How I Became a Full-Time YouTuber for a Company

[Music] [Music] [Music] um [Music] [Music] [Music] did [Music] [Music] um [Music] oh hello hello everyone thank you very much for joining us if you've got in here early usually people turn up late but i'm delighted today to have rob from vid iq now i imagine you'll recognize rob if you don't um i'd be surprised because rob is on the face of the vid iq channel and he makes i don't know how many videos a week he

released to vid iq but it's relentless when you've got the news before it's even broken and you're constantly covering topics um so yeah i'm ecstatic to have you here today rob um but what i kind of really wanted to talk to you about was actually how you became a youtuber because it's not actually the normal way into youtube right and you've got you've got a really unique uh story because youtube is your job as in you

know you do it for a company so can you just set us up rob like how did you end up becoming a youtuber for a company well first of all ed thanks for having me on the show just returning uh the podcast favor that you gave to us a couple of weeks ago i'm also now highly embarrassed and humbled by your very professionally put together intro and it's making me feel as if i need to put

a lot more effort into my intro live streams as well uh so to answer the question how did i get into this youtube gig um it all comes down to a tweet as simple as that i sent out a tweet and that turned into a full-time gig on youtube uh to give you uh quite a lot more context uh i like many other uh youtubers creators whatever you want to call us uh just started out making

videos as a creative outlet uh this goes way back to the early 2000s i'm dating myself a little bit here uh when i was at university and i was doing a degree in english with creative writing and i wanted to be a video games journalist at that point uh i was a gamer like many others at the time who was thinking that video games were represented properly in in the in the entertainment and media world and

uh so i wanted to start writing about video games and getting a degree seemed to be the first step towards doing that and you know i do stuff like write for the student newspaper i have my own website and i i actually got to write for the bbc a little bit the local bbc website but throughout all of these i guess creative endeavors the one thing that you always seem to be starved of is actual feedback

and acknowledgement of what you're doing like i have no idea how many people read the stuff i'd put in newspaper or read that the stuff on the bbc website or downloaded my um video games magazine at the time and you know i could count the amount of feedback i got from all of this creative stuff over a few years probably on a single hand um and so it can be quite i guess creatively soul crushing in

that you're putting out all of this work and nobody's really responding to it i kind of see it as the busker on the street who's playing this amazing music and maybe one in every a thousand people acknowledges it in some way and it got to a point where i'd finish my degree and reality setting i needed to start earning some money and i wasn't getting into the media industry at all and those who can't find jobs

teach sometimes so that's why i went and did a teaching um what's it called now pgce a birth certificate or a postgraduate certificate in education i started i started teaching for a couple of years and the writing completely went by the wayside but as somebody who had like a creative instinct the itch came back a few years later and that's when youtube started to emerge as this new uh video creative platform and i i was that

now at the point where i didn't have any expectations whatsoever i was just wanting to do something creative and if it meant trying to make videos which i'd never done before i thought i'd give it a shot and that was i think back in 2008 i think i made my first youtube video but funnily enough it was probably everything that you shouldn't do when you're making youtube video because i seem to remember it was uh something

along the lines of can you remember andy grays and richard keys are two football pundits they got in trouble for some reason uh and so i did a bit of a mashup so i was using a lot of copyright material at the time uh but the video i posted a video and then for months it didn't do anything i just went about my normal business but i kept getting emails saying somebody subscribed to your channel or

somebody's commented on your videos and i'm suddenly realizing huh i'm getting this feedback on this video i made six months ago maybe i should look into youtube a little bit more and that's when i started to do a couple more videos but it wasn't until i would say 20 i think the beginning of 2012 when i really started to take it seriously because i bought a new piece of tech and i thought if i can do

some content on this piece of tech before anyone else or or show more about this piece of tip than anyone else and maybe that might be a way to start building an audience and and it was and then as opposed to putting so much work out there and not getting any feedback the beauty and perhaps the the dangerously addictive part of youtube is you get feedback on absolutely everything you know exactly how many people have watched

the video how many people have liked it who's commented on it how long have they watched it for and once you're getting all of that feedback all of the time then you can start to i guess take actions on the data and so yeah that's that was my inroad into uh video content i'm still answering the first question here huh but i'll keep going uh that's when i started making content on my own channel and that

channel is still around still exists it's called the video gadgets journal if anyone wants to check it out i don't think i've made any content on there for three years now but between 2012 and 2016 i was turned into my passionate hobby where i would just be making videos whenever i could uh whenever i had some spare time and i covered different bits of top different pieces of tech i was sort of doing strange uh i

guess you would call them mini adverts for google play apps and then contacting the developers and saying would you like to host this on your google play page as your video advert and some people said yes and that brought in a lot more views because i had more exposure so i was working out these little ways of getting myself out there and i think it got to the point of 2016 where i guess third-party vendors and

other businesses were taking interest in youtube and how could how could they add to the youtube ecosphere and those happen to be software tools such as vid iq um that other company who i never tried to name for more for comedy reasons than anything else uh so i downloaded both of them and at the time youtube tags were still apparently a super important thing and both of these tools allowed you to copy someone else's tags and

use them on your own videos and i got to the point there i think when i had about 25 000 subscribers probably a couple of million views so i thought i knew a little bit about youtube and i wanted to give something back to my community and start to say look i've been able to do this i would i would love it if you could do the same thing if you're interested in being a creator so

i started to do occasional youtube education videos even though it wasn't necessarily connected to tech and the videos didn't do that well but i still felt as if i wanted to give something back to the creator community at large so going back to the topic of video tags uh both vid iq and other tool that should not be named could do copying tags but it just so happens that vidiq's version of the tool was fractionally better

so i did a video on how to copy copy and paste tags or something like that and to this day i think the video has only got around four and a half thousand views so it didn't do that great but it's still the thing is it's still up yeah um you could probably search for it how to copy and paste tags video gadgets journal that might bring up the result but it's still up and the key

thing i did is that i tweeted vid iq i said hey vidiq i've just made this video about your tools um hope you can share it and we've it must have been a bit of blind look as well because i know now from experience that our ceo is a very busy person and he's always on twitter but within an hour i think he'd spotted the tweet and he said he'd like to speak to me and so

by the end of that day uh we'd agreed in principle for me to start doing some freelance paid work for vid iq so that was incredible i mean i've been earning money from ad revenue of course but to then start to earn i guess what you might call some professional income from youtube was incredible and i'd stop me if you want at any point asking no no no no no i'll cover you keep going it's all

good so so so so the conversation kind of went like you know you can see that you're very passionate we'd like you to make some videos um how much would you charge this is rob sandy seo asking me this and of course i had no idea what my value or worth was at the time and so i said uh 25 an hour and i think this is where the relationship really cemented itself i i knew i

