people look at YouTube automation sometimes the wrong way they think it's get rich quick yeah you're stealing videos from other creators it doesn't work anymore to just do compilations YouTube's more strict they want transformative content all the videos that go viral now are fresh content this is something people really want to see but no one is making content around it you can make such bad videos around that subject but people will still watch it because there's such a high demand for it you're giving everyone the yeah basically I just gave it away Noah Morris and
kayb box run several YouTube channels raking in millions of dollars without ever stepping in front of a camera their secret they come up with great video ideas for an underserved Niche and then hire Freelancers to make the videos for them I can get someone for 50 70 bucks to do this video and boom you make thousands of dollars so I sat down with them to learn their secrets so that you can do this too some people think you copy their title you kind of copy their thumbnail you make it a little bit different and then
you like recreate the video is that part of your guys' strategy you got to just press record basically I have two of the biggest faceless YouTube channel creators you guys are kind of known for faceless YouTube channels I think of you guys first when it comes to it one of my first questions was like why YouTube why faceless channels you guys have been doing it for a while I guess Caleb like why the faceless route I think it depends on every everyone's different though on goals so I've met a lot of people like we're at
vids a lot of met a lot of people who are actual aspiring face Talent like they want to show their face on camera they want to be the talent they love video right um for I think even Noah could say so we're more business oriented you know we're more here to make profit you know not in a bad way but you know to make profit at the end of the day is more so and so we don't care about the fame or the ego aspect of that and so faceless is nice also because it's Anonymous
you know you see people like Mr Beast I knew him when he was only had 800,000 subscribers he rarely would get stopped even at vid Summit in like 2019 today he he's not even around he can't be walking out there because he knows he'll get flocked and become a whole it become a hazard honestly at that point right and for him he seems like he he's fine with that the life I don't want that life I've never wanted that life I don't really care for that level of Fame for me I just enjoy making Anonymous
YouTube channels entertaining people into making a profit at the end of the day I I think also another advantage that people really forget is that when you're a normal normal Creator it takes a very long time to build interest in your own personal brand right like um they always say like it takes a long time to build up a personal brand and like seconds to break it back down and the nice part about faces channels really is that you don't really TR to build interest around yourself but you go to topics where there is existing
interest and you attach yourself to that uh topic so you're very flexible and you're very Dynamic and that makes it also a very exciting business because you're constantly facing new challenges and new scenarios and I think uh some creators really burn out about the topic they're talking about so yeah you're always innovating always trying new things and um you're very flexible in a lot of ways yeah I think another cool thing with faceless channels is that if you want to try something new you're not really attached to it you could start another Channel and you
guys have multiple channels right I think you said 20 and you're running how many I'm running seven personal seven personal channel so personality channels versus faceless like pros and cons do you think you can grow just as fast with a faceless Channel um as as the same rate as a Creator can yeah well I think the market cap for a fa channel is definitely smaller than an Creator because people obviously naturally Bor to characters and you don't really have a character on faces channels I do know that there are some uh fa channels that emulate
having a personality behind a channel but in general like people resonate with characters better so the market cap is a lot higher um obviously you have channels like T Series but um in general the cap for faes channels is a bit lower but still big enough to be really really large CH yeah I think when people first hear about faceless channels and they see how much you guys make it like blows their mind and they can't comprehend like how you're making that much money off like these channels MH so I'm curious like what's realistic maybe
for someone starting out to uh how long does it take for them to start maybe making money and like what's the investment actually look like for someone wanting to get into this field basically I think a lot of people really really underestimate how long it takes like yeah you can run like faces Channels with like maybe one day a week if they are already making money you have the team establish you have the idea and the format established if that's the case yeah you can spend like maybe a day a week to run those faces
channels but um it's like it's it's faces channel so it's still doing YouTube and YouTube takes a long time to learn because you have to do so many different skills uh and experiences you need to go through to really understand how the platform works and how a video really takes off right you need to understand okay how do I make an engaging video what does a good thumbnail look like and that takes repetition and repetition so I think people really underestimate how difficult it is but it's a great business model uh once those channels are
running so I would say um to get started the uh average U length I see it's around I think 6 months to a year really uh for most people if you really um go at it for like a year you will probably be successful I think a lot of people quit before they can even get successful like they think oh it's a get rich quick and I can do this for three months and I'll be making $10,000 a month no it's like just being a general you like a normal YouTuber without your face so it
still takes like a year of repetition and then you understand the format and you can repeat it over and I should also clarify like during that one year it's not making the same videos and getting zero views and keep doing it what it is isig figuring out sometimes you have to make uh pivots into two different niches or maybe a slight pivot in the topic because maybe the topic you're making no one actually wants to watch and maybe there's another topic that people really want to watch in your Niche you know and so that's kind
