000-subscriber day and the 81,000-subscriber week. Nine of the top ten most-viewed videos in 2021 were Shorts.
The lesson was profound. The platform was rewarding a specific type of content, and by aligning with that trend, The Futur was able to reach an exponentially larger audience than ever before.
The Playbook for Growth
The journey from 30 views a day to 17,000 subscribers in a day was not an accident. It was an evolution, guided by a few core principles.
First, embrace the long game. Success is not instant. It requires enduring the early years of obscurity and embracing the awkwardness of being a beginner.
Second, listen to feedback, especially when it’s hard to hear. Structure is the difference between a rambling, unwatchable video and a powerful, effective lesson. Plan your content.
Third, when you create something with real value, be prepared to amplify it. A small, strategic ad spend can provide the initial velocity needed to achieve organic escape velocity.
Finally, pay attention to the platform. YouTube wanted to compete with TikTok, so it prioritized Shorts. Aligning your content strategy with the platform's goals is the ultimate cheat code for reach.
The growth isn’t in the vanity metrics. It’s in the willingness to show up, do the work, survive the dip, and make the right bet at the right time.
Your audience is waiting. You just have to earn the right to reach them.
TRANSCRIPT
what's up everybody hello donation futurists weirdos you know who you are and of course the donuts today we're going to be talking about how to get subscribers 2021 it's end of the year it's an opportunity for us to reflect and share what we've learned share some stories get a little nostalgic with all
of you and to talk about something that's been really incredible the use of shorts in accelerating propelling the growth of the channel believe it or not we got over 17 000 subscribers in one day one day and that's really significant because our channel is not one where we're used to having viral hits
it's just teaching people design concepts how to run their business things about sales and marketing so it's pretty cool and also considering how long it took us to get to 17 000 subscribers in the first place and and that's really significant for us so it's the year-end review we're gonna do a deep
dive so buckle up this is not a short i hope you will learn something especially if you're interested in growing your youtube channel before i go any further don't forget to like comment subscribe and hit the bell for notifications it's going to make sure the algorithm shows us a little bit of love
so even if you just type in hello in the comments as you're watching this video it's going to just make sure other people like yourself can't see it now i want to start off with a little story i would not be here today if it wasn't for the act of generosity from one
man in particular his name is jose caballere and in 2014 in january we released our first video together and i was 42 years old running a different company creating con not creating content creating commercials and music videos so this was a strange thing for me i was very reluctant to do this and
he brought me into this world so i just want to say thank you to him and also thank you to all of you who tuned in to give us a shot so that we we could find our content legs if you will because it was rough in the beginning and so i'm looking
back and there's this moment here that here he he and i are and there's you can see a little scruff underneath my chin there i was a little tired because you could see a little redness in my eyes but jose and i we had a really good time making content together okay here's
the 30 000 foot view of the subscriber growth like we're really gonna take a macro look at it and then we're gonna go zoom on in okay so from 2014 to 2021 here's how the subscribers look on a graph i like graphs it allows us to see the information really clearly and you
can see in 2014 according to this graph you could barely see any green mark there because the number of subscribers were so low what's really interesting is you kind of see the slow and steady progression until 2021 something wonderful has happened here if you add up all the years the six previous years
from 2014 to 2020 you'll see that it kind of almost adds up to 2021. that's because in 2021 we grew by 800 000 subscribers so right right now we're at 1.8 we fell a little bit short of hitting 2 million subscribers but i'm not complaining yet jonah not complaining yet okay so here's
what it looks like year over year how do we do this year compared to last year and as they dive deeper into this if you can deal with the math and the numbers i'm going to share some content tips what we've learned along the way so you're going to want to stick around
for that towards the end okay so here's how it looks like in terms of year-over-year performance from january to december 6th is basically when we have the metrics we uploaded 104 videos last year as opposed to 293 videos this year so it's almost up by three times as many 281 percent increase in
uploads and that's would not be possible without the inclusion of shorts obviously look at what's happening here with the views from 17.8 million to 114 million views that's a 640 increase in views alone and i'm thrilled about that what that means is we're bringing in a whole new audience who know nothing about
the future they have no idea who this asian bald guy is with the snapback cap and the wallet chain and so they're giving me a hard time but that's okay because that's what growth is about so we're welcoming all these new people into the channel and hopefully they'll stick around to learn other
things from us look at the subscriber growth here 337 000 in in the previous year as opposed to 814 000. so there's a 241 increase and unfortunately the revenue didn't increase there this is the one that's kind of the most off right you see we're having double triple digit growth here but then
in terms of ad revenue we've only grown by 26 percent there's a good reason why many of our die hard long long-term fans are wondering where's all the long-form content gone like it's all gone it's just all shorts now all the time and they missed that well it turns out you can't really
generate a lot of ad revenue on shorts yet there's some some other things going on i can't talk about but there's some other things going on here so we're going to be coming back with some long-form whiteboard sessions because we like the growth we like bringing in the new audience but if your
primary revenue source and primary focus is to grow revenue you're probably not going to be doing it with shorts so that's something to note all right let's zoom in a little bit our best single day performance in 2021 came here and look at these numbers here april 29 2021 we grew by 17
000 subscribers you can see that graph it's it's kind of almost flat line and then it climbs all the way up like everest and it peaks right there and something really cool happened on that day funny thing was we were uploading shorts and i was having a conversation with my friend mo who's
been on the channel many times and i was telling mo mo one of the shorts is really hidden right now it's got like 50 000 views since i since i checked and he goes chris i'm looking through youtube i don't see anything with 50 000 i see something with 120 000 views and
i was really delighted because i thought maybe two of the shorts we released it and it was growing really fast but as i went back and i checked i could not find the video that mo was referring to that i had that had 120 000 views on it because the one i saw
i had a 160 000 views and then it dawned on me that the the video was being viewed so much so that i could not keep up for the first time with the number count it was blasting through the roof and it was so so awesome to see i think it is our
first bonafide viral hit seven years into content creation we finally got our first hit so we're a late bloomer there so here's a stat to look at something to consider it took us two years of consistent content creation to reach 9 800 subs almost 10 000 subs compared to one day getting almost
double the number of subs two years versus one day all because of shorts and we're going to talk about shorts quite a bit so my point of view on this is i'm very bullish on shorts if you want to grow your channel if you want to reach a broader audience learn how to
tell 60 second stories the reason why is because like many social platforms youtube has to keep up they have to compete against tick tock tick tock is just destroying the world right now and so that's why you're seeing a push from instagram reels and youtube shorts and i'm sure if there's another platform
to talk about they're going going to also be doing vertical video in the second 60 second clips all right the best single week performance in 2021 came from this week here and uh what week is this this is april 28th to may 4th in a seven day period we grew by 81 000
subscribers brand new subscribers this is netgain pretty awesome so the next stat to share with you is it took us an entire three years from 2014 to 16 to get to 61 000 subs as opposed to just doing it in one week so this is again phenomenal just a remarkable result here three
years versus one week all from shorts i think you get the pattern here right okay so how do we get here before i can do that we need to take a trip back to the future of course and i want to share some of the stories some of the highlights and some of
the learnings and this is probably the most comprehensive video that we produce on how to grow on youtube so again it's going to be a deep dive i i love sharing this i think it's a line from um prometheus where the um i forget his name now but he's like holding up a
little dot this kind of little seedling of an alien and he says big things have humble beginnings and i think that's that's kind of in the spirit of jose not getting together putting our creative minds and making content so some of the behind the scenes photos here this is one of my former
employees andrew trung who's an amazing cinematographer and you can see there the set it's that all white set and we're shooting everything in black and white and it was just kind of a stylistic thing coming from my motion design commercial background there so here's some some stills from episode one some really awkward