could maybe trust and work with this person rob said no no you're worth more than that we'll pay 45 an hour so that was incredible that somebody had really seen the value in what i could do at the time and wasn't gonna you know i guess fleece me cheat me or anything so from that point on i think one video a week i was making for vid iq uh 45 now which was was nice but it

was just a little bit more income on top of adsense so i was still nowhere near thinking that this could turn into a full-time gig or anything but after six to seven months of a working relationship rob contacted me again and said um would you like to work for us and it's like wow this is this is quite a big thing potentially coming here uh and of course i was interested but because of my work circumstances

i live in canada but i i came to canada through my previous employment and so my visa was fixed to that previous company i couldn't work for anybody else so what i had to do was then apply for what's called permanent residency in canada which then means you're allowed to stay here for as long as you like and work for whoever you want and so it was another i think year and a bit to get that

pr which then meant i could then actually accept the job from vid iq so i think from start to finish from me getting that first contact with vid iq it took around 18 months to then become a full-time employee well not a full-time player i think i'm still classed as an independent contractor but you know i pretty much do everything for vid iq so yeah that's a journey from the very brief very long story of me

starting to make videos and now being i guess a player in the industry or whatever you might call it so when you when you started at video iq was was the channel like brand brand new or had they been putting stuff on it for you so when the vidiq channel started i think vid iq is now nearly 10 years old i think it's um rob formed company in 2011. and i think they started the channel in

february 2013 but all that was there was a couple of test videos i guess to test the software and one advert which is still there and i think that had about 80 000 views but beyond that there was absolutely nothing so obviously rob brought me on board i guess as social software proof that you could use vid iq and grow it grow a tool and at first i was just doing tutorials for the tools but it

soon developed into i think that's what i was doing before but then as our relationship grew i kind of started to experiment and tested a little bit so i wasn't just doing software tutorials i was starting to do case studies which may include our software and that's where i think the channel really started to blossom because it went from being just a way of communicating the vid iq tools and what they can do to being where

a fully fledged youtube channel and we're gonna join in this creator growth journey if that makes any sense you know we're gonna we're gonna practice what we preach i'm gonna try and grow a channel as well as being a software company at the same time yeah well that sounds like it was the best decision they could have made and it's one that a lot of businesses really struggle with letting go of the fact that they need

to stop actively promoting and actually start building a community um yeah you've done amazingly well and i see it when you comment on other videos and you just get flooded with praise and like well vidiq's here they've come to join yeah yeah i've noticed that a couple of times yeah um and i think you are the largest youtube specific channel now like specifically talking about youtube content right uh so i still see think media as the

largest education channel but on the same token they do have a lot of uh tech and camera yeah stuff so i guess if you were just exclusively talking about youtube education uh yeah i can't think of anybody else you got me thinking about it i remember i remember in 2020 uh like one of the goals was so what where do you when do we want to get vid iq and i was saying right i wanna i

wanna overtake video influencers i wanna take derral eves i wanna i would take tim schmoyer and all of these people i'd looked up to uh previously and this is no way shape or form saying i'm now a bigger and better channel because i know for example daryl and tim are focusing a lot less on their channels these days um but you know when we were just getting to our first hundred thousand subscribers they were at three

hundred and four hundred thousand tens of millions of views and it didn't feel as if it was a target that we'd ever reach but amazingly and fantastically we have yeah i think the last year especially um guys seem to just rocket it um well i would say um we've i think we've done um at least 200 000 subscribers in each year and more importantly i will always stress this more importantly it's the views and we've done

20 million plus for the last two years so that's what i'm i'm more pleased about yeah yes i'm looking forward to that gold player button but i think i feel as if not my job is done but when we've got 100 million views and a million subscribers that i think this is something that we've really turned into uh you know a community in a channel that's hopefully inspiring thousands if not tens of thousands of people to

become creators themselves someone's just pinged in a super chat um just saying from inside the lab pc tech from my community to yours shout out to rob dan and vidiq thanks for sharing what you know thank you inside the lab don't forget travis and savage and jeff as well and all of those other people who contribute to the channel audits as well oh yeah cool thank you very much for that um so yeah rob i'm going

to get back onto the channels sort of a bit later but i actually still like to sort of come back to actually making youtube a job um because you're the second person i've ever met that is a youtuber by job um and actually the other person i know is on a channel called proav have you ever seen them they do um reviews on kit um and he had a similar sort of thing he approached the company

and said i want you know you need youtube videos i'll make some and then they took him on full time um now i think as businesses hopefully cut on to the fact that youtube is very powerful have you got any advice for anyone as to how they might actually be able to become a youtuber because it almost feels like you have to go to the company i don't see many companies looking for full-time you know roles

if you were doing it now how would you start to build a relationship with a company that you thought i want to try and become their youtuber so my advice but this extends beyond i guess approaching companies is if you want to become an important member of any community or or see or not be seen as somebody who's trying to to spam or just trying to you know what's in it for myself is give away as

much as you can for free uh to begin with in the sense that how i got my foot in the door with vid iq is that i basically made a promotional ad for their content you know i told people how to use this tool it's really good you know it wasn't even an affiliate i wasn't an affiliate never have been ironically i'm not even an affiliate of vidiq i can believe that um but you know it

wasn't a paid video but i just i was just doing something because i thought it was going to help my community and it just so happened that vid iq was going to benefit from it and so when we talk about people as simple as if you're posting comments on somebody else's videos you don't just post a comment that tells somebody to visit your channel you actively engage constructively in the conversation in the comments all the content

itself and then people start to value what you have to provide and through that hopefully you'll build influence and respect in a community um but yeah i think if you're looking to maybe um getting the good books of a company i i guess one way to see is if you're reviewing products you know you buy the products first and you review them and and then you you let the companies know i'm i think it's dave mays

i think his name it's his name he he pretty much got a paid i think i can't remember who the company was i think it's some sort of shell company for dji dj and i'm i might be really butchering this story because it was two years ago now but i remember talking to him at vidcon and he was saying how a company in china but he thinks it was a shell company for dji contacted him and

then they started i think sending him products but then they kind of brought him on board as a content creator even though it was his own channel i think they were basically paying him to review their products and that type of thing and again that must have been through him first of all just making tech reviews and tutorials to the point where he was identified as somebody uh that may be of interest to that company so

yeah going back to the original question and answer i think it's first of all try and give away some value for free another way this might be is i think lots of big channels they'll start to get fan-made content whether it's like channel banners or somebody to do some music like on our channel audit live streams now people are doing uh they're taking clips from our channel audits and they're turning them into animations which is really

cool from our community and now we've kind of got a working relationship with these people and who knows where that might blossom in the future well so they're kind of like taking highlights from it and then turning it into an animated version yeah yeah there's this one person who does stickman animation and he's he keeps we have like a comedy character in our channel it's called savage whereby we do a lot of genuine channel audits and