of what it is it's just pivoting and making a few adjustments throughout and it sometimes takes that year before you finally make profit and start making extra money because you had to make those adjustments you guys have been doing YouTube for a very long time so you can like get channels up off the ground super quick and people out there watching this like they might have been doing YouTube but their personal channel is not making as much money it's like they might be the perfect person to actually start a faceless Channel and see success faster
yeah 100% I think the guys actually the biggest guys in the space and I know um you know a lot of the new faces crime channels They're ran by actually people who used to run like normal YouTube channels and they um got tired of like talking about Finance or whatever they were making videos about and they blew up their fa's YouTube channel and they were like oh like really works so like people who are established creators and have gone through that repetition of failing a video and understanding what a good video makes yeah they are
usually people to succeed really really quickly yeah you're developing skills and it's like people people look at YouTube automation sometimes the wrong way they think it's get rich quit quick they hear faceless videos and they see the advertising unfortunately like there there's like over four years of marketing that was just not the most transparent I think and so like Noah and I and a few others are trying to kind of erase that and put the right expectations going into this business model but yeah I mean it's not get rich quick and so you're you have
to be focused on developing the skills not going into it solely for money focus on the skills and the skills eventually the the outcome of that is the money that's really what it comes down to I want to pull the curtain back on faceless channels because you said has a bad rap what are some misconceptions Caleb that you see when people get started they're disappointed or like like you said they've been lied to or like it's different than what they thought yeah so a long time ago probably what three years ago at least is when
it started um there's people even on I think it started on Tik Tok it started on Tik Tok there's random people you know there's random people that says here's how you make money from a multiple of different side hustles a few of them did a thing where they said you can re-upload uh just rain noises like rain almost compilation videos right or even Tik Tok compilation videos they're teaching you to download other people's content upload it without any edits and boom you make thousands of dollars now the truth is back when I was starting out
in 2016 that was real back in the day we started making a lot of money from water bottle flips I don't know if anyone remembers that but there was a trend water bottle flips where you tried to get it to land right and that was a huge Trend and YouTube was not as strict about compilation so you can monetize anything so we did make a lot of money in that method but today YouTube's more strict they want transformative content they want to be a little bit switched up they want usually a narration on the content
so it doesn't work anymore to just do compilations you have to be a little bit more creative of your content yeah and I think uh what happens a lot as well and and that's the most common criticism I hear is like yeah you're stealing videos from other creators or um it's not creative content and that's a real like that that's one of the big argument people have for against faist channels and I I think I really underestimate how much time and work actually goes into these videos across our team members like um especially when you're
running documentary channels I run quite a few of those um we run a Channel about court um it's called court cases and like to produce one of those videos it's like a few days of research to find the clips find the news articles find the right context and then that's only the research part then there comes a script writer who just looks at all the research it they put it into one comprehensive story and then it needs to be voiced that voice um sometimes they make mistakes so they have to go over and over and
then um and then the editor comes in and they really have to you know make it transformative and make sure you know there's a lot of context or educational contacts at it and that just makes it really transformative and fair yeah I I would challenge some creators to try try it yourself like try to recreate a content and see how long it really takes to make it it's really um some of these channels are really difficult to recreate so um there are some cases where it's super like tikto compilations where it is not creative and
those are those bad apples are definitely out there but in general like what we're talking about when we're talking about faces channels is like documentary and video essays and stuff like this really yeah so I've heard you say before like you know around $70 to produce a video if you want to just go the automation route how much does it cost maybe to get a decent video that could take off in algorithm there's lots of factors so for example how tapped is a niche if a niche has been around for a while there's a lot
of competitors you're going to be fighting against those competitors so typically that means your the quality standards for that Niche is now a little bit higher so that means you have to spend a little bit money the second thing is how long is a video if you're doing a five seven minute video $70 is pretty reasonable budget if you're in a like I said not too competitive of a niche so and no one can speak more on this because he created a tool that literally finds niches for you and so he knows when he sees
a niche that's kind of untapped he knows I can get someone for 50 70 bucks to do this video but eventually and he'll probably mention it eventually it will get tapped and at that point the budget might increase a little bit more yeah this is a very common pattern where you know you start in a niche and you can get away with really bad quality content so when I'm talking about a $70 video I'm talking about like literally a a script writer from Fiverr that's a very basic like they probably copy paste stuff on Wikipedia
and then a voice over artist and um that just does it really quickly takes them maybe 10 minutes and then the video editing is just like b roll or stock footage it can in those niches you can definitely make some but you have to be the first mover there and that first mve Advantage goes away very very quickly so when we're talking about $70 videos that's something that is getting into the past now like it's getting harder and harder to you know really compete with um with the rest on the $70 budget but um if