intense moments for me at least jose was used to making content he's the adhd loud puerto rican obnoxious guy who can talk to anybody for any reason for any length of time and i'm sitting here the whole time with my jaw tents unlocked up but i got through it i survived and i
kept doing it so this is the very first video that he and i produced together on youtube so it's my first youtube video it's the inaugural video the debut of uh me on youtube so let's look at some numbers here from 2014. you'll see here in the entire year of 2014 our highest
performing episode was this one called trends the design industry it got a whopping 2 642 views not a day not a week but lifetime this took a whole year to get to 2642 views i share that because i'm going to make a point of this a little bit later because a lot of
us are creating content we don't have that instant hit instant success instant fame and love and audience and community that gathers around our feet and says oh my god give us more of this it took a lot of work and to be persistent and consistent to be able to get where we're at
today so i want to share that with any aspiring creator out there don't get bogged down by the numbers don't get bogged down by the numbers okay thank you very much jay rebults for the super chat there i appreciate you um those early days in a single day we might get 30 to
40 views and i was really excited i remember every night i would go to bed and then i would wake up in the morning and check the stats like oh we got 50 views today so excited it's like christmas day for me okay now you'll notice here as i scan down in 2014
in november i created a different video this one was called identity design and branding and you notice here from november to december just one month it almost got one-third of the views of the video that we dropped in january so something was going on so there's a whole story behind this okay this
is a picture of my wife this is her being cute and adorable she's not always that way at least in the way she talks to me but she had watched my videos and she said to me honey i love you but your videos are unwatchable i cannot watch them they're a total mess
they're going all over the place and i just can't keep track of what is being said and i heard that i felt that i know she loves me i know she supports me and she wants me to do well so this is valuable feedback because no one else is going to tell me
this kind of stuff so i i went back to jose and i talked to him i said you know what here's what we got to do at this point in time we were just winging all of our episodes we would brainstorm in the morning write down some ideas because we were both teachers
we both do lectures that we could just wing this and so i said you know what the next time we need to do preparation we need to build a keynote we have to plan on what we want to talk about and we want to shift away from using youtube to sell our products
and services this is really not the purpose of this video let's do this experiment together it is really to teach and explain and share the things that we know the things we do in workshops and in classrooms already let's try that and let's include some real life examples to help educate people and
so this is some of the slides from that episode that was the beginning of a shift in the way that we made content you can see here there's a whole structure to the slides there's there's explanations like i mentioned before there's examples and what we were able to do was uh in not
giving up and trying different ideas having someone give us valuable feedback i was able to not quit that first year because the numbers were terrible so one concept i want all of you to really to get your head wrapped around is to embrace the suck everything that you do in the very beginning
when you're doing something new and different you're going to be bad at it to to enter into a situation where you're doing something new and different and challenging and to expect great results you're only setting yourself up for failure so embraces suck just to say this is supposed to be difficult it's going
to feel awkward i'm not going to like the way i look i'm not going to like the way i sound and i'm going to make a whole bunch of mistakes and be okay with that and if you can embrace that then you're going into the whole content creation process with the right mindset
so i would like to present to you the wheel of suck all right where we start on the outside and we have these ideas and it's like i have nothing to say and what i'm doing is really stupid and no one's gonna care and then as you descend in towards the center before
it gets to the part where it gets fun you're probably gonna have feelings like i said something and and and no one cares so first i get over the fact that i had nothing to say and it's stupid and now i've embraced that i have something to say but nobody shows up and
then you dive in one layer deeper and it's like one person said it was dumb and you're gonna have to deal with that so you're gonna have to deal with the negative feedback and then as you dive in deeper you're gonna probably feel something like this sucks why am i wasting my time
so it's kind of like the wheel equivalent of the dark night of the soul where you sit there in the fetal position wondering what you're doing but if you can push through through all that stuff eventually someone shows up and they actually like what you do and you start to have fun you
got to get through a lot of layers of setbacks and disappointment before it gets fun okay now we're going to jump to 2015. you can see the cadence here i'm not going to spend as much time on each year but certain years have different stories i'm going to share them with you so
the highest performing video of all of 2015 is this video where my wife says okay i can't watch your content so we get serious jose and i although not perfect we get together we make this video and now you can see it's at the top of the charts for us and now you
can see some significant jump in the performance of the video this video now in this year has 58 000 views and that is a big number for design channel where jose and i are still trying to figure out what the heck we're doing and who we are serving so those are good numbers
there in 2016 a new video supplants it and that video is called my first design portfolio again i took the time to organize my thoughts build some slides make it visual and this one got 162 thousand and in 812 views pretty good you can see a lot of progress being made here and
this is the snapshot of the keynote slide so that you can see kind of what it looks like i'm talking about the t skill a concept that we've been talking about at the office but we haven't really shared with a lot of people and for some people who aren't privy to these kinds
of design conversations it was new it was a novel they were learning something and we were talking about niching down and finding focus going a mile deep and an inch wide and things started to make sense and i was looking at it from the point of view of a motion design studio i'm
going to hire you you've got about 60 seconds for me to figure out if you're worth a second look or a deeper dive if i don't see what i'm looking for in the first 60 seconds i'm going to be gone hence the nick cage gone in 60 seconds reference there and a lot
of creatives make this mistake you put too many things on a website you use too many slashes in your titles i'm a photographer slash art director slash cg slash photo retoucher slash juggler slash dog walker i don't know what to think of you and because i'm confused my brain hurts i'm moving on
so i still to this day recommend for most of you that are starting out pick a lane find a focus be proud of that claim it and then start to prove that you can do this thing and you're going to find a lot more work opportunities and this episode worked i i think
also because i had to go into the archives and pull out some of my student work you're seeing my student portfolio here so it's kind of nice to be able to to book in a career and show you show people like this is what i'm doing today and this is what i did
when i was out of school and and see the gap and hopefully not be totally ashamed of the work that you do when you're in school 2017 i'm jumping here to next year this video is the beginning of the game changer this is a video called pricing design work and creativity it got
half almost half a million views and something really cool so i'm gonna zoom in a little bit more on this video in particular many of you who know the channel who know my my ugly face know me because of this video i've been stopped in the philippines i've been stopped uh in in
tokyo in in kyoto in all over the world people are like you're the guy who talks about the logo right the guy the the security guy at the airport's like i've seen your video it's this one so this is the one that's got the the widest audience and it was a it was
a combination of a couple different things i was doing a hybrid whiteboard live teaching and this is something that i'm really used to and comfortable with it allows me to combine my my love and my passion for drawing on a board and diagramming things and trying to make complex ideas simple and easy
to understand it was a combination of me having a prepared lecture and then doing an open format ama style thing there's a gentleman in the audience his name is junghang and he's a professor at cal state northridge he has since passed away best way of cancer so god rest her soul but jung
was just super adamant about asking me a question and he had been bugging me before the before the workshop started during and afterwards and he was like chris i want to know how much you charge for logo because this is the kind of work i do and i could definitely use some training
some skills and some some new tricks if you will and i kept telling jung please be patient i have a lecture i'm going to get to it so we take a little break and john's like are you going to talk about this or not like i will i will i finished the lecture