then for the last 20 minutes uh one of our guests turns into savage and then he savages the channels he says how rubbish they are and terrible you know and this is all done through tongue-in-cheek like people actually have to fill out a dedicated savage form they know what they're getting into we're not just doing it for people who genuinely want help but anyway um one of our community members is taking those clips and turning them

into animations and now we're using them at the beginning of our live streams of in something called memes of the week because we let people take pictures of us and make turns into silly faces and whatnot and those animations are kind of like the the headline of the memes of the week so it's kind of a case of um showcase your skill to show them yeah exactly yeah we've always found that as a production company people

always want to see exactly what they're buying and it's like you know you're talking to a solicitor and we're like we haven't actually made a video specifically like you want but they still want to see it so that makes a lot of sense then it's give them what they want and then let them go i want this like you know how much is it going to cost me kind of thing um so i'm hoping like i

said in the next few years more and more companies start being more open with this um and i feel like at the moment it's the sort of thing you got to reach out for definitely um but i think it's inspiring for you to tell your story that's kind of why i wanted you to unpack it really because yeah there must be a lot of people who like making videos right now that's one thing i wanted to

go through with you is your journey of actually producing content because you weren't formally trained you know you didn't go to film school or or learn at uni how to set up this kit so how did you end up learning how to make videos like where did you start out uh 12 years and about 2 000 videos i think is a general answer to that it's all i think sheer bloody mindedness to the point where you

know i should probably spend more time on the you know the theory research watching however people do it rather than just bumbling about i still think i do that uh to uh to a certain extent ultimately i love once i got the bug for it you know made it like 20 or 30 videos i realized just how much i enjoy the creative process and so this is where i have this personal uh argument of to begin

with i think quantity can be somewhat more important than quality because it allows you to go through the entire creative process multiple times and develop i call it like youtube muscle memory so that when when you are 50 videos into making content and still nobody's watching it because if that's youtube you know it does take a lot of time to get discovered you are so much better than your first videos and you can create something much

better uh more efficiently and get it to youtube uh quickly and so that's how i did it i'm but i'm gonna say i'm not gonna say that that's how you should do it it's just how my i guess my brain works i like to do rather than research and it feels as if youtube generally speaking rewards consistency and you turning up all the time and yes sometimes content you think is gonna do really well on youtube

doesn't and at the same time you'll smash something out in 10 minutes and that turns into your top performing video over a number of years again that's youtube but i think by by consistently making this content you start to learn you know how youtube works as a as an ecosystem uh so yeah for me it was just a case of using the first camera i had and for the first two years not realizing that all of

the lights in your living room are terrible for filming because they're all of like a warm yellow color you know it took me about i think three or four years to realize that cfl high temperature lights are actually really good uh for for filming i still have a relatively simple setup have you been using the same camera now for i think five years i rarely change the set because i hate variables like i i like things

to be consistent to a point where i can just press record and record i don't have to switch scenes or whatever again that's a personal preference and um yeah i mean i i still consider myself a average to decent person in front of a camera i still see myself as an average to decent editor i still see myself as an average to decent thumbnail maker i i consider myself a six or seven out of ten for

most youtube attributes but what i think i'm really good at is taking an idea to youtube so something will come into my head and within 30 seconds to a minute i know whether or not i'm gonna make it into a video and then within four to six hours the video is done and uploaded to youtube an example of this is youtube shorts we all know it's a big thing right now and i think on tuesday youtube

accidentally leaked out an article about them launching youtube shorts in the us and they quickly pulled it back but i managed to get the article because it's still cash it was still cached on google at a time which was quite funny i was using google's own tools to you know unearth a youtube mistake and so i think i i remember this because it was it was on wednesday and i just finished a live stream a q

a live stream which is two hours long and and you'll know ed doing live streams can be pretty intense and you're pretty tired after them it is but i knew this i knew this information was really vital and i wanted to get it out as soon as possible so i think i started the video at three o'clock and then i'd published it on youtube so i'd done everything from start to finish in about three and a

half hours and i think that's where my my biggest skill is that when i decide to make a video i can do it very very quickly to a i'd say a good standard i always feel as if my videos are six or sevens out of ten but they're the first videos on youtube on that particular topic and i think that's where often my edge is in on youtube they are always the first to the point where

it's just scary how quick you get it out like i don't although the other day i was quite happy because i did one on tax and you hadn't covered it yes well again that's because if stories come out on a tuesday or a wednesday then i'll be a bit slower because we've got two hours worth of live streams on both days so that's the trick to anybody if you want to get a youtube story out before

me do on a tuesday or a wednesday and and you might be there before me i need to free up my tuesday mornings yeah to try and get ahead of you um it's funny actually you say that because when i started watching you a lot more it was when jim but dad how do i um yes my girlfriend came into the kitchen and went we've seen this bloke's blown up on youtube like a million in the

day and she showed me the video it was you and i was like oh man i have to me yes so i got up at 4am the next day and started writing it and got it out and uh but i still miles too late but it's um it's it's hard because you don't necessarily have to able to batch so i like to batch produce stuff so you always have to really be you know what are you

making on a week later you might not know yeah i hate batch producing i don't think i could ever do it because i can't film lots of stuff one day and then edit it the next day uh again this is just completely the personal way i do it but because i like to do and just get my hands dirty i don't do that much um preparing said in terms of like properly formatting the the structure of

a video and writing a script i it's very much on the fly so once i've got the idea and then once i've got the intro everything just seems to naturally flow i never very rarely get i guess film block or anything i know where it's i know generally where it's going to go um one one step to the next and i'll just have these occasional wacky ideas that come into my head and i kind of input

them into a video whether it's you know a little bit of a comedy thing or um you know i just want to have a little um a side point i talk about um so yeah again i don't generally preach these things because i think everybody just has those personal innate ways of creating content and so as you say i don't know what i'm making next week i mean i kind of do i have a list a

backlog of stuff of um you know maybe i'll talks about i think the backlog of stuff might be how to get a thousand subscribers using vidiq's tools that's something that i've been meaning to make for a couple of months now but i know on monday afternoon i'll suddenly get access to the youtube shorts tool and i'll drop everything i'll need to do a tutorial on that so i'm always there's some there's always something that's going to

come up like this this week i had a i had a a blank week but youtube talked about well now first of all they released the real-time subscriber page they just threw that on everybody at the start of the week so i made a quick video about that and then yeah the the shorts article came out so those two things have occupied my time and then i went back to the tax video that you were talking

about and looked through the comments and there's quite a lot of frequently asked comments so yesterday afternoon i made it like a quick 10 minute responding to those frequently asked questions so i think once you're totally consumed by youtube and it becomes your job for me it's quite easy to to think of ideas i i think of myself as a freelance journalist the you know the roving reporter is going out there and finding the new stories

himself on youtube but then occasionally the bigwigs at vidiq will say can we do a video about how to use this tool or that tool uh so there's always enough to keep me busy yeah well it's i think it might be worth just talking through the benefits of that because so i used to have 36 videos ready to go i was always 36 videos ahead i had a quarter's worth of content produced because i had to