you have that first mover Advantage it's certainly still possible we're actually doing it right now in a niche but um yeah you just have to um think about $70 is kind of the basis and it goes up from there but with the AI tools nowaday you can get a JP script that takes you maybe like 20 30 minutes to generate then uh you can even monetize your videos with an AI voice over as long as the video editing and the scripting is really good so you can then just spend $70 on a video editor which
is certainly possible if you get a video editor from India or other low cost countries you can definitely get a video editor for 70 bucks and actually get decent quality on it if you just do the voice over and script yourself you know yeah let's say you find a niche that typically you want to find something that that you know a little bit about or you're passionate about you know for me it was basketball right basketball though there's a lot of competitors and there's people making amazing videos and so I probably would not have succeeded
if I just started with like a $50 video in that Niche where would you suggest that they spend most of their money say they're willing to do a little bit of the work May maybe they have a little bit of editing skills or you know they could maybe write the scripts but they don't want to like where's where are you going to see the most bang for your buck is an editor a thumbnail artist curious what you think so for I think it just depends on your strengths it's like I have a lot of business
mentors and they taught me that like you got to figure everyone has different strengths and weaknesses some people might be good at writing so that's your strength write the script some people might be good at the narration some people might be good at the editing you got to figure out what that strength is that you're willing to double down into and then you hire and delegate the rest when I started out I didn't have a lot of money obviously so what I did is I learned the game of everything because I didn't have any money
so I had to learn editing I had to learn the basics it wasn't enough to get millions and millions of views but it was enough to get get a little bit of money in the door and proof of concept then I found a random friend in high school I was like hey man I'll pay for your laptop I'll buy your you know camera or your microphone gear and you just do it for 30% and I'll do the video idea and thumbnail so we were like a partnership so we did it which was the best deal
ever and then what we ended up happening is he was making all the videos for me for the most part that ended up giving me a th000 bucks or sale that I then per month I was able to now hire a little bit more professional people on like upwork.com or fiverr.com and I started obviously cuz I didn't want to lose all my money so I had to start small so I was really good at editing so I I sucked at script writing I pretty much failed high school so I was like I need to get
someone to take care of that for me so I hired a script writer on upw work for like 20 bucks to do everything for me and she did a really great job sure enough the retention went up the views went up because of the quality and I just every little step until the entire thing was outsourced was like for me so you know it's just you got to start with what what are you good at do you guys use AI to write scripts now is that like where would you use AI in the process to
help maybe save a little bit of money where it's still decent enough cuz like if you had AI now and you were still in high school like you could have saved even more money cuz I I bet it probably would have been maybe even better than what your probably yeah I could have wrote the script myself probably now CHP yeah CHP is totally fine now the like the more you move up the leather like like the scripts are the easiest to replace then the voice over becomes a little bit harder because people still hear it's
an AI voiceover so they're less attached to the channel because they genuinely know there's no real person behind it and then the video editing is still really tough like I would recommend staying away from AI generated videos at all like are still really really bad yeah they they I I still have yet to find a tool that's really good for AI generated video like there's a lot more work there if you had to put at the top of the list like this is the most important aspect for YouTube when it comes to titles thumbnails ideas
editing script what's the like number one thing that you would say matters the most I know that's such a hard question probably even matters what matters the most yeah so um if I can start all the way at the top the most important thing thing is that you build your channel if we're talking about faces channels you build your channel around an area of like really high demand low Supply that's the formula that has worked for us both for years and it will always still true because YouTube is essentially a Content market and each market
has supply and demand and it's just really important that if you're starting a faceless Channel and you are you have that flexibility to uh uh any nich that you want to essentially it's really really easy to just do research see what channels recently popped up and just started and that's usually a really good indication of okay this is something people really want to see but no one is making content around and if you start your channel around that subject that's the most important factor you can do like you can make such bad videos around that
subject but people will still watch it because there's such a high demand for it and no other Supply but as soon as you start going in the NBA Niche or basketball Niche like you have to compete with hundreds of other channels and then you can't do that lowquality video then you can't make those mistakes you have to do everything perfect and I think especially for beginners that niches the most important step and afterwards comes video ideas packaging and then the video itself so it's a reverse when it comes to faces channels really my what I
usually teach clients who don't have a huge budget because everyone's different some people work with me they have lots of cash some people don't have a lot of cash most people don't right so what I teach with that is sometimes when you don't have a lot of cash you have to do what he said which you need to go into a low supply high demand Niche at the very beginning because it's the cheapest budget for videos right now is that going to be a long-term Niche typically it's not always the most long-term Niche it's not