and so now like like a tea kettle steam was building up in his eyes and he's like chris i want to know how much you charge for a logo and so at this point the energy and the motion in the room was like really getting amped up and i was getting amped up
and so what transpires afterwards is kind of a little aggressive style teaching admit it it's not usually how i want to teach but i'm i'm vulnerable i'm susceptible to these emotional moments myself i know the robot has emotions from time to time and we got into it and after we finished recording i
turned to aaron zekely who's been with the channel for a number of years but not not until today i was like aaron i think that's the episode cut this thing for me and so this winds up being a multi-part video and i think it's part three of the series and this is the
part that catches and something weird happens you know and when i say it catches it got like 30 000 views not not a ton of views and i was a little frustrated i was thinking man i'm delivering so much value here why aren't people watching this and i couldn't figure it out at
this point in time mark contreras uh was working with us and he's a former youtuber and i'm sorry google employee and i asked mark mark i want to boost this video i want to pay people so that they can watch this video and learn and make some money i think it's a good
video it just needs a little help so this is what we decide to do mark runs the youtube ad campaign if you don't know this you can boost your videos to show it to an audience that you target there's a lot of ways to do that i don't want to get into it
mostly because i don't know how to do it but mark did it i didn't realize it though because i was just telling him spend 50 bucks a day right i'll pay 50 bucks a day and what happens is i forget to tell him to turn it off and he didn't ask me so
at some point i'm like mark are we still running this campaign he goes yeah did you want me to turn it off like dude we're spending a lot of money on this thing and we make no money on youtube at this point keep this in mind and so we wound up spending eighteen
hundred dollars to get people to watch this video from a period of january to february of 2017. we recorded this video i think in november october i can't remember there's a stat somewhere and it was just doing okay right so what had happened here by boosting this video it's my theory i have
no evidence of this is that it reached a broader audience it got picked up by two blogs in particular design taxi and digital synopsis and these two wrote an article and they have a really big audience and i think this is what happened so you see here in the timeline i'm trying to
figure this thing out here yeah so in october of 2016 we released this video and it doesn't do a lot and during this period of january to february for about 50 days we boosted it and you can see little spikes of activity it's not going crazy but i think what happens is by
targeting the right audience right people see it one person shares with another and then it starts to really take off which is where that big spike comes from and you'll see there that the first big spike we get 6828 views in one day remember in 2014 a good day for us was 50
to 100 views per day and now we're getting massive numbers and you can see these two big tidal wave spikes there so a very viable strategy for you is if you have a really good piece of content whether it's a long form one a short one it doesn't matter is to consider boosting
it and targeting a specific audience i would invite mark next time to do a video with me to teach you how to target the different techniques that you can use because that was probably the best eighteen hundred dollars i've ever spent in my life and i've made good investments in my life so
it's a big statement there because this starts to change the entire channel and the trajectory of what happens and how the future is possible all right closer look thank you very much for the super chat so i'm also monitoring the super chat here so uh this person is asking did your average watch
time decrease significantly significantly from transitioning mainly to shorts if so did this hurt your organic reach or your longer eight minute okay a closer look i'm going to answer this question you're going to have all those answers all those questions answered because shorts has made a huge impact on our channel so i'll
get into that a little bit all right so another significant milestone in the history of the channel is in quarter one of 2017 jose and i we don't see eye to eye in the content the production so we're going to go our separate ways uh lovingly and and still as friends so the
school becomes a new entity we become now the future both urls exist so if you ever wind up on youtube and you're like why is it say the school i don't know why but youtube works that way but so jose and i go a different way and i share this because there's that
moment where you and your mentor don't work together anymore he's the person that brought me into this world and here i am kind of trying to do it on my own so you you take that kind of little hit of confidence like am i going to be able to do this and will
will i have the energy will our audience still welcome me into their living rooms or into their laptops and for a while a lot of people kept asking this question where's jose what happened to jose what's going on with you two can you guys get back together and make content again and that
was not in the cards for us because we are better as friends not so good as business partners and and and that's why that needed to happen i'm happy to report once we got over that initial year from the breakup i think the new audience came in and they didn't know of any
anything else and so they're welcoming and as they say the rest is history 2018 okay not a significant amount of growth here and we're seeing similar numbers a little higher but still doing really well this video is still performing well and this little sleeper hit this little sleeper video my first portfolio is
also performing really well 2019 you see a pattern here that one video where we spent 1800 whatever i said we spent is consistently ranked number one in terms of getting the most views for that year another video that started popping up there as you can see the topography manual which was a really
awesome project for me to be able to teach typography and to use motion design and to bring it to life and to work with two collaborate two collaborators um leo ding from redcat he's based out of vietnam if you want to look him up he's an amazing animator he runs a company and
my friend and former employee adam sanborn who's a composer he wrote the music leo did the animation i did design and it was an awesome way to kind of get something out there that i think still stands up for me as a really good piece of content you'll also see down here uh
this other video here how to get 10 000 followers on instagram in one week this video even though being released towards the end of the year in november 6 of 2019 there's a whole story behind this one it started to shoot up there it got 304 000 views so anytime you see a
new video spike or an old video spike you have to pay attention to what's going on in the world what do people want and you need to be able to respond to that so i'm a data guy i really like seeing this kind of stuff and so when i see something move i
move the team i move the content to meet people where they're at this is really important okay there's a story behind this video and the inspiration comes from another channel called veritasium they have about 11 million subscribers very enviable subscriber account and i was watching this video somehow it popped up on my
feed it's called my video went viral here's why first of all i'll let you know this is an excellent title also a very good thumbnail but the content is what really got me so my video went viral this is appealing to my self-interest i want to create viral videos and theoretically he's going
to say here's why you also notice the title starts with really what we want and it's not phrased in proper english right you might have written this as here's why my video went viral but you're losing on the keywords right you want to take advantage of youtube's predictive text or a search so
that when you type in video viral those words need to be near the front so when you're thinking of your title and we'll talk about this a little bit more don't worry about proper english but think about how people actually search they don't type in in complete sentences so this is this is
tip number one for you here okay so this is for for all of you watching and for my team who's sitting like well i was told in english class that you knew you could never write a sentence like this this is not english class this is about understanding how people search so if
you if you look at how you search that's how you need to title your videos this is what the video looks like there's a veritasium guy super smart scientist person how to go viral that's a thumbnail and it's really cool because you see a hand done graphic behind him and you see these
red bars it's almost like i got to see what's behind the red there must be some kind of secret here as i'm watching him film which i in what i presume to be his living room i've noticed something here he's talking about concepts and he has this flip chart old school flip chart
with homemade graphics hand lettering and there's something really charming about that when i'm watching a video i can't help but to notice my god somebody spent a lot of time making these kind of crafty looking not super polished graphics and interactive elements on the right there you can see that he actually takes
a pair of scissors and cuts the line between the big person and the audience really interesting so he's making his graphics interactive i also think when when you watch something that has a hand done element a lot of casey neistat's videos you'll see this we just appreciate that a human being in their
hands made something so i'm i'm more of a fan of like slick graphics but i can see the visual appeal and we respect that somebody spent a lot of time making it and we'll just check it out just because of that i also think that's a reason why in this day and age