do the business as well but i've stopped that now so i try and get a few weeks ahead but like you said it's news and actually news is views there is a cheesy thing for you um and being able to react to that quick um so what would you advise to people then when it comes to like you said you said you drop you drop everything almost to cover a story is that a strategy you recommend

for a lot of educational channels drop everything uh i'm not sure if that's a good strategy but i think if you are um a search based channel then being on top of the news topics in your space is absolutely crucial the the example i always fall back to is let's say you are a tech channel and your schedule which you post on your channel planet is every i post videos every monday and every friday well what

happens if apple announced the iphone 12 13 release on a tuesday do you wait until friday to talk about that and the sim the simple and obvious answer is no because for the first 36 hours after that product release announcement everybody is searching on youtube so you as a creator need to respond to what's happening in your your space your topic but at the same time you've got to think about how you can add a different

angle or insight versus all of the other channels that are going to be covering it and that's the tough thing it's trying to differentiate yourself it is yeah that that is a challenge yeah it's also incredibly stressful i don't know how you do it it can be yeah yeah i find it like you know i don't want to rush anything and i like i i write everything so i just can't do it without it and it's

like you know i need to write it and that uses up all my brain power so i write and then leave it and then i'll come back another day and film it so um yeah for me i find it incredibly challenging to cover the news but also um the side of the world we're on and at the moment you know like you said shorts is gonna get released in the us um are you gonna be able

to get access to that in canada i have no idea because i have been talking now about youtube shorts for six months and i'm convinced i'm going to be the last person on earth who can actually make a youtube shot because youtube's trolling me i think that that's all it is okay good luck because like i've been looking at vpns and like how can i how can i fall youtube into the game in the states because

i want to cover it i even thought about creating an account in india so i could download it but i'm i think it's connected to your account in some way i tried to do it and i couldn't get it to work i set up i set up a vpn in india um and it just i just couldn't it just kept saying i couldn't trick it it's like so smart yeah um but it's a problem because you

know obviously we want to get in there first and talk about it i kind of want to play with it too um so not not much shorts content coming on this channel for a while i'll tell you what that this is a good example of you work with what you've got you know people talk about i don't have the equipment to do this on a video or i don't have this this piece of tech of this

product to review i mean i haven't got youtube shorts but it hasn't stopped me from talking about it a lot and providing as as best good value as i can and so never never use use it as an excuse that you you haven't got something or you don't have access to it you can always find ways as a creator to provide something of value or and entertainment on the topic but that doesn't matter i've got some

stuff coming on it david walsh i've noticed david walsh has got access to it and he's done a tutorial and i'm just seeing his views go up and i'm like but isn't david walsh and enfield no you win some of you lose them i thought he was in the uk yeah yeah so i think as far as i'm aware some people in the uk have had access to it for at least a month because one of

our team our team in vid iq is in the uk and he's got access to it i might message i'm connected with him on linkedin i might see if i can pop around his house because he's not far away steel is fun and there's someone in our chat who um is very tech-based se cybersave if you know of any way me and rob can access youtube shorts and trick youtube into thinking we're in the states or

india can you just let us know it'll be really helpful i hope you i hope youtube isn't listening to this maybe you should change the title of this live stream to how to vpn livestream hack google play i didn't say i was going to do it i'm just interested if you can do it of course of course um so let's go back purely for educational reasons eh yeah of course of course um so if we go

back to the vidiq channel um how many years ago did you say you started putting videos onto it now my first video i think was either april or may 2016. 2016. okay fine so this isn't time that so in that time what if there's one thing you've got out of that and you're like this is the best thing for anyone on youtube to focus on if they could only focus on the thing is there something that

jumps out to you as like what that would be [Music] i guess in a kind of convoluted way uh being authentic and being true to yourself i know that sounds very cliche but because i all of a sudden i wasn't making videos for myself um and my audience i was making videos for a company slash their audience to begin with it was just tutorials and you know how to use vid iq and it's not that i

i didn't enjoy making that that content it was a case of who's gonna find this useful slash entertaining slash wanna come back to this channel if it's just how to use an individual tool on a piece of software and it's as i say as i said earlier on it the channel i think over the course of the first year evolved into not just vid iqs software but i guess the manifestation of a channel i would make

as a youtube growth educational channel within the realm of the vid iq umbrella does that make any sense at all what i've just said yeah a corporation yeah yeah a corporate entity and i that's where i have to give a lot of thanks and praise again to rob sandy because in terms of creative input and like control he has almost never interfered in what i've done on the channel and as i started to make these more

i guess risque bits of content where i would add a bit of my own humor or something you know he never objected to that and so it gave me the confidence and the freedom to start making the videos more in my own style and way and so that i think is one of the reasons why the vid iq channel uh has grown and built a community uh as it has done and so to put that into

context for other creators it's when you start to become i guess more more confident in front of camera and you feel yourself and you realize that you don't i mean for you ed obviously you you do write scripts but i think for most people it's probably going to be somewhat of a relief when you can just talk to camera without too much planning and preparation or um you don't spend so long on a certain aspect which

you think is really important but to perhaps the audience it's just another part of a of a longer form form video i was interested in that i uh as part of a video i'm making i started another channel um another another channel this isn't a shorts test one um i just wanted to get some data prove a point and um so i've been putting a video a day on it i'm not on camera at all it's

faceless just me talking over screenshots i haven't written a thing it's topic i don't know that much about um and i'm finding it so easy to just talk and the videos are ranking and getting views and i was like why am i spending so much time writing but for some reason youtube i just i find it very hard to articulate and i will just go off on a tangent so writing suits me but i think you're

right a lot of people would probably find it easier not to the reason we tend to recommend they do is in the start you know like you said about practice practice practice yeah kind of that get once you're confident and then you can move on um so you do a very good job of um coming across as authentic because i don't think many people will have realized that you aren't vid iq because i didn't correct even

though everybody thinks i own the company yeah i just i thought you were the guy who owned the company and i never noticed it says resident youtuber on the bar and it's always like this is the guy who owns the company how cool is that um so he does feel authentic so you're doing it right that's what i mean yeah everybody thinks i make all of the videos everybody thinks i design all of the software everybody

thinks i do all of the customer supports so if anything good or positive happens with vid iq yes i do own and run it if you have any complaints or issues then do contact rob sandy and he will be able to help you out with that the other rob yeah it's not it's not helpful that you share a name either is it really yeah well and the really crazy thing is i don't know if anybody's seen

him but he has like a huge mop of hair he's really curly and big and wide um and i i have photoshopped his hair onto my head uh for comedy purposes in the past in fact actually i once researched you because i was like oh and if this guy owns it of course it said the owner was rob so i was like oh yeah yeah yeah there is that there is that so even when i looked