sometimes going to last three years you know if you want long-term consistent money you usually have to Pivot into more like bigger niches like I don't know basketball or there's a bunch of them gaming there's a lot of other ones so what I usually do is I take the money from that Niche and now that I have a lot more money you know 30 40 Grand let's say eventually now I can take that money and I can play a little bit more risky moves and compete in a a little bit more competitive market where the
quality standards might be $150 a video because now I have the money for it right and then you start building a real brand like a real faceless channel that that has a a brand and authority and everything and there's a discussion that we had today um actually with a guy named Tommy top five gaming who's a very big I think he has six million subscribers one of the biggest uh faceless gaming channels out there and he even uh wanted to ask us a question he was like why do you guys just not focus on one
or two channels why do you do multiple channels right we had this good debate about it and both sides I think had their own points to it and maybe you want to like touch on that yeah so there's really two different ways to approach this um for me I really love hoping from n to Niche um so so basically when you're speaking about faces channels we always thinking in modes so you have multiple modes and these are the three most prominent ones you have a quality mode which is what you are doing on basketball like
produce uh go into a niche produce really high quality content and then out compete People based on quality then the second one you can do is the first movers Advantage this is what I love like I love um going in searching for those Market opportunities and entering in them like I think this would be the easiest one for beginners because you don't have the know how to really make an amazing video I think making amazing videoos more difficult than finding those opportunities and then third uh would be like a knowledge mode like for example um
this is a good example I I recently shared one of my police body cam channels on my Twitter as well and um what you can do to create a knowledge mode there is now it's not a knowledge mode anymore because people know it after this podcast but essentially what you can do there is you can um like all the videos that go viral now are fresh content so what has been happening in that police body cam Niche is people has have been taking other uh clips from YouTube and putting that in their compilation on their
police body cam or their documentary and what happens then is people keep reusing the same and same clip so audiences click on the video see the same clip they click off and then your video dies out but what you can do is you can submit foer request Freedom of Information acts to the Sheriff Offices and you can pull fresh footage and that's how you have a a gap or a mode on your competitors essentially so this is what we call you're giving everyone the yeah basically I just gave it away yeah so uh it's fine
I'm setting the channels anyway so CU there so much competition coming in but yeah if you wanted to stand out now in that Niche that's what you would be doing now it's not a mode anymore um but uh the principle makes sense though because what you're saying that makes a lot like for me in the sports where I'm like people have seen the top 10 plays of Stuff Curry or whatever right and so it's like you have to find that's an interesting takeaway for me is like people want to see new content and so whatever
Niche you're in it's like how can you stay on or create or somehow find new things that no one's ever seen before and obviously that is going to um make people want to watch that even more yeah right right right and and it's a very interesting angle for example yeah just taking different angle on the same topic could work work really well there's this one YouTuber who recently made a really good um video on the JFK assassination it's called let me know that channel and um there's a ton of videos right on the JFK assassination
but he um did it specifically around okay where um were the suspects around that time and like this specific library on the road that JFK was assassinated in and and he just did it in such a unique perspective that um that video did really really well while while there are tons of videos on that subject he did really well because it's a fresh perspective and and that's really what that knowledge or quality mode is about the the higher you want to go in the space the bigger you want to go you have to start figuring
out new ways to provide something new to the Market but I think also you got to figure out how to balance what already works sometimes people go too far and they try to reinvent everything but that's also where you go wrong even to this day Mr Beast you think wow it's the most unique ideas it is but some of the stuff that he has the certain editing style the certain thing he has was taken from other creators and you just combined it all into his own formula so you just don't do too much of Reinventing
the wheel you want to make sure you still have a little bit of what works in the in the mix yeah so actually Mr Beast that's might be an interesting topic to talk about as well there was a video train versus pit that video idea has been taken from a faceless Channel Niche which is called BNG and those videos get millions and millions of views like 60 million views a video and that's where I took that from because that came from the BM genius and he took that idea and just put it on his own
channel cuz he knew that that has worked in the past and essentially he just took that and put that on his own channel and that's what we do as well we look at okay what has worked in the past and how can we capitalize on it uh in the present if you're looking to get your first th000 subscribers or make your first $11,000 on YouTube then join our free YouTube challenge that many other small creators have joined and seen tons of success during this free challenge Sean is going to share some of the best strategies
for growing to your first 1,000 subscribers on YouTube as well as making your first $1,000 just go to tube 1K challenge.com or check the link down in the description so I want tips for someone watching this they're ready to start their Channel and they're like maybe they already started and they're not getting views one of the big things I hear you guys talk about is like find what works you know this Mr Beast example like he found something that works and he made it his own made it definitely made it better is that still the