with cg graphics that people still love stop-motion animation because it feels human okay and so when i'm seeing this i'm also thinking a couple different things like right now you see my face or you see jonah cutting away to a visual but you're not seeing my face against the visual and we're not
interacting so when you want to make a video like this having someone reveal things to you almost like a magician like check out what's in my hand and then check out what's over here we're kind of seeing a performance piece and we're seeing someone literally interact with the graphics behind them and around
them and i think that creates a lot of visual variety so it's not just a talking head or someone with their hands talking to you like this and so that gave me this idea and you'll see like what ultimately we did if you ever watch that video okay and there's a story behind
that and so i think that there is this trinity trinity of like how videos or why videos do really well and i'm still working on this so this is subject to change so there's a giant asterisk and disclaimer here i think videos that do really well especially as we're getting into second third
maybe even fourth generation youtube creators now is there's an element of utility this is useful to me i can learn to do something and i'm gonna better my life because of this but if you do that and only that it can be very boring if you think back to grade school and you
see these demos and these lectures done by by your professors who weren't very engaging what do you do the utility part draws too much energy from your brain and you fall asleep okay if you can if you combine and integrate expertise your personal expertise if you're a scientist a chef if you're a
gardener if you are carpenter if you teach me something but you're also an expert at it that elevates the video and we like to see people who are really good at their job in fact there's a bunch of tick tocks and other things like on reels where you see people who are just
like really good at folding boxes or making donuts or something or laying down some bricks the the combination of utility and your personal expertise make for a very satisfying experience last part of this trinity this trifecta is to catch a trend and if there's something going on where everyone's talking about it and
you're able to put those three things together you're gonna do really well let me give you an example right now i think there's a a lot of buzz around the new spider-man film with tom holland i think it's called no way home is that right jonah i'm not sure dude you're asking the
guy who doesn't watch movies whatever the trends are there's always something that's popping on the news uh jesse whether i'm not even sure smokesmole you know that guy he just got sentenced for for faking a race crime like that's in the news anything that's in the news and pop culture if you're able
to talk about and integrate into your video i think you have the magic formula so let me give you an example say you want to teach people how to bake cookies right right and you're a pastry chef and you make a cookie with a spiderman face just in time for the holidays or
for halloween or something like that you're tapping into the trend you're teaching people how to do something and you have an expertise those make for very satisfying videos if you add in your personal voice and your personality and you learn how to tell really good stories i think you have a chance of
making a hit and if not boost the heck out of it okay let's go back to this whole whiteboard thing there's a story behind this um i can't remember what day it is but i think it is the second to last day at any not nab at adobe max we have a booth
and we've scheduled something and that night i stay up to prepare for this talk because people had said we want to learn about social media so i'm cool i'm growing on instagram i want to share how i do this and i go to fedex kinkos the next morning and they're looking at me
like dude we cannot print these things out for you in while you wait there's a whole process here it's going to take half a day i was thinking simple black and white print come on man you can do this for me they're like nope i'm bummed excuse me so i'm really bummed and
i get my car and i know i have to be at the convention center downtown so i drive over thinking you know what they have a print and copy center over there i'll just use their services they have to be done the same day because that's the whole point of being at at
a convention you have to get stuff done on demand so walk in there with my file pretty confident and i said you know can you print these out like no problem how big is the file i tell them the size and like we can do that but we send this stuff out it's
not done on premises here so we'll have to wait for our driver to take it to that to where we actually get it made and then they're gonna bring it back when you need this i said well i'm gonna be live in one hour so they look at me like this is not
going to work okay it's fine no such thing as obstacles just opportunities and so i rush over to our booth the guys are looking at me like chris what's wrong said i can't get my prints done so kind of from memory i redraw the graphics to the best of my ability on each
of the five or six sheets so i'm recreating what was supposed to be printed and i'm doing it like just like a madman because there are already people gathered around ready for this thing to begin i finish it with just a few minutes to spare and my heart is going crazy because the
adrenaline's kind of getting to me and and then i see that an audience is gathered and then we launch into this video and i tell stories i teach people how to to grow on instagram and what i've been able to do to get 10 000 followers on instagram and it's not clickbait i
really did do this and that video is now performing really well i think it's one of our highest performing live streamed videos i think it's got over a million views now so there's a little backstory there okay i want to share something with you that i've i've shared with my future pro community
but it's the five c's of content creation when you're creating long form content there is a formula that we tend to stick to and when we don't follow this formula it doesn't always work out so well for us i want to quickly mention and appreciate darian clark thank you very much for the
super chat there uh i really do appreciate you man okay the five c's of content creation this is the part where you might want to take out a pen and write some of this down and i'll go into it but i'm not going to spend that much time talking about it okay there's
still a lot for us to do so the five c's are cold context content conclusion and call so they all start with the letter c alliteration is working it's strong on this one right so how do you explain uh uh so here's an example of like a context right sorry let me start
over this is bad what you want to do is you want to start with a cold open and this is something that's exciting it's a non-sequitur and typically what happens is as you're filming the content there's this moment this wtf moment like what the fudge happened right what you do is you take
that out of context you cut it out of the content and you start with that piece and so everyone's like what what's going on like is there a car crash there's an explosion what's going on and then you get into the context where you ask big rhetorical questions these tend to be like
the why questions why does it matter and why would you care about this why would you listen to me and you in doing so you kind of set the intention and agenda for what's about to happen okay so some some examples of this is how do you explain when others are able to
defy all of the assumptions why is apple so innovative year after year say maxis and the resources this of course is from simon sinek's famous uh the golden circle start with why why do why do they have something different why is it that martin luther king led the civil rights movement why is
it that the wright brothers who figured out powered men flight so he's like three and a half years ago i made a discovery that profoundly changed my view there's a pattern to all of this so simon sinek on that talk one of the most viewed ted talks is asking a lot of big
rhetorical questions to get you to become interested to pique your curiosity then he tells you he's made a discovery so now you're going to want to know in doing so then he can launch into the actual meat of it the content part but without that people are like well why would i care
about this so some secrets of storytelling is that all stories need a couple components there has to be a character and a character wants something and then there needs to be an obstacle so character want an obstacle without these three components you don't have the makings of a very good story and that
creates conflict all right and you might have seen our white board called the five ingredients there's another one uh uh or the one i mentioned from simon sinek the the framework of the golden circle and it's what how and why check out that video if you haven't seen it highly likely you've already
seen it and then towards the end you're going to conclude you're going to summarize you're going to tell everybody what they learned so that they can recall that you're doing them a favor good teachers good lecturers do this and then there's a good chance that you want them to do something so this
is the call to action if there's nothing for you to sell or anything for them to do then what you'll do is you'll probably end it end on a catch phrase the best ted talks seem to have a catch phrase okay all right so now i go a little bit deeper so you
can understand what what i'm talking about the cold so you want to start with the cold open uh this is like a car crash that catches the viewer's attention and oftentimes it's an out of context clip from the main video which we talked about the context asking the big rhetorical questions asks the
why questions why should they care why should they pay attention why should they listen to you and is this something you want to know the answer to if you do stick around the content is the meat this is the big insight hopefully you can do this through the wrapper of a great story