into it i found out um i thought you were the owner um so i just want to talk to you about the stress of youtube um which is something i've got i've realized it's quite stressful recently as i've put more effort into it um now i think everyone in in my head when i started this i was like once i've got 10 000 subscribers it's going to be so easy once i've got 100 000 subscribers it's

going to be easy but also if you're working with influencers now who have hundreds of thousands what i've noticed is it's got harder but not the actual building the following but the mental side of it and dealing with that following and the fact that you've got so many eyeballs looking at you so as you close into a million subscribers is there anything that you know the perception you had of back then if you got to the

stage right now is there anything that's completely different as to what it's like running such a large channel if i it doesn't feel as if it feel like that actually it's it's funny that i think you know seven or eight years ago when i was thinking back and i was maybe getting 300 views a day i thought if i just you know can make a thousand views a day i will be happy and now we get

about 80 000 views a day and i'm still thinking if we can just get to 100 000 views a day i'll be happy so as you as you say the the the stress or the pressure to strive to improve is always there and i guess the gamification of youtube doesn't help with that in that it kind of conditions you to constantly look at the analytics and see how can you improve you want all of your graphs

going up and to the right and when they start to decline you know you start to blame youtube yourself or all of these external factors which you don't feel as if you have control over i would always say and this is again this is another reason why i think people should think about quant quantity first i think unless you're going to outsource all of this you have to have a passion and love for for making videos

even if not necessarily that many people are watching so i think after i made 100 videos i realized i just love doing this anyway and that's why i think i've i've still been a little resistant to handing over the reigns to anyone in terms of you know i'll film it and somebody else can edit it and then somebody else can do the thumbnails i just love the whole creative aspect of it and maybe i'm perhaps i'm

a bit too protective of that so again i don't know how um how useful that is to um creators it in that sense um because i feel less less even though i work for a company uh you know i'm paid by them i i don't feel pressure because i've managed to turn my passionate hobby into a professional career uh and so i i will continue to love to do that i think from a creative side side

of things i am starting to feel a little tired you know i i call this accumulated fatigue it's not that i'm exhausted at 5 00 p.m on a on a tuesday and feel as if i need a week's vacation i feel as if i'm not burnt out but i know i'm reaching a point where i need want to step back and you know probably take a few months off and so i am planning to have a

sabbatical uh maybe next year um which again i'm going to be super thankful to vidiq for allowing me to do this um and yeah i guess it's a case of i think once i've hit a million subscribers and 100 million views i may want to take a step back and say right where do i want to go do i do i still want to just keep making video content or maybe i want to start to think

about other ways i can contribute to the the youtube community and one of the things i'm still not that good at but i haven't done very much yet is public speaking you know being being up on stage and i feel as if i want to do that a little more in the future so it may mean that i start to take a step back from video content you know in the next five years that type of

thing um so yeah where was it what was the original question now i don't i don't know but i was enjoying listening to what you said because i kind of resonated with the fatigue side um and i don't know because of lock down and staying in but in my household there's two people making content full time like you know yes and and when you have people talking to you um you sit down like live my girlfriend

sits down at night and then the west coast of america wakes up and she suddenly gets 300 messages we're both kind of getting exhausted like you know it's not like it's just like oh we do need a break and it would be nice just to have a complete week where you're not thinking of content ideas because you probably like me where you wake up in the morning and you've got an idea and you get up and

you're like right i better get on it like you just want to get it done um are you not like that well i was just thinking when you were saying that like i i think on it was wednesday and like i i um it was one of the one of the days this week when i i woke up and i like i haven't got anything in my to-do list but i haven't really got any video ideas

right now and i kind of had a bit of a not lazy morning but i was just doing bitty things i was posting stuff on social media uh reading a couple of articles doing a bit of video research but then all of a sudden i think just before lunch it's like i've got an idea to do something and then as i say i dropped everything and i i made that video in the afternoon so as long

as i have that spark this thing that keeps giving me ideas at random times then i will continue to make um i'm love making content but at the same time i feel as if i want to give that part of my brain a rest for a little while at some point very soon yeah i think well i don't know if you you've probably followed tim schmoyer's story um because he made a return recently and he was

talking about his brain which might have been a result of because he was you know he was big on youtube wasn't he like he was always writing stuff i learned a lot from him um so you know you've got to stop burning the candle at both ends at some point well i here's the thing about um what i do is that i mean a short answer to this is yes i sold out in the sense that

i used to make content on my own channel and i was building up a community and then effectively vid iq bought me and from that point onwards i don't have to i don't really worry about uh all of the other pressures that other creators have in a sense of a lot of people are still relying on adsense which fluctuates from day to day and youtube can flick a switch and then it's all gone they're having to

you know chase sponsorships brand deals trying to encourage their community to buy merch or join memberships or you know buy a product and service i kind of agree to surrender the unlimited but very volatile potential of all on youtube to have you know i guess a stable job with a steady income within this crazy world of youtube and so yeah i think you know tim schmoyer who is not only a creator but he runs his own

business you know i i would burn out instantly with all of the business aspects of things because you know i'm terrible at all that stuff i i'm the first person to admit that i'm not essentially a marketer a businessman you know that's why i call myself the youtuber in residence at vid iq i don't feel as if i'm any more than that i make youtube videos for a company and that's it i mean it's funny because

like the posh way of posh way of talking about what i do is i could call myself a vice president of video production you know if i want that to be my linkedin title for you know future future job roles elsewhere but at the end of the day yeah i just make videos and i like doing it and so that's what i'm going to call myself you touched on a really good point earlier when you said

that you need to like making videos to do this because i think a lot of people get into youtube because they think it's good money um yeah yeah you know it can be it's not necessarily i don't know if people know that there's a lot of six figure follow people that are following so you don't make any money other than ad revenue um which isn't good money um or it's scary they should be making seven figures

if they're only making six figure only if they're only making six figures from their youtube channel they could and should be making seven figures oh i'm talking about zero there's just like ad revenue they're making um it's the same amount of time oh sorry as we're talking about the other way around we're not making any ad revenue but they're making six figures yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so there's a lot of people get into it for

that sort of reason and it's often because the love of video isn't there um one thing you've mentioned twice and this keeps popping out to me now is you've said the quality versus quantity thing and actually i think i'm starting to side with you especially in the early days right so a couple of people have commented apologies i can't remember your account name um saying recently they've started youtube channels from scratch with no niche no intention

of growing it they just want to keep putting videos out to get good and then they're like and then i'm going to start my channel but i just don't want to start a channel rubbish like i can't argue with that really can you it's it's yeah go ahead sorry it's getting that production down and like you said like putting out getting the that bit right and then maybe starting to build the youtube bit on top um

which could play out in their favor do you know what i mean like you know if every video they make starts getting suggested from day one and ranking in search for the thing that they really want to grow and there's no rubbish on there um it sounds like a smart way of doing it what do you think about that youtube doesn't hold all of your videos to account in terms of future success mr beast is the

