Stoked to be working on this with @PaddyG96 and it's been a ton of fun so far!
It's a mission of mine to help creators understand Youtube and their data better - so if you have any questions please ask in replies or DMs!
Excited to keep digging and learning📈
We studied 3.3 Billion views to decode the YouTube Shorts algorithm.
What makes a short viral?
How much money can they make?
Are they actually good for growth?
Here are our findings:
I think there’s a gap in YouTube right now. Now would be a particularly good time for some protagonists to tell incredible stories.
Not “YouTubers” per se. Just people doing genuinely cool things, recorded.
YouTube was once a kind of escapism. It should be, once more.
I think a top 1% YouTube strategist knows about everything they’ve heard. Every concept is not new.
But if you’re a top 0.01% YouTube strategist, I think there’s a humility of “just because I haven’t heard of new things recently, doesn’t mean new things don’t exist.”
I find that if I’ve not learnt anything for a while, it’s because I haven’t pushed myself enough to put myself into intellectually difficult enough analyses/situations.
Arrogance is a kind of recurring stupidity that needs to be consciously perceived, then overcome. It’s the worst combination of contentness + blindness one can have, because it stops you from learning AND perceiving.
It’s not good enough to be the “best at x”. That’s just other’s opinions. Instead, it seems better to ask of oneself the question: what’s the truth of how this all works? And how close am I to that?
Inevitably, that ends up being a good motto in terms of self-improvement. You can go to infinite heights with it, because your limitation is no longer others, but perpetually yourself.
That said, I probably repeat the following phrase like a broken record, but there’s plenty of others who are way smarter than me at YouTube. The depth of others’ knowledge can be insane (a lot of you that follow this account!) and I feel fortunate to not come anywhere close to knowing everything.
But for storytelling for example, which I know I’ve studied in great depth, so much of what I continue to learn is actually just to continually observe everything that both on and off YouTube, and see if it applies to storytelling. Storytelling is a great tool for making really good videos, but for me, it’s a framework by which I interpret my own life and everything around it.
I guess the main productivity hack to spending an obsessive amount of time on something, is to let it be your lens for interpreting the world. The world is full of stories that don’t look like stories, for example. Even eating a meal has open loops, anticipation, payoff, resolution. This isn’t even my original idea, I got it from a book on writing manga by a famous manga author.
But if it’s your lens, you can’t help but use it all the time. There’s about 5,000-6,000 waking hours in a year. I’ve been thinking this way now for about 4 years. I am delighted to report to you that there’s new things to discover everyday despite this.
Our lives are short, so this is probably not a worthwhile approach for people who don’t get intrinsic joy out of doing it. It’s kind of weird.
But, the act of interpreting everything in the context of the goal/journey you care about, that’s cool and worthwhile trying for sure. Maybe that’s business, music, sports.
I’d recommend most people at least give it a shot: the analogous application of life’s learnings to your main mission. You have to think outside the box a lot of the time, and make some real stretches, but it’s kind of fun.
@Paragon_Hex@noahmorris Fwiw I largely agree with your conclusion, just not sure how the things you're stating are getting you there and how factually true they are.
🎉 ANNOUNCING: THE YOUTUBE STORYTELLING PRIMER
It's time to unveil a bunch of stuff I've been working on for months! And this is the first of three things that I think will help a lot of YouTubers grow their channel first.
'The YouTube Storytelling Primer' is a FREE 5-day email course I've written about YouTube strategy, filled with five essays on these areas:
1. YouTube Ideation
2. Making thumbnails
3. Making titles
4. Making hooks
5. A brief guide to useful storytelling concepts
TO GET IT:
- If I already follow you on X: just DM me your email address
- If not: then retweet AND reply to this tweet with "YouTube", and I'll DM you the link
See you inside!
@ltzShadow@AprilynneAlter@BenSyversen If that were the case, you could never have more Views than Unique viewers when looking at 1 day right? But that doesn't seem to be the case. Could be missing something, lemme know if you think I am and can easily test again.
I believe it ends up counting as 2 views and so if you watched 5 minutes of a video, left then come back later and watch another 5 minutes - AVD would be 5 minutes.
Sometimes I'll sometimes calculate AVD per Unique Viewer to get better idea of a viewer's watch time on a video.
AVD Minutes = (Watch Time Hours * 60)/ Views
AVD Minutes per Unique = (Watch Time Hours * 60)/ Unique Viewers
No huge insight comes from this other than occassionally having better benchmarking/understanding of viewer consumption (and also just feels nicer seeing AVD being higher! haha)
Should I do more of these raw unfiltered thoughts?
Official announcement soon but we're starting to open up applications for cohort 5 of my accelerator. It's insane.
We'll give a free scholarship to someone who likes & Rts.
Or just apply here: https://t.co/jnVn8VhO5k
@griffinbeels @LudwigAhgren Agreed - saw a TN that did similar thing with money and liked the different perspective on showing progress and feels it utilizes the space well
Announcement: Want to work with one of the biggest groups on Youtube?
At Sidemen we have big plans and are looking for the most exciting Youtube talent out there!
We're currently hiring for a full-time junior thumbnail designer. You'll be working and learning alongside our main thumbnail designer @_SJIHT and me, as well as a whole host of awesome people!
Full details in the link below (only apply if you meet the criteria!).
Apply 👇
We just launched Viewstats Pro - it’s a bunch of the internal tools we use at mrbeast for data, ideas, thumbnails it’s awesome. RT this tweet and I’ll pick 3 random people to get a free year of Viewstats Pro
https://t.co/s4QP0Sg03R