and remember stories are built on the framework character want and obstacles i i was watching a video with eric at meets he's a master storyteller he says that stories are the operating system of the human mind this is how we remember things this is how we understand the world and we're generally motivated
by two primary forces to increase pleasure while reducing pain stories allow us to do this we learn from what happens to other people that's why you want to use stories so in the conclusion is you you've you have some discovery you have some kind of insight you've you've learned from from your life
experience what to do and what not to do and you're going to go and share that with them so if you can give them a brief and concise summary of what's happened that's it and the last one is the call end with a clear call to action invite the audience to engage this
is really important if you want your videos to be viewed by a lot of people so you'll see a lot of times at the end of a video people will say let us know what you think about this video do you agree or disagree with my point of view i want to know
what was your your favorite bit or what is your take on x ask them a question and then they'll comment and then that helps you with the algorithm and and one thing that i learned from gary vaynerchuk which he'll say something like this what's your key takeaway and if you can timestamp it
so that we can reference it and that also gives us a road map as to what people found to be the most valuable part of the entire video most likely i will forget to do a call call to action at the end of this video but if you remember it you'll just do
it for us anyways okay 2020. here it is there's the video from adobe max of a year and a full year later it's at 1.159 million views pretty awesome pretty exciting because live stream videos typically do not perform well they don't perform perform well for us or for other channels because people like
a really condensed finished product and live streams it's hard for people to watch it's a demand on their time in 2021 here we are the monster here is the short 41 million views and counting this thing slows down for a little bit and then it starts to take off again so clearly here
if you if you take a look and you scan here look how many of these videos are shorts and you can tell the shorts because they're vertical in nature in the thumbnail you can see that only one video here is a long form video at number nine is that original video that set
everything off in motion which is the pricing design work and creativity so here's the key bullet points that i've noticed here nine of the top 10 videos are shorts which generated 114 million views which is i think 300 percent more than what we did last year so did it hurt our view count
not at all and you can see also the time watch is up significantly and it says 3.6 million hours of watch time in 2021 and using shorts in conjunction with whiteboards on longer form content we're able to grow the channel to 815 000 subscribers this year just falling a little short of our
goal and it generated 188 000 in revenue for us and so if you're living in some part of the world where it doesn't cost that much to live where it's like 10 15 20 30 000 a year which is the median salary you can actually live very comfortably just by making content that
people want so i love this because youtube i think is one of the few and at least for us the only social media platform that directly compensates us and we're able to monetize the value of our content period no other platform pays me anything despite the fact that i create content from for
every other platform i understand some people make money off of facebook we haven't seen that money and as of right now on instagram i make a whopping four dollars a month if that from posting and writing content every single day so you can see why i'm so bullish on youtube this is going
to be my home because they take care of me so i'm going to take care of them all right let's look at the comparison between uploads versus lives you can see here that the uploaded videos they're almost all shorts and then the live videos you can see which ones perform well let's take
a look at the live video here it's the one on the right here you'll see that most of them are a lot are whiteboard lecturing type of things the only one that isn't the only two are the ones with seth godin and saggy have at the bottom there those were interviews with two
uh two masters of their craft of course seth godin a best-selling author and saggy have a master designer of logos those two videos were very popular but even still they rank in positions eight and ten in terms of views for the year so whiteboard sessions based on that little insight that i was
able to pick up from veritasium we've been able to create a different kind of content for us i'm really happy that's the kind of content i'll be making more of so what else did we learn about live streaming oh i guess we already shared all this stuff using the whiteboard flip charts i
do my own way by using typesetting and printers instead of doing handcrafted graphics i don't have the time but also i don't love that aesthetic myself but i'm always trying to think about ways to make the graphics come to life and make it interactive so that's why we have the whiteboard it's dynamic
meaning that there's things that you can do to it that you can change and affect what's going on i referenced before it feels like a magic trick being revealed to you and if at all possible you you want to film this in front of a live audience because then it becomes really interactive
some of the best bits come from unscripted parts where people ask questions or they make unexpected discoveries and we have conversation plus it's much nicer to to be able to make content and share it with people versus just talking to yourself okay and lastly i think people really enjoy it because they can
pause the video they can watch and they can they can take notes and it's it's a much deeper level conversation versus i'm just going to explain a few things and you can go on with your life all right jonah how many people are watching live i can't see the live count number do
you know we currently have 345. okay so i i just wanted to quickly welcome all 345 people that are watching this is the last live stream for us from the future for 2021 so i'm glad that you're here okay there's a whole story behind shorts i wish i could tell you that it
was some genius idea of sitting there thinking man let's take advantage of shorts but it wasn't that at all it was actually during a conversation with a fellow youtube creator we're talking about his book his name is brian elliott and he has a youtube channel called behind the brand and i have to
tip my hat towards him because after we finish talking about his book he says chris you know you really need to take advantage of shorts i'm like um what do i need to do so brian tells me that some other people have had success and he thinks the kind of things that we
do are ideally suited for shorts so here's where i love the youtube creator community are we in competition with each other maybe perhaps but not really so here he's telling me here's an insight i haven't been able to do anything with it but maybe you'll be able to do something with it so
he just told me a couple of simple rules use the hashtag shorts in the description because that's the only way that youtube will know it's a short it needs to be 60 seconds or less and he says be careful about making exactly 60 seconds because according to him youtube added a little overhead
to the file and if it's over 60 seconds by one frame it won't count and won't be shown as a short and lastly he's like chris get on this so what do i do i call my team i delegate really quickly i called jonah ricky and mark i said guys we got to
get on shorts get on it right now and i i relayed to them exactly what brian told me start looking at our best performing content and cut those things down to make 60 second clips make sure you don't go over 60 cut a little bit shy of that and they do this and
we're releasing an episode a day every other day and then we start to increase the frequency and it doesn't look like anything's happening so it looks like we have a zombie a piece of content that doesn't perform at all it's alive but not really mostly dead and i remember because i'm having a
content meeting with the gang the team and i don't know which one said this to me uh maybe it's jonah chris dude we want to continue doing shorts because it's not really posting big numbers and i said to him i know i'm a little disappointed i'm not quite sure let's just leave it
alone keep making them i'll figure out what the game plan is so we started a question like is this thing even working you know and i remember a lot like from the early days in 2014 when we made content though that no one cared about that no one showed up for like we
didn't even have haters because we didn't have an audience back then that it was important just to keep doing the work just do the good work and stay out the results seth godin talks about this in his book the dip right so on the graph here on the x-axis you'll see that effort
is applied over time right and then on the y-axis the vertical axis you'll see the results so what inevitably happens is in the very beginning when you try something new you just make a little bit of effort and you get really great results as time and effort goes on and increases the results
start dipping down and it looks something like this you'll notice that little white dot there so at the beginning it's fun lots of results and then all of a sudden we're working harder but things aren't working out and then we have what i guess seth calls the first failure and that usually is
the end of us and we don't continue on but it's in this valley this trough where things get really hard and people just abandon it and everyone leaves if you can make it through that valley and you make it past the quitting point you will get to mastery just remember this it's called
the dip if you like this idea go buy seth's book i'm a big fan of his writing and his writing style and just how this man thinks go out there and read this book the dip all right so let's take a look at it so you see here at the point in which
