I got a million YouTube views, now what?

In this episode:

• A major milestone on YouTube and the surprising journey that led there.
• Why chasing views isn't always the best strategy for content creators.
• Differences between short-form and long-form content creation.
• And much more!

This episode is made possible because of:

• The Creator Club: Your online community for podcasters, video creators, and writers
• Content Clips: Repurpose the content you’re already making in one click.

Chapters

• 0:08 YouTube Journey and Content Strategy
• 9:52 Video Quality and YouTube Strategy

Transcript

0:08

Welcome back to Digital Creator with me, your host, Dylan Schmidt. Today, I'm gonna share with you my YouTube journey. I just got an email notification from vidIQ that I hit a 1000000 views on YouTube, which awesome. You know what? Let's just give myself the round of applause. I wanna share really a quick overview of my YouTube journey timeline, and I'm sharing this in hopes that it can help you with your YouTube journey because YouTube is a fascinating place with a lot going on. You just don't even scroll. You just open up YouTube. It can be overstimulating because there are just so many things competing for your attention, a lot like other social media platforms. So I started my YouTube journey in June of 2021, which feels like 3 years ago, but according to a calendar is coming on 4. And initially, I was like, I'll make long form videos. I'll make short form videos and the short form videos will be repurposed from Instagram and I'll just post them to YouTube, but then I'll have a specific YouTube strategy. Now that was the initial expectation. I hired a video editor. Actually, I've hired a lot I pause while I'm saying that because I've hired a lot of video editors, and it's crazy. Like, finding a YouTube video editor is not easy. There's so much nuance to a longer form video than short form video, in my opinion, that, you know, I was trying I was struggling to find, someone good at it. And this was, again, we're talking, like, summer of 2021. So I had recorded a bunch of YouTube videos. None of them had really, like, gotten some traction. I had gotten edits from these editors, and there'd be mistakes. And I was struggling to find, like, the differences in cost of, like, spending$250 on a video versus $75 on a video because sometimes the $75 video would be better than the $250 video. And And I was seeing videos on YouTube that seemed similar to what I wanted to do, and they seemed really straightforward. So then I would try making my own videos, but it would just be so time consuming. And we're talking like just talking head videos. So I was like, I don't know what the heck to do. I kinda just let it go by the wayside because it wasn't bringing in clients. It wasn't making me new connections and I just focused on short form videos. And I had a couple of them do really well, which was cool. And I'm talking like really well by thousands of views over 10,000, over 20,000 views. And I was like, alright. I'm not gonna, like, pay all my attention to YouTube because I was prioritizing more Instagram and TikTok at that point. I'd put YouTube number 3 on the list. I just would repurpose content from short videos that I'd post on Instagram or TikTok and put them on YouTube with no thought about it. This was right around when YouTube had launched YouTube shorts, so it was good timing for me. So I guess you could say in the beginning, my YouTube approach was really just repurposing content. But I had felt in the back of my mind like on YouTube, I need to do longer form content. So I would publish, you know, my podcast videos because I would record interviews or publish the video to YouTube. Some of those would do okay, but nothing like really substantial, especially compared to like the YouTube shorts. And I just felt like this, I don't wanna say obligation, but this, like, if I'm doing YouTube, I have to do YouTube videos. So all the way to about last year, I would say, I had been kind of focusing on and off on YouTube videos, but really struggling to find, like, my niche or how I would make YouTube videos different than the other types of content I was putting out there, like my podcast or the short form videos because I have made so many short form videos, primarily educational ones. I've gotten really good at condensing a topic down to like 30 seconds. Like that's one of my big skill sets. And so when it comes to YouTube, I find myself anytime I try to make a video that's like 10 minutes or longer, I struggle stretching out the topic while keeping that same hook attention grabbing formula that I could do in short form videos because I'm like, there's so much unnecessary fluff here and I just wanna cut it out. Like, why say more if you could just say less? But that's not to say I've completely abandoned long form content on YouTube or anything because I still have a separate account than my main one that just reached a 1000000 views. I have another account under digital creator which if you're on YouTube right now listening or watching this that's what this account is. It's not my main account. This is just like my podcast account which acts as basically a feed for this podcast which is currently like the only longer form content I'm putting out. And so reaching a 1000000 views on YouTube primarily through shorts is a pretty cool mile marker for me because I don't rely on ad revenue from YouTube or anything like that. I don't pay attention to like how close I am to being in some ad network with YouTube. I don't try to make money through monetizing on any of these platforms. So I'm not aiming for views. I'm aiming for connection, quality of views. I would gladly take far less views if there was deeper connections there than just going for virality, which is a really hard concept for a lot of people to understand. But there's a fine line to it. Right? You could go super wide and try to reach topics that as many people are familiar with aka like mister beast style content or you go really niche and do things your way and understand that people might be slower to adopt. And there might still be a big audience, but sometimes it might not be as big as you really hope for. And I'm saying this because, like, yes, I have reached a 1000000 views, but