best thing to do you're saying don't reinvent the wheel you know find some research find some videos out there that are doing well is that kind of like the best advice for someone is to not reinvent the wheel I think it's a balance uh like I said like for me at the very beginning if I don't like if I'm a beginner I don't know YouTube I see too many clients assume that they are better than the YouTubers who's been here for like for like us for a long time so like I give them advice they
like nah but I think I should do it my own unique way it's like you just look at what's currently working learn from them so what I usually do is I can there's a way you can take other people's scripts not to use it but to study it so if you go to the actual specific video of your competitors you can take the there's a way to look at the transcript like the captions and you can actually copy all that put it in a Google doc then you have to reformat a little bit now you
can put in chat gbt and it'll reformat it for you you did that but the thing is like what you can do is you can pretty much look at all of this the script and I try to compare it with like three other of the scripts I can see how they hook the viewer in which is one of the most important parts how do you make sure people don't just find the next video you know within the first 15 30 seconds you got to hook them in so I will Lally me and my team whenever
we're about to walk into a brand new Niche we want to study what are they doing that we can do for ourselves and if there's like patterns we're looking for patterns this is what Mr Beast always does is everybody I know in YouTube who's successful they find patterns about across the board if there's patterns in the script we will try to do that and make sure we don't remove that part if there's an area that isn't across multiple scripts we're like okay maybe this is just extra fluff that they decide to add cool that's optional
so that's how we kind of identify the same goes for thumbnails Etc this is like those that pattern identification and this is why I love doing you know the niche hooping because I'm really really good at identifying those patterns within okay what has worked and how can I you basically uh identify what's the core of what makes a video work and then you think about okay how can I add one step onto that how can I improve that 1% and that's basically what you're doing is if you're really good at that pattern identification and actually
a a good tip is also for normal YouTubers um go to your competitor copy and paste all their most top performing videos and ask jtp what's the what's a common pattern in the titles or same thing you could do it in the transcript what's a common pattern in the transcript and come up based on that pattern come up with like 30 new titles and this is how I start in New niches like I look at the top performing competitors I copy their titles put it in chat GP and then it will um give me back
all the patterns plus newly generated titles based on those patterns yeah some people think that all you guys do is you go on YouTube you find most popular videos you copy their title you kind of copy their thumbnail you make it a little bit different and then you like recreate the video but that's not really what you guys are doing and actually that doesn't really work right like if you were to do that it kind of goes back to like people have seen that before anyways how much are you looking at nich's uh competitors in
your own Niche versus looking a little bit outside of your Niche or maybe at like yeah and seeing what other people are doing to move it to your world and be like that golf video is amazing I think I can do that kind of in like an NBA realm so sometimes we do I do I look at the most popular I do see some videos where I'm like okay I could make another version of this but I have to be careful because some niches the trend is already dead I see a lot of people look
at a viral video from someone's competitor let's say 12 months ago viral video 5 million views oh man maybe I should do a similar title and thumbnail and everything blah BL blah right like that's what they're saying on this podcast right but what they don't realize is maybe they got that 5 Mill views because they're talking about some trendy event that was 12 months ago and now nobody's talking about that trendy event so you upload the video got 10 views right so you got to make sure it's relevant to to this still to this day
there's a lot of news channels that report the exact same news Philip DeFranco so many others will report the exact same news on Tik Tok Etc that's happening right now but they still all get lots of views so you know there's a way where you can still talk about similar topics but then at the same time we're talking about also you want to be once in a while testing new topics at the same time so I I do a mix of the two right yeah yeah I agree what what I often do is I really
try to study okay what has done well in other niches with a similar format soen you're not copying videos oneon-one you're copying formats really so um this is U something I call format uh transferring which is you look at formats that do well in one Niche and you copy it to in new Niche because usually it works so um a good example would be let's say documentaries do well nearly well in every single KN so what you can do is you search for uh a new topic let's say um golf we'll just go work with
golf there aren't a lot of golf documentaries have you seen a lot of golf documentaries not not my brows feed no exactly right so that's what you can do is there are a lot of football documentaries there are a lot of documentaries on film star celebrities but there aren't a lot of um documentaries centered around golf so what you do is you take that format and and format I mean the thumbnail the title the way a video structured you take that and then you put place it in a different context and that's simply what you're
doing and that's and that's what a lot of the top creators do they just take that format and they put it in their own context and um so it's not it's not really stealing it's like stealing like an artist basically do you guys think documentary you know those kind of videos do you think they're doing well because they're long really long form content is that part of your guys' strategy yeah yeah 20 I'm I'm a big fan of very long form uh content it has been The Meta for the last few months actually I don't
know if you've noticed but longer videos actually uh tend to perform better nowadays and it's pushing towards even longer videos why because YouTube obviously uh Compares videos of the same length so 8 million videos gets uh compared to another 8 minute video and then a 10-minute video gets compared to a 10minute video and then a 20 minute video gets compared to a 20-minute video so what happens if you make a let's say a um 8 minute video there's a ton of 8 minute videos right because it's easier to make a short video than a longer