best example of this who pushed out hundreds of terrible videos which is still on his channel and yet today he has nearly 60 million subscribers and billions of views i don't think mr beast will have got to where he is today without being a terrible youtuber to begin with and if if you're caught in this loop of wanting to make the perfect video um from the very beginning first of all you're probably not going to start

for a long time you know you'll think about starting this channel and think about it and as you're thinking about it there are 20 or 30 people in your space who have created channels are already getting ahead of you um i call this a youtube procrastination youtube as a as a thing as an organic as a being of some kind cannot stand um otherwise just going on my head procrastination yeah if it can't find the content

from you it will go and find it from somewhere else like if you can't just say to youtube or can you just hang on a week while i make this video youtube's not gonna wait for you it's gonna go and get it from where it can because youtube i'm afraid to say folks it's not built for you the creator it's built for the viewer it's to find the content that's on its platform and serve it to

them and that's why i think um this new return viewers analytic is is so important and how it's making a mockery a little bit of the concept of subscribers and yeah it's something else i want to make sure i mentioned is if let's say you've made 50 terrible videos but you've got really good at making i guess terrible videos and you know how to um make a you know a heart a thumbnail you know how to

make a video fairly quickly imagine if you suddenly get that idea and you can turn it into something five times quicker then you could do six months ago because you have all of these skills now to be able to do that um and i think that's especially useful in the search area of youtube where then you can bring this idea to market very quickly hmm interesting i like yes you made some really good points there um

there's also this uh um this 80 20 rule isn't there whereby you let's say it takes you five hours to get in to make what in your head is an 8 out of 10 video but then to to get that extra two points to make it the best video you could make in your your current skill set takes another 15 hours you've got to put all of this extra time and effort in to get this video

to a really high standard and i think for and creators who already have a big huge established audience that can be important i i take mkbhd as an example who always seems to push out 10 out of 10 videos he has super high quality content but when youtube is still trying to figure out who you are it doesn't know who to serve your content to an audience would you rather make four eight out of ten videos

or one ten out of ten video oh i'm looking at a live stream uh then it's doing some weird countdown really yeah huh look i think yeah oh unless i've just hang on sorry i i just press refresh sorry just started the livestream from scratch um that's that's a really good point as well um the the there's something i've struggled with recently so the last video i put out i probably spent the most time i've ever

put on a video and i was like i need to take this as a marker of if the watch time is better on this it's worth it you know yeah yeah um and so far it's about the same as one with less effort so i was like okay i'm learning something from that although i loved making it and it was fun um you're right in that maybe an 8 out of 10 is a better option than

a 10 sometimes depending on the result two really good points there first of all always be testing so you tried out something new and you've got some data back to tell you whether or not it works and also yeah i've been experimenting with the same thing in terms of i do a lot of mediocre graphics and texts on my videos to illustrate things which take forever to do yeah um and i'm not sure what the the

payoff of them is and i think a month ago i did one video where it was just press record on the camera and just talk 15 minutes and then when you edit it don't put in that much b-roll just you know click the the content itself so it was like a 15-minute video that i took about three hours to make and usually that for b would take you know six to ten hours and it was it's

one of the better performing videos i don't know if that's because of the the title and the thumbnail was more intriguing because it was something along the lines of my advice for starting a youtube channel and it had me holding a a silver play button with the word patience above it yeah so that kind of had a nice little um clickbaity slash click worthiness to it uh and so i it may be that that got the

thumbnail in the title which yes i spent time on but you can spend a lot less time making a decent thumbnail in title than you can really good content that got them in the door and then as you say sometimes people will watch your content for as long as they're going to watch it irrespective of perhaps the innate quality of the content because what's really important to the viewer it might be especially for educational channels how

to's utility channels is the value of the content what the information they get from it yeah it's it's an interesting one because of course you're always you know you make the best stuff you can um but it might not always be right and what you just said about the titles then i i do believe that a title will make someone watch a video watch for longer even if the video isn't as good as one maybe with

the worst title do you know what i mean it's like yeah it's like you know i want to get something out of this and put the time in um that's a good example yeah let me just talk about this example very quickly because i've got this in my head because of tim schmoyer uh so tim schmoyer video creators tv by the way he i would say is one of the godfathers of inspiring creators to make content

he certainly inspired me so i'm not no knock against him at all he made a video about returning viewers and i think his title was something along the lines of new youtube metric returning viewers uh and the the video is of a very high quality and i think it's probably better than the video i made in terms of actual value and education i made a video on the same topic but i changed the title well my

title was cheat code unlocked how to beat the youtube algorithm in 2021 so that is a lot more i guess clickbaity in its own way isn't it you know people love to search for how to beat the youtube algorithm so and and then it had my picture you know the usual youtuber look of me pointing in a shocked way like that and so that got people into a video but then the actual content was about look

i know i've got you into this video with a pretense of how to beat the youtube algorithm but let's be honest you can't be or hack the youtube algorithm anymore instead of figuring out how to beat an algorithm you need to learn how to build an audience and this analytic is going to help you do that and so the comparison in terms of the way i've presented to the presented it to the audience is in quite

a lot of contrast to tim but then my video seems to be doing a lot better and i think it's because um tim's now i think he said in a video maybe a year ago that he's he's che he's pivoting his channel yeah and he's being a lot more focused on a very particular audience which is i think channels that are already over 10 000 subscribers who already think about how to turn into a business and

so that video even though it's reaching a lot less people is super valuable to them and tim's trying to get i think um high tier clients who who are gonna you know each individual client is gonna pay a lot more money whereas for me i'm sort of trying to appeal to a much mass broad audience trying to tell them about this new analytic and hey by the way have you heard of vid iq may you want

to download our software and then people download the software they like it and then maybe they're going to invest in it so it's like two very different approaches to a similar topic and they're both very um very good in their own right um but they're just appealing to different audiences i think that's you've hit the nail on the head there um and it's probably something i got caught up too much in myself is that so my

other little channel i've started 300 subscribers um i make content my target audience for that is people with about 100 000 followers um now you can't make content for people with a hundred thousand followers for search but i don't care i'm not looking for tons of views i'm really just looking for three or four of the right views um yeah whereas when you have a channel where it's like you're just trying to get lots in those

metrics um you know you really need to put a value on per viewer a value per viewer and if that's a stat it should be um because like you just said i can see looking at tim's last viewers that these would appeal to me because i'm not looking for a clickbaity quick um fix i'm looking at yeah you know new versus returns from a face that i trust that's fine but your your um thumbnail which was

cheat code unlocked was genius because i would as soon as that popped out i was like oh that's a great way of appealing to especially the gaming community but even me yeah like chico's when i was younger you know they were fun and i was like oh i wish i'd thought i'm thinking more about how to tap into the emotional trigger of somebody um there's somebody else on the team called alexi who um who's really helping