the team wants to quit and stop doing this because we're getting no results 25 days later is when it goes thermal nuclear you can see that it's almost red line there in terms of like how many views it's getting and then it does that hockey stick kind of thing where it just goes
almost straight up and that's the most exciting thing to see when you're creating content that thing that shoots up like a meteor right all right that's when the video goes viral and that's one of the happiest moments in terms of my youtube career here there's something else i want to bring to your
attention as to how to make shorts that really work i couldn't figure this out at the beginning but for a while the retention graph on this video the one that got 40 million views was 130 what how's that possible how can you retain an audience 130 it means that on average people watch
the video 1.3 times and why were they doing this much like in tik tok reels and on shorts for youtube these things when you watch them on mobile they loop automatically not so on desktop but they loop on on mobile and and shorts are designed to be consumed on mobile because it's vertical
in this nature so if you create a video where either it's so interesting or there's a lot to absorb or you hide the beginning and the end of the video people will watch it and then they'll realize wait a minute i think the video has already looped by that point the retention graph
has done its thing you've already gotten the numbers for it right so how do you do this there is a way you want to create these seamless edits these loops you can't tell where it begins and ends so typically in a video you would start with a question like how do i do
something and then you would give people the answer but once you know the question the answer once you finish the answer it's kind of done so one little clever trick that you can do is you can start with the answer and then end with the question so it seems like something else is
happening right and another variant to this is to ask many questions and answers within the one minute segment therefore making it even harder for people to figure out where it begins and ends i know this is a little deceptive but i'm letting you know if you can get people to watch your video
more than once on average your video might go viral and that's the whole point somebody who does this really really well is jamie brindle on instagram so i included his instagram name here the jamie brindle go check him out he does a great job because he films two parts he's giving advice to
himself one is advisor and one is a freelancer and he does a wonderful job he changes his clothes he changes his tone of voice a little bit it's really cool and one thing that we've been able to do in making our lives a little easier is an idea called content repurposing you've heard
of this before let me try and explain it to you okay it's the old hub and spoke model so you have the hub it which is your long-form content things like the whiteboard sessions 10 minute videos one hour long videos whatever it is that you do you want to pull away the very
best parts and try to put an edit together that's a micro piece of content a short and that's pretty much what we've been doing because we have hundreds of hours of content that a lot of people have not seen not because we've not uploaded because they just don't want to watch these long
form videos they don't they can't make the commitment of time and so that's that's kind of what they're doing they're just going to watch a little short video so make it really easy for them to watch by taking the very best part think of it as a self-contained mini movie or mini lesson
and if they can watch it and feel satisfied there's a good chance they're going to want to know more and they'll keep watching these videos from you that helps you with the algorithm it's going to get more people to watch your content okay so some of the key takeaways that's why there's a
key there get it key takeaway all right the videos i in my opinion should be self-contained some people some of our friends who are creators on youtube use the shorts as a trailer for people to watch the full video so it won't have the satisfying ending and for me it's really important you've
given me a minute of your life i'm going to try to teach you a lesson and we don't always do a good job at this because sometimes when the team's editing i'll ask them like um what am i supposed to learn from this video so make sure there's a satisfying conclusion to your
story whatever it is you're trying to teach ideally it's designed shot and edited for nine by 16. so it's a vertical oriented video versus a horizontal video that's got a lot of black space above and below ideally that's what you would do and i i found that the the highest performing videos are
sometimes a little unexpected for me but there's something in common with all these videos they they kind of put their finger on a sore spot to get an emotional response from our audience they either get angry they get happy but they feel something almost all the videos that do that do really well
on our channel so we always sit around like that one is probably gonna do really well because it is just messing around with people it makes them upset in one way or the other not on purpose but because people have their points of view and also to realize that when you're creating anything
shorts or long-form content it's going to take time to find your audience and to gain traction so think about it if we had quit 20 days in i'm not sure that we would have caught what we needed to catch but we kept doing it and in fact we went from doing every other
day to every day to twice a day and at one point i was contemplating doing three pieces of content per day shorts are shorter so therefore i think easier to knock out you can try ideas out quickly you can iterate on things you can remix stuff really quickly so use this as an
invitation for you to try new ideas with low risk of failure all right next and i'm here towards the 80 mark here of the presentation what about what i wanted to share with you today so we're almost done i'm going to talk about the hook and bait the hook and bait as you
can guess is the title and thumbnail these two work together in conjunction to make sure your video is attractive to people the most critical thing is the title and the second most critical thing is the thumbnail so we have to learn how to write better titles to give people what it is that
they want it's not just the writing of the title the content needs to follow the promise of the title and so if you are a student of advertising you're probably familiar with this formula i'm spacing on the person's name right now but he he wrote about it in his book this book will
teach you how to write better he uses the formula rot formula which stands for results objections and time so if you can write your title promising people a benefit a result if you will they're more likely going to tune in or you can address an objection and lastly you can promise them how
long it'll take them to do it so the classic example is learn how to speak spanish that's the result even if you've never spoken a foreign language before in two weeks that is a great headline because it combines the results with the objection and the time now you don't have to use all
three you can just say learn to speak spanish in two weeks or just learn to speak spanish hopefully you get that and i'll show you some examples i found this by doing a little google search this is from crazyegg.com 41 engaging examples of the best headlines and so there's a couple formulas here
i want to share with you and so this is a formula you can use this the blank best way to get blank without blank right the seven best ways to get thin without dieting see i just made that up so you can use these formulas as kind of like a mad lib and
just fill it in and try that because it's specific it promises a result and then it takes away a pain point the objection that you're going to have right here's another one you're running out of blank here's how to fix it so you're running out of clients you're running out of something a
problem here's how to fix it uh here's another formula you'll be blank if you miss this guide to blank then you'll you'll be um i don't know what is the foam of jonah i know what oftentimes i i know what the fomo is uh you'll be upset if you miss this uh this
drop for a jack kirby poster which i missed from mondo i was really upset because i missed it by half an hour okay so you can use these formulas and the last one i'm just going to skip the other one but the last one is camp a versus campy which is what which
is better so you can do powerpoint versus keynote which is superior mac versus pc which is more valuable back paint versus photoshop well you get the idea all right here's the other thing i would encourage you to do before you make any piece of content what you should do is test your idea
before you actually make it how do you test an id before you make it sounds crazy well what i would do is go onto google or youtube and start typing in your title and see what comes up what you're looking for are pieces of content that has a lot of views and a
lot of interest so a bunch of videos on the on the subject you want to talk about and a lot of people are watching it so i like to to find subjects where there's hundreds of thousands if not millions of people watch that video and what i do is then i watch that
video and i ask myself can i do this better can i make a more updated version can i present this in a way that's unique to me can i add something that they haven't seen before and if i can i'm going to go ahead and make that piece of content i want to
quickly say thank you to darren clark thank you darian grateful oh that was an old one right and then now we have luda salama i don't know what cops are but thank you very much for the super chat appreciate you and i'm going to just really briefly talk about the image and i'll
tell you what has worked for us okay so use google use youtube's search algorithm to find what people are looking for and you'll probably find out that what people title their videos is not what you expected it to be there's this cognitive bias it's called um what's it called uh dang i forgot
