Media Money

Happy Wednesday!

Let’s dive deep on YouTube today, shall we? Here’s the TL;DR so you can decide if you should keep reading or not:

YouTube is an incredible platform for building a business on, and I didn’t feel this way a few months ago. Here’s why I feel this way and specifically how you can capitalize on this opinion of mine.

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Ok, let’s continue.

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I’m both encouraged and disheartened by the idea of YouTube.

Discouraged because in 2019, 30% of kids ages 8-12 wanted to be YouTubers. I have 3 kids in that age range, and as much as they love watching a little YouTube every Sunday afternoon as a family, they don’t want to be YouTubers. Whew! But wait…who is gonna take over The Koerner Office when I die….? Hmm…

I’m discouraged because I don’t think that media and screen time should have as much of an influence as it does on our kids. And that’s coming from a guy that’s creating more media for people to consume. #hypocrite

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I’m encouraged because YouTube is giving a voice and an audience to incredibly bright and inspiring people, without them having to impossibly sign a deal with a mega conglomerate.

The internet enables that, and it’s rad. I’m on both sides of this argument, as I am many arguments in life, because the truth is usually somewhere in the middle.

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I originally started my YouTube channel as an easy way to publish my podcast episodes in video format. How hard is it to hit record on a camera while I talk?

As a marketer, I’m fairly familiar with what YouTube RPMs and CPMs are (the metrics used to determine how much money YouTubers make), and they are just okay.

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Mr. Beast only makes about $2 in top line revenue for every 1,000 views he gets on his videos. Not a lot for an RPM at face value, but at scale, those numbers are pretty sweet. He made $6.4 million last month from YouTube ads on his main channel alone, and that doesn’t include his sponsored ads or the merch, chocolate and everything else he sells from his own companies.

But we don’t use outliers as examples now, do we?

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The vast majority of aspiring YouTubers quit before they ever put out 3 videos, because it’s hard and results almost never come right away.

I knew going into YouTube that I could basically round down any ad revenue I’d ever receive to zero. I wasn’t starting a channel to make money, I was starting it to publish my podcast on a platform with 2.5 billion monthly active users.

And what does it take to get monetized on YouTube? 4,000 watch hours and 1,000 subscribers. And that’s really hard to get! Especially the watch hours. And YouTube shorts views don’t count towards watch hours, only long form.

That’s convincing a small city’s worth of people to spend one full hour starting at my ugly mug.

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That’s the pessimistic part. Now time for the optimistic part.

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YouTube has 2.5 BILLION monthly active users, and the most sophisticated algorithm on the planet.

It will find your people in ways I can’t fully explain. It will get your content seen, if you pull just a few levers I mention below. It doesn’t matter if you have 1 subscriber or 100,000,000. If those levers are pulled, it will push your video. I’ve seen it happen over and over again.

TV is dying and controlled by billionaires, YouTube is exploding and controlled by anyone that clicks “Publish.”

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YouTube is an incredible platform to build on, and the platform is now pushing creators that are authentic, unscripted and under-edited. The pendulum is slowly swinging away from jump cuts every 2 seconds and mindless pranks. Tiktok has rewired our brains, and we are starting to push back.

Are jump cuts and Tiktok going away any time soon? Not at all, but the data is showing that we’re at least getting sick of it. This is why Tiktok now allows videos up to 10 minutes and 90 seconds for IG reels. The algorithm on all platforms are prioritizing more watch time per video, not 6 second clips.

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That’s why some guy talking for 48 minutes with no editing got 11m views. And another dude that just speaks into the camera about his weightlifting routine has millions of subscribers.

YouTube just wants 4 things:

  1. Your video to not be skipped by more than 20% of people in the first 30 seconds.
  2. Your video to be watched for an above average amount of time. If the average viewer spends 3 mins watching a video and they spend 6 mins watching yours, even if yours is 60 minutes long and they skip 90% of it, they will push it to more people organically.
  3. More than 7% of people to click on your video after seeing the title and thumbnail. This means you have to have a great title and thumbnail.
  4. To have a great title and thumbnail, you have to start with a great video idea, that you convey clearly through your title and thumbnail.

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You don’t need editing knowledge or a bunch of money to do any of those 4 things.

Here’s how my YouTube journey has gone since I first published my video on February 16th of this year. I started with 13 subscribers.