me out with this another example was it was a tax one where you know it's a pretty dry topic yeah um and again i did go a bit clickbaity with an image of somebody putting their hand in the back pocket of somebody and see i'm taking out their wallets as if to suggest that youtube was perhaps finding another way to steal some of your revenue and again once you get into the video it's about you know

how the the new youtube tax policies are not really anything to do with youtube it's u.s law and they've got to follow those rules and then ultimately i say that a video is only clickbaity if it doesn't provide the perceived value of its intended audience and you get that answer by the um the views that you get the the likes the dislikes the comments within the content and and the watch time and if it's suitable for

your audience whatever that audience is then it's click-worthy but again i think that's a conversation open to interpretation well i think actually that's that's one of the most misunderstood thing with thumbnails so when people say you know they make good thumbnails i think initially they think like oh they need to look pretty but what you've just said was hang on it's not it needs to make someone feel something or intrigue them which doesn't necessarily mean it

always has to be the prettiest design um because i think i remember yours i've seen the image because i remember seeing it on pop-up and being like oh that looks completely different to what you usually do um yeah yeah it was it was it was a departure from our usual but it was telling a story how did you did have you got any enough data on it to say like actually we found that that worked better

it's tough because it's such a new story let me see i can have a quick look at the analytics and see if a click-through rate is any difference um sorry i'm doing some live analytical checks now to see what's going on so the click-through rate on that one it was four percent so it wasn't that high so maybe i i you see i created a thumbnail and i showed it to a colleague of mine and they

said you know tax is a bit dry it doesn't really have it doesn't have any emotional triggers and so that's what led me to this idea of making this thumbnail like in the first day it was five and a half percent but now it's starting to drop down so there are there are sometimes when what you actually do is you create a thumbnail that appeals to your core audience your community your your subscribers so it can

i guess maybe a little more emotional in it in that way but then as the video moves away from your community and youtube starts to test it with new audiences you start to think about how you can make it more discoverable for research so i think the the title right now is is this a new youtube tax maybe i should change that title now to um what it might be something along the lines of how to

well what would it be ed it's it's going to be something along the lines of how to the thing is navigate youtube's new tax system or something i was thinking about this because i made a video on it um and in the end i just thought my video wasn't relevant enough for long term search it was more about the now and what it means rather than you know if someone searched it in two years time it's

not going to have quite the right tone so i specifically just went to get browse and suggested views from that um got some from search just for being having the keywords in but i didn't structure the video it was a bit of a rushed video actually because i was trying to get it on the news um i didn't structure it well enough to actually make it work for search which is probably a mistake um but yeah

you have to switch it and that's that's one that's one interesting point so at what point do you change your titles to attract to search more than intrigue your initial viewers and subscribers and you know try and get suggested instantly um i think it has evergreen i mean i don't often do this but i think if it has evergreen potential you know and you you've created a search-based piece of content and search traffic has not been

driven to it i would maybe give it like a week or two um because you do need to get beyond that first stage of browse and and it just appearing in return viewers feed to see if they're going to click on it then i start to think about how it might be more valuable to search yeah it's this question of like should um when should i try and revive dead content and my general advice always in

the past has been if you think it's still if if you still think the video has value today as of when you first published it then yeah maybe update it like the tax one as you say it was a in the moment news story it doesn't have that much legs i don't think so i'm publishing one more video on it this weekend and then i think i'm done with the topic so i don't know if i

will bother um changing the uh title but i have a video on how to use the youtube video editor which is doing terribly and every i'm trying to get that to to kickstart because there are other channels who have made videos on how to use youtube's video editor they're getting hundreds of thousands of views yeah recently it's potential it's um it's justin brown it's his fault he always seems to get you know super high views on

those videos and i i can't replicate it so justin brown's content he's very good at simplifying it which i think for the beginner search audience is perfect because i was watching somebody did the other day and i was just like oh this is really easy to watch so i'm guessing he through search he's getting the beginners in nicely um so complicated this isn't there when people think oh i'm gonna start a youtube channel you know it'll

be fun and make some videos and then they get sucked in and they then they realize the complexity of it all and i think also as well is as if if your video is not like in the top three searches you know i guess it's below the fold it's below this the scroll wheel if you can't get your video there it makes such a massive difference to click through rate all right when i was first studying

click through rate if you could get your video as a top search term it often has more than double the click-through rate of the second ranked one because i think the first videos that really started to take off on the channel were ones about youtube hashtags fully enough it was you know there's things that are terrible and nobody uses we thought at the time that youtube hashtags would be the big next the next big thing so

as happened many times we were the first education channels to bring something out about youtube hashtags and it's ranked number one for a very long time now i think it's got half a million views and we did a follow-up video which was things we've learned about youtube hashtags which for quite a while was ranked number two so we have the number one and a number two ranked videos but the click-through rate for the top-ranked video was

like 12 and then the click-through rate for the second round video was about five percent so there's a huge difference people are just naturally going to go for what youtube recommends as the the best result it's the same on google top top one gets like 30 of clicks and then it just tails down um which is a frustrating thing then because the people obviously spend a lot of time on their thumbnails and some that's often why

you see one's ranking top they don't tend to seem the best thumbnail but they're getting good clicks um well things haven't moved up um so yeah i'm aware you've got to get off soon i just thought um the stream's always about 45 seconds if anyone's in the quest uh comments and wants to fire in a question for rob um go for it um going back to search rob um it was interesting you said about like reoptimizing

dead content because when i started with youtube ages ago it was used to take six months for anything to get traction and i saw it about four or five videos all the same after six months suddenly just went bump and started moving um yeah so you've got kind of got to be careful as to when you re-optimize and i've always done it when things are older than six or nine months because i've never seen anything do

that well after that yeah but you know i'm sorry was that a question no it's just me rambling i was waiting for someone's question to come in i think as i was saying i for me i'm always thinking forward i mean yeah it does sometimes only take five to ten minutes to change a title on something um but often i'm thinking look it didn't work this time but is it new information can i talk about it

again can i release a new video i know that the video i make today is probably going to be better than the one i made six months ago uh so so i we have done that and then sometimes what we'll do is we'll just we'll i will just hold up my hands and say you know what i made this video i did it because i was influenced by this channel which was ranking highly but i changed

the thumbnail and the title a little bit i'm just going to try and use their title and see what happens i i know we've done this for a video which was along the lines of how to start your youtube gaming channel for free we changed the title a little bit and it wasn't performing well so we just we just change the title to one of the highly ranked ones and the video's starting to perform a little

bit better now so yeah sometimes a little bit of uh how shall i put this requisitioning of other people's metadata uh can give you a little bit of a boost is it just i don't i don't yeah i i don't recommend that like this is like we're trying to rescue something so you know we made this content and it hasn't worked so we're just going to see if we can um use somebody else's um ideas a