video and as soon as you start moving up that letter let's say 20 minutes there's less 20 minute videos than uh to compare to so it's easier to beat that competition in terms of uh average view percentage uh also in terms of CTR so you're compared to a different uh set of data that's easier to uh compete with so that's why those longer videos are slowly uh becoming a meta essentially yeah I still do this to this day but um I usually start smaller actually at the very beginning but only for the ones who have
less of a budget like if I'm Consulting a client has less of a budget for someone who has a lot more of a budget then like he said it's usually better if it works for the nich some ises aren't longer length but a lot of them can make it figure out how to make it work um that's when we if we have a bigger budget because it cost more money the longer the length it is that's when we can go a little bit longer length on the videos and everything um but for beginners I usually
start with smaller length like six maybe eight minutes long just because I know that in for beginners who have never done YouTube they need repetition so even if they have an 18-minute video and even if the algorithm slightly performs a little bit more and pushes out a little bit more than a 6-minute video the odds are it's still going to be a really bad 18-minute video and so they're going to be losing a lot more money and you can get a little bit more repetition and more data at the very beginning on short length then
when it gains momentum then we increase the budget we increase the length and then that's when it really starts to exponentially grow because now you know the game yep right but another thing I wanted to add on to everything is again length is another way to differentiate yourself from competitors so it's again aeme you're creating when you're making those longer videos CU you're also talking to a different audience a really good example would be um daily dose of internet has like 5 minute videos right there are people that put daily dose of internet videos together
in like one or two hour compilations and people put that on on their TVs while they're you know doing the dishes or whatever so that's a totally different audience you're talking to with those long longer videos so you're in a competitive market or in a very saturated Market you would differ yourself with those longer form uh videos essentially so that that's why they tend to perform better recently I want to know Caleb what do you think about YouTube shorts today is it worth doing for a faceless channel to grow faster make money like when should
you use it not use it what are your thoughts yeah so every person I talk to who's doing shorts as well on a big level they don't even know the algorithm of shorts they're just assuming things like with YouTube I can look at certain videos I can get a gauge of okay this is doing good this is doing bad shorts sometimes stuff takes off that like you don't understand like you know what I mean that's just very weird they just test everything at that point um the second thing is I look at shorts like again
I look at YouTube first off as again profit like I'm just trying to earn a little bit more money that's my goal right so I'm not trying to be famous I think a lot of people get almost instant gratification because shorts are a little bit easier to go viral on and so they're like wow I got I we've met so many people here they're like I'm doing 50 million we got actually there was one guy doing 150 million 150 million views some kid like 19 or something 150 million views a month on on YouTube like
oh my gosh I was like what's your channel like how much you making off of that he's like oh like 20 grand yeah I'm like I'm like so let me guess YouTube shorts he's like yeah YouTube shorts it's like it's it's a weird world now because when I started out it was obviously YouTube shorts wasn't a thing Tik Tok wasn't a thing right and so obviously when you said views you knew it as long form so a lot of these guys though they've tried to transition they've tried to do long form and shorts on the
same channel and most of them some of them get away with it but most of them are not having success that I run into and to me that's bad because the long form pays the most right you can put a you can make a little bit more money with brand deals you can make a little bit more money with ad revenue and the biggest one is I always tell people right now like actually ask yourself YouTube shorts or Tik Tok when you what was the last person or last three Tik toks you saw do you
remember the person that you watch the person's name no what about YouTube like the last three videos can you remember the last three videos one of them yeah part of it is cuz I watch a lot of the same creators too though right yeah you're more memorable and you're more likely to be stopped in public more right if you have a long form then you do short form another really interesting story I heard about um long form versus short form is there was at vidon I don't know which year it was there were two creators
next to each other one Tik Tok Creator and then one long form creator that had like 10,000 subscribers like 100,000 subscribers something so that short form Creator had 10 million followers on Tik Tok and then the long form had 100,000 so what happened was they both did promotions on their channel so he did promotion on his YouTube channel and she did promotions on her Tik Tok account and then what ended up happening was no one showed up for that 10 million follower shorts grater and then everyone showed up for that um long form YouTuber and
that's really the difference and I think a lot of people think in a way like why not do shorts instead of thinking why do shorts cuz everything is about opportunity cost essentially because if you spend like an hour a day or I think most people spend more than that like two three hours a day on shorts what if you invested those three hours in getting a brand deal or getting better um long form videos you will make exponentially more money from those then you know getting that instant gratification from all those short form views um
and that's why you know I don't think shorts from a business perspective is a good uh move some people though they see shorts as an opportunity to explode their Channel then like once I reach monetization or once I reach a certain level then I will move over to long form I have a buddy though who has a basketball channel uh you know 100,000 subscribers but it's all short he's tried doing long form he can't figure it out he can't get any views I don't know do you guys see that with people like is that common