jonah what's uh it's like as an expert you have cognitive bias um it's a curse of knowledge that's the bias thank you thank you jonah you're welcome appreciate you saying nothing and looking at me i was muted you didn't make eye contact with me i was trying to think about it i'm like
i have no idea about the biases it's called the curse of knowledge like when you learn something you forget at one point in your life you didn't know how to do this thing and so you'll use very technical language and you'll use that as your title right how how to use a swiss
grid or you how to use the fibonacci grid to design a better swiss modern layout okay now everyone who knows what i'm talking about doesn't need to know this because they already know it so you're using such sophisticated language and very specific vocabulary that somebody who's actually looking for this but doesn't yet
know what to type will never find your video but if you if you come up with another title like how to make design how to use type and not suck you know and then it's like oh i need to use type how to design okay i get that so generally speaking you want
to use broader more generic language and speak simpler if you can do that you're going to have a better chance of people finding your content all right so the thumbnails thumbnails are really important we find that bold graphics with bright strong colors and high contrast usually draw people in now these are not
mr beasts or veritasium or marc robert levels thumbnails because they actually spend a lot of time thinking about what the thumbnail is going to be and what the video is going to be called they're doing a lot more planning than us and they deserve all the views that they get but this is
me designing the thumbnail after the fact which is 99 of times how we design our thumbnails ideally what you do is you think about what it is that's going to draw people in something outrageous something eye-catching something something different when everyone's zigging you're zagging and so this this image of the eyeball very
powerful it's hard not to look at that eyeball you look at all the other thumbnails around it you're going to see that you're going to be drawn towards this thing because it's looking right back at you try walking around the room it's still going to be looking at you and so i like
to create really whenever possible conceptual or metaphorical thumbnails but it's not always possible but i don't find that they work that well i think people are so jaded if they think oh this is a slick thumbnail and the video has nothing to do with this and i'm not going to be fooled right
use your judgment there but just stick with the basics don't get all crazy with 3d shadow blur and all the tricks that you've learned in photoshop stick with bold simple graphics bright colors that are on your on brand for you and stick with a couple of consistent typefaces to use and i think
you'll do really well all right is there jonah these these super chats are these old or new the luda just another amount there yeah ludo thank you very much uh appreciate you now darien's like illuminati for the eye maybe um how many people are still watching now jonah we have 355. all right
same number more or less yeah 10 less 10 less i guess i've killed 10 people all right so let's talk about content levers okay and for our european friends i think earlier i saw analy and other friends from from europe hanging in there it's super late for you guys i appreciate you hanging
in there with us it's probably two or three in the morning okay content lovers we'll talk about that these are general principles or things that you need to do to get people to tune in to to look at your content to watch and to care number one is to break sacred cows or
to challenge them at least be a myth buster go against the grain say something that is going against popular belief because this is things that get people to tune in so what you want to do is you want to challenge conventional wisdom and if you can do that there's a good chance that
this is going to make a good piece of content for you number two this is important is for you to figure out where you stand on a position a lot of times we're afraid of pushback or criticism uh that people won't like us we never take a position so we wind up walking
right in the middle if you like a particular brand of coffee talk about the brand of coffee that you love that's taking a position if you like a particular type of car or typeface just talk about the things you're very passionate about you don't necessarily need to be negative but by being so
passionate about something people know where you stand having a clear point of view has has been i think a key to me building my personal brand and connecting with an audience so take a stand be polarizing to be for or against something and to then be able to substantiate your claim right the
third content lever is to fill an opportunity gap address frequently asked questions that have been ignored there's this acronym it's called ask and and i picked this up from watching sean cannell's channel called think media he says answer a specific question if you type in very slowly on youtube as you're trying to
figure out the title for your video it will show you the most popular search results pay attention to that and then click on some of them and see the kinds of results that you get and if it feels like it's in the ballpark of what you want and there's enough videos with a
lot of views on them and you think you can do better that's probably a good sign that it's safe to do that video okay here's the big recap what we've learned in the last seven years of content creation but more specifically this year particular okay what we did was we we took content
from a lot of different sources and we tried a lot of different things we repurposed clubhouse calls which are social audio experience and we put them on youtube we went all in on shorts from from march ford and and that has been the biggest driver growth on our channel not only in views
hours viewed subscribers new audience on every metric it was killing it except for one revenue so we took a pause on long form content because look the algorithm dictates the kind of content creators make and and when they reward a very specific kind of thing being done you'd be a fool not to
do it we we pause on live streams too unless i have time to do a whiteboard we've taken a break from that what we did was we repurposed our most popular content into shorts there's this thing it was hit once it probably would be a hit again this is why remixes are so
popular it's familiar but different and some people who watch the long form content of ours a 30 minute video we don't expect everyone to memorize and or learn everything so when we release a short again they will comment something like oh it was a good refresher thanks for the reminder i needed that
today and then we focused on making product-based content based off our highest converting products that also helped us generate some sales and this is really how we sustain ourselves we discovered that our highest performing shorts are role plays that really strike an emotional chord with people even when i don't like the video
myself because i'm being really combative sometimes dismissive those are the videos that people watch it gets people really angry and riled up sorry the categories that we continue to work on are things around the soft skills like pricing strategy negotiation mindset those kinds of things are the topics i think we want to
be known for so we'll keep doing that we stop producing content with guests they just don't have the draw not everyone's a great public speaker not everyone has written bestselling books so it becomes very hard to to have a video with a guest and for it to perform well and we continue to
invest time and energy into creating whiteboard sessions we believe that's what people want and we'll be producing more of those we have another one to drop really soon i think you guys can enjoy it but i already have my book of ideas filled with what we'll be doing for 2022 okay that's it
for me i'm going to open up to taking some questions live from our audience and jonah's got some of them queued up um this is not the official end but i just also want to take a quick moment to thank you all of you who tune in who share the videos who comment
who are such loyal fans of the channel telling your friends your mother your cousin your brother your sister your dad about the channel you're part of the one billion mission which in case you don't already know i have this huge mission which is to teach a billion people how to make a living
doing what they love if it so compels you to do so if it gives you joy feel free to send me money my venmo is right there okay jonah let's bring up the question let's go to q a what's the question give me a second jonah is i i tried my best to
queue him up for this ah i'm the only one chris over here hey man i'm one man too i'm doing what i can here here we go so this is from um sil seal view do you look at the early results of video and update the thumbnails on the go do you recommend
that very good question let's keep this question up on the screen here jonah okay i watch the performance of the videos now if you're a youtube creator you'll notice something when you log in and you see your dashboard it'll tell you how your latest upload is doing relative to the previous 10 uploads
right or whatever the uploads are so it'll say it's 10 of 10 it's one of 10. and so when a video drops and it's it's hovering around 10 of 10 that's not a good sign i'll go and look at the headline or the title and i will start to adjust it i'll make
some changes and i've noticed and this could just be confirmation bias at play here when a video comes out of the gate it has a very short window to make it i think it has about two days for it to find an audience otherwise youtube moves on to serving up some other video
but when you change a title it reindexes the video and gives you another shot at getting it right every time you do that it re-indexes on several occasions not always when i change title the exact same video with the exact same thumbnail will start to perform better it'll go from 10 to 10