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Now yes, I also started with 72k Twitter followers and 7k newsletter subscribers, but not so fast my friend. It is very hard to convert followers or subscribers from one platform to another.

It’s much harder than I expected, in fact. People are creatures of habit, and if they get most of their business content from X and their landscaping ASMR content from YouTube, they aren’t going to consume your business content on YouTube, even if they’re already on YouTube every day.

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For this same reason, it’s also hard to convert YouTube Shorts subscribers to become long form video watchers.

The pre-existing audience definitely helped, but the YouTube algorithm doesn’t give a crap about it.

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I had 1,400 people click on this YT video from that link on X yesterday, but the YouTube algorithm just shrugged. It doesn’t care. Yes, the views counted, but YouTube won’t start pushing that video organically to more native YouTube users just because 1,400 people came from X to watch it, because the retention and click through rates weren’t quite good enough for that.

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Did I add a couple hundred subscribers from it? Yes! But those subscribers are not nearly as valuable as, say, newsletter or podcast subscribers. Their attention is more split.

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The gold standard for acquiring YouTube subscribers is by YouTube pushing your video organically to a larger audience. That is the equivalent of a podcaster sending thousands of cold emails to be a guest on a few other podcasts, because the best way to acquire new podcast subscribers is by appearing on the same platform (podcasts) in front of new audiences.

YouTube does this for you, for free! Your content just has to be compelling enough.

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So why should you care to build a YouTube audience?

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Here are all the reasons I can think of:

  1. You don’t have to show your face, have a unique story or a ton of skills. My Chief of Staff, Kamal, has an incredible YT channel called 2 and 20. He has 40k subscribers from only 5 videos! And he never shows his face! Why? Because his videos are well-informed and well-made. And the topics are on things that anyone could research and learn! He makes a few thousand dollars per month even when he isn’t publishing new videos, just from YouTube ads. And then, he just made 5 figures for a sponsored 60 second ad read in his latest video. That’s a 5-6 figure part time income that will keep paying dividends for years to come even if he never lifts another finger. Not to mention, he got all of his subscribers from YouTube natively. He doesn’t have an audience or a newsletter that he acquires them from. No cheating!
  2. It’s a great way to keep a journal that your kids can watch or read (the transcription of) one day. And hey, maybe others will find it interesting and start watching, too.
  3. It’s evergreen. Sometimes videos will languish for months and then the algorithm will send it flying. Mr Beast makes 8 figures per year, solely from videos that are years and years old! My kids watch Seinfield with me every night, 35 years after the show was made! Evergreen, baby!
  4. It rewards endurance, or people who don’t quit. Is that you?
  5. Every post is a free lottery ticket. They’re all asymmetric bets. We’ve sold $64k in vending machines this month because I posted a 30 second video last month. That’s my whole argument, in one sentence. Many of the same arguemtns I’m making for YouTube apply to any video platform, YouTube is just the most valuable.
  6. It can actually turn into real income. How much am i making from ads? Let’s see:

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I got monetized on July 16 after 5 months of grinding out videos. Since then I have made $534, or ~$15 per day, and $42 of that was yesterday!

Does that change my life? No. But what will it be next year? Will it be enough money to retire on in 5 years? Quite possibly.

And let’s be honest, I’m just having the same business conversations I have always had, I’m just hitting record, being more deliberate about my questions and then paying a VA to edit them and make thumbnails.

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Had I also done sponsored ad reads since day 1 that $534 could have been about 6x more.

The average RPM (revenue per 1,000 views) on YouTube is about $3, and mine is almost $11 because you guys are a LEGIT, high value audience. So thank you for being awesome!

I could say a ton more, but I’m out of time. But the long and short of it is this:

  1. Don’t overlook YouTube when it comes to business opportunities. Even if you never get formally monetized and your channel stays small, 100 people that trust and watch you regularly, in the right niche, will be much more likely to buy something from you than someone you cold email.
  2. You should keep a record of your life, for your posterity if for no other reason. This is a good way to do it.
  3. Every time you hit “Publish” you enter the lottery.

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There are my top tweets from last week.

Speaking of algorithms, the X algorithm has been loving me lately. Very grateful for that! I’ve had 3 posts with 1-11 million views over the last 4 days.

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Please check out my podcast at the links below.

Thanks for reading!

Chris Koerner
chrisjkoerner

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