nine out of 10 like there are some creators who get it right like but that's very rare it's like nine out of 10 creators they think like oh I have a really big short channels a few million subscribers and they get 10,000 why why is that happening um cuz I think people underestimate how different sometimes short form viewers are from long form viewers because essentially long uh long form viewers they have different attention spans through uh common shorts users like common shorts users they love like some people love shorts some people love watching long form
so when you try to convert those shorts users to long for videos they just don't like watching long form videos like they watch like watching short form videos and so those are two different audiences your catering through even though they like the same subject they might only enjoy shorter form videos so there's a big difference I think I think your team like Sean kall's team you guys figured it out too I think I saw a video a while ago that Sean uploaded breaking down the shorts metrics on the think media podcast I think it came
out shorts was like younger demographic or something like that right and then the longer was a little bit older demographic what was it that sounds right but I don't think it was a crazy difference I do think I do think for sure it's a different audience because like even for me I I'm not on YouTube shorts I don't scroll the shorts feed and when I do I'm even like I'm like I just would rather watch long form that's just me personally now there is I want to ask you about this Caleb cuz there's this new
feature where there's um a tag where you can click to link on your short form you click that takes you to the long form video do you think like There's Hope in that they're they're obviously trying to get people from shorts to long form I I'll say in my opinion first off I think that hurts retention based on what I tested but I need more data it's still new but my theory on shorts so I've been in the game of YouTube since like 2016 okay so I've seen updates where they normally YouTube would take sometimes
a year on average to roll out a very basic update because YouTube wants to be safe before they roll it out to everybody so what they do is they start with a pool of people then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and then they launch it to everybody shorts was one of the fastest things and features I've ever seen release from beta to public the fastest I've ever seen they've ever done to for for a feature which in my opinion is also the biggest features they've ever launched for the platform and my theory and
I don't freaking know but my theory because I know that YouTube's a business at the end of the day my theory is that Tik Tok was coming up at the time Tik Tok was starting to take market share of YouTube YouTube got scared and so obviously investors are going to be going down YouTube's throat hey we have money in the stock market with Google YouTube whatever you got to figure out how you can take back market share how you going to compete with Tik Tok was just taking everyone over right so now they're like scared
the executives have to figure something out ASAP to like gain market share back and then they rushed out YouTube shorts as fast as they could without giving it real data studies like we don't even know Tik Tok yet we don't even know what's going to happen to the average human viewer who watches 60-second content what's going to happen to the psyche of that type of of viewer we don't know that yet so I don't know what's going to happen to the future of content in general because of that another concern I would have is the
profitability just for those platform platforms I know for example Snapchat is losing tons of money on their um snap shows that's one and then I'm pretty sure both Tik Tok and YouTube shorts are barely profitable or unprofitable I'm not 100% sure you should fact check me on this information I think they should Roar it away yeah yeah so and and that's the thing there's just no room for ad placement so how sustainable is shorts as well that's another question in the long term but also another Trend that you start seeing is that um discoverability is
becoming a really big thing also on long form so obviously Tik Tok is moving towards longer content right and it's that has to do also with profitability for that platform same thing for YouTube um they see okay Tik Tok is going towards longer content so how do we compete now well Tik Tok you can dis scuff new creators super quickly right it serves uh new creators in a really fast manner so what YouTube now has to do is they have to make or boost newer channels really quickly so newer channels or fresher content can thve
from the platform so what's happening uh usually when you start a channel there's this thing called like a starter boost that's usually what I call it your channel takes off really quickly and then it plateaus really quickly as well you'll literally see like an exponential graph and then it just dies out like this it it looks very similar to a short form graph actually you know how in the past like long form would like gradually go up and like shorts would shoot up and die out that's now happening to long form video as well just
to boost that for new channels yeah for new channels yeah interesting and so let's talk about more about that for a second cuz that's like that seems like a huge opportunity for people to jump into this space if CU I feel like I've seen that too and going back to like Steph on our team right like he's seeing traction on his brand new channel like started with zero subscribers and is getting thousands of views if those videos start to die off like what advice would you give him to continue to like are you seeing cuz
it could just be he has a great video great thumbnail but how much of it is it just YouTube giving views versus great content it's natural XD um this happens quite a lot like we have a lot of channels that blow up like 200 300K on the uh first video and then you upload a few more videos and the videos just die out like it doesn't work you have to get through this throw F like a like um a mode and then the video Start gradually performing better so YouTube pushes it really aggressively in the
first two three videos and then the channel dies off and you have to consistently keep uploading and then gradually the views will start coming back and I think you've experienced multiple times multip times I've been starting a lot of new channels I keep running into it where it'll Spike up you're like oh my gosh we're doing it again one weekend and then it'll die out like okay maybe it'll come back like you just got to give it time and keep pushing through all right so yeah if you look at the uh videos right here the