to 9 of 10 to 8 of 10 and sometimes even reach 2 of 10. so the titles matter a lot and so if if i could i would get my team all to sit down and try to write better titles but they have enough on their plate so there you go all right
what's the next question jonah all right i'm parched but jonah is going to pull up the next question for us here we go this question is coming in from jonathan perkins the only issue i see for shorts is i feel your channel has gotten totally cluttered when i look for videos i can't
even find the long-form ones okay jonathan thank you very much for the feedback oh so let me i screenshotted the wrong one so his question is is there any way to get around the channel getting cluttered okay but i can answer this one though right yep so jonathan um i get it so
there's there's two things there's a couple things that we can do but there's also things that you can do uh number one is we can split the channel again and create a third channel just of shorts and and have that channel grow but here's the problem if that channel were to get 10
20 million subscribers i would probably just abandon the main channel because i'm just gonna go where the audience is and and this is why i've i've resisted creating additional channels because it's splintering a a very small company and only a few content creators here into many different channels and it's it's getting a
lot more for us to do we could do that we might do that i'm not leaning towards that but things can change in 2022 the other thing is you'll notice is when you are looking for content you can literally click on the short shelf or you can click on our main video hub
and you can sort by this stuff it's not like you don't have any tools available to you and we'll try to do a better job of letting you know when new videos drop by announcing them on social media so that if you're caught up and you know what you already are familiar with
the content library as we drop new videos i'll do a better job of announcing it on twitter and on facebook and elsewhere so that you have a better chance of grabbing the new content and i apologize if it's annoying to you so jonah did i answer the question already or no okay ask
the question again then the second jonathan question that's not this one how do you prevent your channel from looking cluttered yeah there's nothing you can do because we're literally going to go back to uploading two videos two shorts a day and then hopefully we can get back in the rhythm of releasing a
medium to long-form piece of content on the weekend that cadence was working really well for us we kind of dropped that for a little bit but we're gonna come back to it yeah unless youtube changes like some other features and has like a separate thing for it yeah then i don't see it
happening okay what's next i can only do one or two more questions because i'm i'm really getting like caught mouth right now what are we looking at here all right here we go jonas grabbing another question for us yeah i can do that okay so sept is asking maybe that's short for september
what factors go into choosing to delegate a video and what's the minimum amount of time necessary to lead that to that decision okay this is kind of a broad question here oh i'm sorry delete not delegate okay so what factors go into choosing to delete a video uh we rarely ever delete a
video uh the reason why we would delete a video is because it was full of mistakes or we're like glitches and typos all over the place well there are many videos that we have that have typos here and there but at the end of the day i think it's the content that matters
not whether or not we got every word spelled correctly but if we somehow are are not paying careful enough attention and and the video comes across as being offensive or inconsiderate or not thoughtful and and we're getting a lot of blow back for it we'll delete the video that's never our intention is
to aggravate our audience people are agreeing with jonah for some reason i have no idea yeah well i would say one thing what what jonah's looking for the next question the one thing that i i will say is i don't know if you've noticed this but earlier on when we had a different
team here you could see me get on edge because you know i work really hard on the preparation of the talks and then i have a lot of things to juggle and when the team doesn't do their job you can see i lose my cool now i've gone to anger management i'm just
kidding i've not gone to angerman oh okay i was about to say really i just tried to have more competent people working with me who can do their job so i don't have to like lose it right it can be quite frustrating when you come in and you're ready to go and somebody
makes you do the intro four times because they can't figure out how to do the audio yeah i hate those people yeah those people kill me i know so you see that i'm a lot calmer i'm still the same person i just have more competent people around me all right jonah yep from
sebastian do you see it um okay here's a question from sebastian if you start as a newbie should the content be more specific or more mainstream this one's a tricky thing um i i think that the way that you phrase it it's either or that it's either specific and therefore a very small
audience or it's for a really broad audience but you don't know what to do i don't know if either one of them is a winning strategy i think if you go back to that triangle let me see if i can find that here i'll bring it up give me two seconds this trinity
thing that i talked about earlier right here okay let's join let's cut to that so remember if a video has utility i'm learning something i feel like i'm improving my life you're helping me to create a transformation and you have expertise in the thing that you're talking about and you tap into a
trend you can achieve all those things your expertise and the utility is based on your your your niche market right niching down the trend is the part of the mainstream and you find that overlap and it's a wonderful thing so i would just screen capture this part and just use this as your
guiding principle am i providing enough utility am i doing something that tapped into my expertise and it's a trend one of the high performing types of videos that you can create today are reaction videos like real singing coach reacts to musician so i have an expertise i'm gonna get really nitty-gritty and try
and teach you how to be a better performer and to command your vocals but i'm going to talk about whoever the trending singer is vfx artists respond or react to latest vfx film see there's a pattern there and those work really well i don't know what my thing would be but i think
a reaction video series would be good for us based on that observation all right joan let's do one more and then we're gonna say goodbye because i am so thirsty very dry so here it is um the what is this here the v in the vn visual space where's the line between pandering
and creating long term value so pandering means like um just appealing to the audience the kiss butt i believe that's what pandering means right and i'm not sure that those are uh yeah those two ideas are related i always want to create long-term value for our audience and long-term value doesn't correlate or
actually it's not related to the length of the content you can watch a really long video that sucks and it gives you no value and and conversely you can watch a very short video that's only one minute long and actually receive a ton of value how do i know this because before making
youtube videos i used to make commercials and commercials were only 30 seconds long and those commercials were so well crafted they can tell a complete story and get you to think about the world differently in just 30 seconds when we talk about pandering i think it's like oh i'm gonna kiss butt so
i'm gonna i'm gonna just shower my audience with compliments and and i don't know if that's going to help anybody so i would just separate those two ideas okay jonah are you going to throw me one more question is that what that activity is are we almost done here all right so you
got one more for me and theory okay so this is the last question how we're going to end the very last live stream broadcast of 2021 so apple's one full says your sound guy needs to do their job yes he does yes he does it almost feels like we're starting over every single
time we do these broadcasts but i forgot to mention you'll notice that we're in a totally different space here this kind of rich background which my wife designed and the lighting and everything and then jonah set this up because i want to use more of our really cool space and so he had
to reconfigure everything and so i got to cut him a lot of slack it's just the two of us here at the office so i appreciate that the old me would have gone ape on jonah right now the new me is like you know what everything's gonna be fine okay on that note
i want to thank everybody for for hanging out with us for the past i don't know an hour and a half two hours for for listening in and allowing me to share some of the stories and some of the insights i've obviously um i would like to go a little deeper on some
of the ideas specifically but this was a year-end recap and review i hope you got value from this if you want to know other things let me know in the comments ask me a very specific question that's on topic relevant to growing content or growing your youtube channel with content either about shorts
whiteboards or long-form content i'd be more than happy to help you but just ask your question in a very succinct way and i'll do my best to respond otherwise just give it a meaningless good job great job team layoff jonah those kinds of comments actually help us out with the algorithm please on
behalf of myself and joan and the entire future team who's probably doing fun things right now and not working like the way we are i want to thank you as always and i will see you in 2022 that's everybody thank you very much see you later
Enjoyed this? There’s more where it came from.
Get insights on creativity, business, and design from The Futur.
You can unsubscribe anytime. By submitting, you agree to receive communications and to our Privacy Policy.
“Don't get bogged down by the numbers.”
— Chris Do
Key Takeaways
Subscribe
Details
- Length
- 1h 23m
- Views
- 133,929
- Topic
- CONTENT CREATION