little bit um yeah i would never i would never encourage people to directly copy titles thumbnails et cetera et cetera but it's just experimentation when you know everything else we've done with a piece of content hasn't worked robert but a question come in um yeah i think you're gonna like it it says a subscriber's really dead should my uh cta be for likes instead well it's funny you should uh say this uh this is because of

a video i made on monday where i said basically subscribers are dead because of this new return views analytic i think that i mean in reality i think subscribers have been dead for years in the sense that i don't think youtube takes into account subscribers at all in terms of how they're surfacing content to a viewer an example i gave is your content is more likely to appear on a to a viewer if the viewer watch

your content last week and didn't subscribe as opposed to somebody who subscribed to your content two years ago and hasn't watched anything since youtube is interested in the viewers watching habits recently not what they subscribe to if you don't take into account the notification bell uh so i think obviously subscribers are still important in the sense that they're required for monetization for unlocking certain features there is that vanity side to it i think uh ed you

can correct me if i'm wrong here but i think uneducated businesses and brands will look at very artificial metrics like subscribers and views to see um if there's like i'm sure we've all been well anybody who's got more than ten thousand subscribers will have been emailed by a company saying hey hey video gadgets journal i've loved this video uh we would like to do a brand deal with you and you know it's just a copy and

paste spam email um so there is that and yes getting the trinkets to play buttons and whatnot are also useful but at the end of the day you don't earn any money from subscribers you do earn money from people watching your content and engaging with your content now the likes thing is interesting because i i think youtube are going to be bringing out some more data on this very soon uh which i have had a sneak

peek at but i don't think i can tell you tell anybody any more than that um i think ultimately getting people into your content and having them watch for as long as possible are the the most important metrics for for your videos so i mean in terms of calls to action i think you can still put them in your videos just don't spend 20 seconds saying make sure to subscribe to my channel so you get the

best news tips advice tricks and whatever because you're just wasting time that could be spent providing something of value what i usually do with my call to action is i try and provide something of value within the first 90 seconds and then right after i've delivered that value then that subscribe no icon just appears on screen i don't reference it or anything like that it's kind of like a subconscious trigger to subscribe but again i've not

really done any explicit testing on this uh and maybe i will in the future well it makes sense from the way that you uh you use the platform yourself there's lots of creators i'm subscribed to whose content i never see and all i do you know what it is though there is this element of the scientific name for it's like the bite of mine phenomenon which is that you notice things you are interested in more than

you're not so i'm always looking and the straight away as soon as i go on youtube i click on the thing but in my head i'm kind of going to see everything else is a blur so right i thought to myself the other day you know all this stuff doesn't pop up but i was like well i'm not looking for it so i wouldn't even see if it did pop up um because i'm i've got blinkers

on and i want to see stuff so it totally makes sense that youtube only wants people to click on things they're interested in so they're not going to show for me the subscriber thing feels more like a career more like something just to give creators a bit of a boost it's like this is how many people i'm impacting this is how you know this is like a mark on how my channel is doing um and maybe

that is the side that is helpful for people but at the same time might not be very helpful [Laughter] how long have subscribers been part of youtube and the answer to that is since it's inception or maybe just would say like 15 years so it's a metric that is now 15 years old and ploppy 54 gaming let me ask you this how many channels are you subscribed to how many of those channels do you actually watch

on a regular basis and do you watch those channels from your subscription feed and notifications or do you just see them as you're browsing through your homepage and say oh yeah this this guy or this girl's part another video and i'm i know i subscribed to him subconsciously i subscribed to him in the past but it's on the on my feed now so i'm just going to watch it if you look at your traffic sources and

just see how many views come from uh subscription feeder notifications it's generally less than ten percent well the notification side of thing i don't even know how well that works like it doesn't notify everyone who's put the bed on anyway does it yeah well this is this continuing myth i can't neither disprove all prove it that people click the bell notification and don't get notifications i just i i think youtube is past that now the the

discovery algorithms suggested algorithms are so sophisticated now it knows how to tell people when there is a video they want to watch beyond subscribe notifications brilliant when you take one more question rob and then i'm going to let you get on um sure so this question here um rob how do we properly a b test our thumbnails or titles oh that's a good question that's a good question it's a good one uh yeah so this is

the question of uh that that company that shall not be named uh how's such at all uh so youtube apparently have been teasing dedicated a b thumbnail testing for years at this point yeah so i think they've got the technology but i it i guess it just falls over completely when you release it at scale maybe youtube can't handle switching billions of thumbnails you know every day from people who want to a b thumbnail test the

problem with any sort of existing current a b thumbnail testing is is is that it's not true a b thumbnail testing because you're not sharing uh different thumbnails at exactly the same time you know you may be testing one thumbnail for half an hour then another for another half an hour and because the velocity of your content is so it's it's all over the place in the first 24 hours it's hard to get that result so

what you need to do is test it on reliable evergreen content you know videos that are getting like 100 views every day you know they have been for six months you might want to set the thumbnail to this for a week and then to from now be for a week and then you might get some ideas of what actually are the most successful thumbnails um i tend to if i'm doing any testing i will test it

on a series of videos i'll like say for the next five videos i'm going to test me my face and the thumbnails and then for the next five thumbnails i'm gonna test uh an object or an icon that replaces my face but at the same time you know the title and the topic can have a huge influence on whether people are going to click on it um for example we've just done a video about youtube shorts

and um taxes and those are both completely different topics so you know you you're now going to get a different click-through rate on them anyway so i know i'm not really i'm kind of skirting around the answer here because youtube doesn't provide the tools to allow us to do this and so yeah that's what i'm thinking like over a course of 20 to 30 videos over the course of three to six months you can test these

thumbnails but at the same time i would hope that as you're a content creator who's getting better one percent of the time you're making better thumbnails every time you you go into that part of the creation process so it's like do you a b thumbnail test videos from six months ago versus today when you know your skills are going to be a lot better anyway i feel as if i'm giving you a really bad answer here

so i'm just going to such a hard there's too many variables i stopped doing it um the only reason now i'm just testing it but for me if you've got a video ranking in search and you can see that it always brings in 160 views a day every day yeah then you can kind of test it but what you said was true it's not a proper split test because um because it's not giving it's swapping it

down you're not doing at the same time so really split testing works when you've got some controlled uh elements to it and then yeah otherwise it you know my concern is that something's working and then i change the thumbnail and it drops and it's like well that wasn't a test that was just sabotage [Laughter] the two things are very different um okay guys we're going to wrap it up now because rob's going to get with dave

rob thank you very much for coming on giving us your time i really appreciate thanks for having me on it's been it's been great hearing your story and yeah you've got so much knowledge um on youtube and yeah i look forward to watching more of your videos and i'm getting some ideas from you because whenever i learn a lot from you which is great by all means uh we don't monetize our content so we don't mind

if people steal our ideas we just don't steal our content all right guys thank you very much for joining us today and we'll finish it there