there's people who have reached a 1000000 views in, like, a month or less, especially through shorts. So on one hand, yes, it is awesome to reach the million mark. On the other hand, to me, that's just a number and it's like impressions or something. Like, I've been able to reach that many people. That's really cool. Sounds cool. But, like, it's not changing my dollar. Right? And maybe if I was to do a brand deal in the future, they go, oh, how many views is on your YouTube channel or something like that? And I could say a 1000000 views and that, like, sounds cooler than saying, you know, 34,000 or 500,000 or something. But at the end of the day, when it comes to money, like content clips is my main revenue generator, which is an agency that produces social media content. And that doesn't get paid through views. We get paid by our clients, which choose to work with us. And sometimes they might find out about us through YouTube, which is awesome. But someone watching a video of mine, for example, on YouTube, it's it's gonna be a pretty specific person to see my video and go, I like what he's saying. I like how he's saying it. Let me go to his page and learn more about who this guy is because I'm not talking about like tech reviews or selling you on a course or trying to get you in my funnel. Really, I have 2 options, which I guess is a funnel if you will, but, like, the funnel is kind of shallow, right now at least. It's really like a free community where you can come hang out if you're a creator called the creator club. It's a discord community. And then content clips, which is just a paid service where we create content for you. And then I do have, like, my email newsletter, but it's like a lot of giving. Like, a lot of what I do is giving, giving, giving this podcast, for example, like the leap. Right? I don't offer really many things in between, like content clips for the most part starts at like $1,000 and up. Sometimes it's less, but on average, like our clients usually spend about $1,000 a month and up. And that's a pretty big gap from, like, not spending anything. And most creators I found are not in a space to be spending $1,000 a month on services to help them with their short form social media or their podcast. And so instead of being like, hey, you're like, you should buy this other thing for $200. I'm just like, come hang out. I'll help you how we can. We can connect and we can grow together because I'm not claiming to be this guru guy that, you know, has every answer. A lot of what we do as creators is experimentation. And when I look back on YouTube for me, what has worked has been experimentation. Some of my best performing shorts have been ones where I had the most random fast idea. And I was like, let me just film it real quick and put it out. And then it ends up being a video that gets views and comments and engagement 3 years later. It's not because I had this perfect idea that I wanted to put out. It's because I was quick, I was authentic, and I didn't let overthinking hold me back. Looking ahead to how I'm going to view YouTube this year 2025. I've got some ideas that I have not kind of fleshed out. But there's one opportunity that could be doing long form content for a brand. And I'd be making YouTube videos for them and their channel. And then also for my own channel, maybe I do more YouTube videos when I finally find an editor that I vibe with. But I think I would need some help in the scripting department because I can do the podcast like this. I can do short form content like no other. I can write emails. I can help people script their podcast. I can do all that stuff, but something about YouTube and maybe it's because I'm a big YouTube consumer. I struggle with like the sectioning out stuff of YouTube. So if you have any tips on that, I'm like totally open. Like I said, I'm not a guru in every area of this stuff. I know certain things through my own data, but I don't have the data to back up like YouTube scripting, but I'm excited about hitting the next 2,000,000 mark and then 5,000,000 to 10,000,000. Cause I really, really like YouTube as a platform. I like consuming content on there. I think it's valuable for creators. How cool is it? You can just upload any amount of video to that platform and they just host it. And going down a quick rabbit hole real quick, I just was cleaning up my Instagram feed. There's a connection here. I promise. I was just cleaning up my Instagram feed and I was scrolling back. And Adam Mosseri, the CEO of Instagram just recently said this, and I hadn't looked at my own feed, but he said that older videos or videos that don't perform well, they degrade the quality of your videos. And I think it's to save like server storage space or something. So when I was cleaning up my Instagram feed, which I don't think I've ever done, I was scrolling back and I was opening up some videos that didn't perform very well and they were so blurry and it wasn't my wifi connection or anything. The videos were blurry. They had been degraded because they were older videos and they weren't performing that well, especially relative to some other videos on my page. But I was like, I gotta archive these. So I ended up archiving most of my videos and I'll probably maybe unarchive some videos on my page, but I was just shocked. Like if maybe look for yourself on your own page, if you go back on videos that you see didn't perform very well, look at the quality of them. It's like shockingly bad. YouTube thankfully doesn't do that. You can control the quality on the user side. If you upload a video in 4 k, it will stay on 4 k. Like, they don't remove the option to view a high quality video even if it was uploaded 3 or 4 years ago. And I don't think that difference between something like Instagram and YouTube is talked about enough. You can have videos from years ago on YouTube do really well today and that doesn't really work the same on Instagram. So what do you think about YouTube? Are you a fan of the platform? Have you been taking it more seriously? Do you have plans to take it more seriously this year? I'd love to know. Maybe hop in the creator club and chat with us, and we can talk about our own YouTube strategy for 2025. Go to the creator club.com to hop in the conversation, and I'll talk to you next week.