first video got 217k views like we saw all these Somali pirate videos doing really well so we just like okay how can we improve the thumbnails a bit and then we did the same video and that first one blew up like it's super easy to blow up these channels but then what happens is you see the second video does well the third video does me and then it just starts dying out you see this pattern it's probably the same as on his channel as well where those first three videos really explode and then it dies
off so usually to fix this it's it's a very new problem that's been arising and that's exactly to do with that discoverability where they push you really hard at the start and then it dies off a bit so you have to then start tweaking it and try and get it to start up again and after you've gone through that Val it will usually start seeing some more consistent growth afterwards so yeah that's one of the challengs yeah let's talk briefly on like uh avoiding copyright issues or like I've had a couple show up on mine
I think there's just there YouTube Just scans your videos right so like sometimes automatically it's like oh this is owned and then I dispute it and then I'll be like okay I'm going to go um but yeah briefly I think people you know obviously you know this is not like legal advice but like de Stone in here but you know you use fair use and so um I I think and there's videos on it and stuff but I don't know if you wanted to add any tips for that your video or the video itself you're
creating has to be way more valuable than that one clip you're inputting in video that that one clip is just for a small bit of context on a uh very big picture essentially so um yeah you can use like for example one uh clip or one video and cut it up and then spread it out throughout the video cuz then you're using too much of One Source what you want to do is get multiple sources you want to make sure that there yeah there's interval that interval between comary and actual uh clips and then you
want to make sure that you're adding a storyline or um educational uh content to it that usually really helps with arguing for fair use uh another thing would do be very careful where you get the footage from usually movies TV shows um ads or creative works you usually call them those are very dangerous together with sports bro cost you might know that yourself and there's by the way there's some though that do allow it this is why it's like it's like a game sometimes cuz you just got to you got to be testing like look
into some of them have like public licensing agreements that you can either buy or they have a public domain licensing I know marvel I don't know if it still is this way but back in the day my Marvel Channel Marvel wanted people to be talking about their footage to be showing the footage not to show it as like a full length but be using in the background because they wanted fans to Hype up the next movie some movies want it to happen but some don't so you just got to be careful on that one yeah
that that's right yeah that's exactly right yeah I've had a few like copyright claims and it's if no one's ever experienced this set basically you know it's like hey copyright claim you can go into YouTube Studio dispute it and basically just explain why it's fair use that's all I did and I just explain why it's fair use and um it's come back every time for me like cuz I truly am transforming new content so if you are doing that then um there's really nothing to worry about and and what I've done on scale like what
you're going to have to do on scale eventually like that's going to be a thing where someone's going to falsely copy stke I'll give you an example or copyright claim Aiden Ross for example we made a video breaking down like some some gang violence that was going on it was very customized we found multiple sources of Clips there's nothing copyright about it right we transformed we made an amazing commentary about some gang violence Aidan Ross went live and then he decided to watch it as a reaction video I'm okay with that he did a reaction
video obviously that gave us a little bit more views but then his team which there was a whole controversy his team then copyright uh copyright claimed and actually I think they copyright strike copyright strike my video so then that they claimed that his was the original but he was the reaction of video that was already published in that situation when you're on scale when you're making lots of money you need to have a fulltime attorney I have a full-time attorney we sent them a whole cease and assist it was a whole thing and then they
immediately removed it because they know they're in actual Court it would be a whole mess and so you sometimes have to defend yourself there's people that would try to gain the system it happens all the time and that's when on scale you need to have an attorney like ready to go yeah totally agree like if you're scaning up you're going to need legal support well what you guys are doing is super inspiring for me to like see what's possible with YouTube and faceless channels and so I I look up to what you guys are doing
what you're building if you were to talk to that person who you know you put yourself in the shoes like you have nothing now and you're like I'm going to do this I'm going to start a YouTube channel what would be what would you tell Noah what advice would you give the person just getting started today right uh especially you have a smaller budget just take it slow like the things are opportunities or YouTube is not going to run away from you like faces channels or faces content will exist I think for the next two
three years minimum like except if YouTube makes some radical change all of a sudden we'll be fine let's hope like like YouTube shorts yeah right no but so let's hope that that doesn't happen but I don't see that happening anytime soon because then they have to enforce it for all the faces channels and that becomes a real mess so um yeah what I would do first is just take your due diligence with researching everything try and practice video editing script writing studying thumbnails you don't have to spend any money like nothing you can just start
studying that's it cuz the studying is what takes the most time and I think the studying the studying period and people then also starting to upload videos that's where people lose money if you would study become like very knowledgeable on YouTube and then start spending money on producing videos that's how you avoid losing any money because then you have all that that knowledge up front and the chances that you succeed is like infinitely higher than if you just start straight right without studying first love that what would you have to say Caleb I mean we
do the same game so I me he's got in